A new embeddable forum software - looking for feedback

We've been working on a new forum software platform aimed solely for 'embedding' a forum into an existing website. It's meant to be lightweight and not full-featured, though we'll be adding features over the coming months.

We haven't launched it yet, but I was interested in getting some feedback from the AA community.

You can head here - http://tal.ki/embed-forum/ (the website itself has a ways to go). A unique embeddable code will be generated for you. Then you just have to copy & paste that 1-line of javascript on a webpage or blog page and you'll have a forum inside your site.

One unique approach that we're testing out is for no account creation. So that members (including the admin), *must* login with facebook, google, or yahoo (we'll be adding other service providers soon).

I would love to hear your feedback, critical, positive, or just concerns. Thanks ahead of time.

http://tal.ki/embed-forum/

 

Interesting idea.

I noticed a word not spelled correctly. "Past it in your website html" should be "Paste it in your website html".

Do you have a working demo somewhere?

 

thanks for catching the misspelling, i'll fix that now.

and good point about a demo forum, i just created one here:

http://talki.yolasite.com/

 

vlauria,

That's a great idea. I haven't used the Facebook connect options on my sites, but this seems to be an interesting concept.

How do you do moderating and administrative work on the site? Do you have a demo or some screenshots at least of a 'backend' or admin control panel?

 

ArnyVee, these are all helpful questions - it let's me know what we should be addressing on our homepage - thank you.

We released a new version of the site this morning, so it looks vastly different. I added a very 'crude' feature tour and I'll have our designer clean it up over the next few days. It includes some screenshots of the admin actions that are in the admin panel and admin actions that are inline while posting. We're trying to put as many admin actions right where they should be, like when viewing a post, viewing your member directory, etc.

http://tal.ki/feature-tour/

 

We've also added an example forum on the site now: http://tal.ki/forum-example/

I would love to hear more feedback from fellow admins as we have big hopes for this service and can only make it happen with feedback from people who know forums best!

 

Definitely an interesting idea. Where is the actual database?

The News Forum Announcements forum says there are 4 posts but I only see 3 posts in 2 topics?

And for some reason the 'go back one page' in my browser can not get back to the original link.

 

vlauria,

I'm liking your work

Do you have any plans on making a profile page for each member? Not just having the link back to their Facebook page, but something that can 'pull' their info onto your own site.

 

Abomination, we store the forum database on our servers, hosted by Amazon.com so that they're 'in the cloud' and distributed across the world - which makes for fast loading times and lots of scalability options.

We refer to a post as both a topic and a reply. So there are two topics, and one topic has 0 replies and the other has 2 replies which total 4 total posts. Is that confusing to people? We combined the two to keep the layout trim and able to fit into a small space so people can embed it on any website with no problems.

Abomination, what happens when you click 'go back'? We have it so that it actually takes you back through your navigation in the forum. So what happens when you press it? What happens when you press it multiple times?

ArnyVee, thank you. We probably won't pull any profile information down to our servers as that can get out of date quickly and may leave information available that people don't want exposed if they change there profile permissions on a site like facebook in the future. We support single sign-on, so if somebody already has a site, with profiles, we can link the forum profiles to the original site profiles.

Are your concerns of having members 'leave' the site to view a profile or something else? We open the profile in a new tab/window so that the original forum still stays open.

 

.......

 

thanks Abomination. What browser and version number are you running so I can try to recreate the 'back' button problems you experienced?

We have to do some advanced javascript to make everything work nicely within the iframe, every browser behaves so differently....

 

firefox 3.0.1

I am specifically using this version because my forum members do not update their browsers often, and need to test my own forum for some issues occasionally.