About us forum

Hi All,

As some of you may know in early December I did a two week motorbike trip in the Mekong Delta and while much of the time my mind was occupied with matters such as "watchout chicken/pothole/truck/lunatic/pho stall" I also spend a good while firming up some changes I'd like to make to the Travelfish forum.

So, just as soon as I am vertical again (I put my back out on Xmas day showing the kids "how" to use their new boogie boards... and so am bedridden and dosed to the eyeballs at the moment) I'll be making a few changes to the forum. Some are cosmetic while others are a bit more involved and focused on you all getting a bit more out of it.

This is my hitlist -- and your suggestions are, as always, much appreciated. The one oft requested change I won't be making is changing the default fro private messaging to ON, but I will make it more obvious how people can turn it on.

These changes will be rolled out piecemeal over the coming month.

So, in no particular order, here goes.

General appearance:
* Forum is switching to full screen width (so no left column anymore)

* Summary pages, for eg this one: http://www.travelfish.org/board/ will also show the latest thread in each section.

Related reading
* At the moment we try to suggest links to related reading, but these link just within the forum. So if you ask a question about weather in KoSamui there may be some links displayed to other similar questions. We're going to add to this links to the various Travelfish blogs, as they're goldmines of information that are not really getting all the attention they warrant. Again hopefully this will help people better get the answers they are after.

FAQs
* We'll build out the FAQs linking to the most commonly asked questions which will hopefully save everyone a bit of time and bother.

Messaging
* Sorry, but the default setting for this will remain off, but it will be made more obvious how people can change it in order to send and receive private messages.

Profile
* If you're an Flickr, Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook or Google+ user, you'll be able to add those details to your Travelfish profile. This will make it easier for people to contact you (should you wish them to).

* The currently very brief profile pages will be expanded and you'll be able to enter more information about yourself and your travels (should you wish to).

Moderation
* Finally setting this up so others can help me in this regard -- I will be in touch privately by email regarding this. Ideally I'm looking for a moderator for each of the country boards for starters.

Subscriptions
* If you subscribe to a thread you have not commented on it will now (belatedly) be possible to unsubscribe from it. Sorry for the long delay on this.

Signature links
* Basically anything commercial isn't allowed. Personal travel blogs and that kind of thing are fine, but if you're link goes to a travel insurance, cheap flights, hotels in Atlantis, condos in Lisbon or whatever it will be removed.

Signup page
* We'll better clarify our terms of use and explain that Vietnam-based travel agents are not permitted as members - hopefully that will see some of the spam drop off (currently about 90% of the forum spam originates from Vietnam).

There are a few other minor things, but these are the main ones.

If others have thoughts on any of the above, or suggestions for further improvements/changes, please comment below.

Cheers!

Somtam2000/Stuart

PS Welcome to the handful of Thorntree members who have joined in the last couple of days -- please feel free to add your input to this