Hi everyone,
I manage a wikidot about a small programmable robot (www.thymio.org) and we have a forum. What we would like it to become is a place where people who possesses a robot can come expose their problem easily if they have one and where they can answer each other easily. As you know, explaining something with an image is much easier than with text.
The problem is that inserting an image in a forum post is a pain. You have to upload the image in the forum main page and then to link it in your post manually, choosing the size and so on. That's just impossible to do for the general public, especially those we aim with our small robot.
So my wish would be to have a really easy way to upload and display an image in a forum post. This could be by having a wizard that allows you to upload an image an then that insert it in the post for example. Something that would not require you to go upload an image manually elsewhere and then link it in the forum post…
That would be so great! Thank you in advance!
Christophe
One way you can achieve this is with a custom forum using pages and data forms instead of the traditional forum. With this, you can have a file field called "attachment" that makes it very easy for users to add attachments. Such a forum is called a "Page-based" forum, since it uses pages rather than Wikidot's in-built system.
An example of one I made can be found here, and here's a post that had an attachment on it. Unfortunately, the system I made never got widely used because the old forum had 6 years of momentum.
However, there are are few tradeoffs, the biggest of which being that they must actually be built.
Timothy Foster - @tfAuroratide
Auroratide.com - Go here if you're nerdy like me
Thank you for your answer!
I use these forms to allow people to create pages easily (or to promote an event they organise with the robot). The problem is that we use the forum since 2010 and there are already quite a few threads… Changing the whole system now would by difficult and induce problems such as dead links and so on… But I will think about it!
Most people won't go back to very old threads, so creating a new page-based forum might not cause the problems you think it will. On a forum I am a member of (for the band Barclay James Harvest) the PHPBB forum was hacked last weekend from China and 10 years of threads and posts have been lost, but they are starting again. I would go with what Timothy suggests, uploading an image while making the forum posts is very easy and perhaps more intuitive than the normal Wikidot forum.
Rob Elliott - Strathpeffer, Scotland - Wikidot first line support & community admin team.
@Rob: BJH - cool!
Sue