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Home Theater Forum launched on the Huddler Platform

As of this morning, the Home Theater Forum has migrated over to the Huddler Platform. 

This comes from site owners Parker Clack and Ronald Epstein:

New skins, big changes: June 24th Updates

It's been a big day for the Huddler platform.  We pushed some major architectural changes for our sites and layered in some additional functionality. 

Semi-Variable Width Site-Wide
Until today, the Huddler platform has displayed all content with a fixed width layout.  We have now added 256 pixels of variable width.  All pages in the forums, as well as Wikis and product pages, will now be able to expand wider than before.  As you re-size your browser, the width of the main content will either get bigger or smaller up to a certain point. 

In-Line Replies For Forum Threads
Previously in the forums, when you clicked the "Reply" button, a popover opened with the full reply editor.  Now, the What You See Is What You Get editor is stuck at the bottom of the thread, in-line with the previous forum posts.  The "Advanced Reply" or full page editor is available as well.


Updated Home Page And Featured Content Modules
The home page is still in flux with more updates coming; however some modifications have been made to the layout to put increased emphasis on active discussion forums and other featured content.  The primary addition is a new module for featured news and discussions.  This content is hand picked by community administrators. 

Below this module, you'll find a list of the most active discussions from the forums, a module for the most highly ranked products in the community, and a hand picked featured Wiki article.  Logged in users will also see their subscriptions above the featured content module.

New Thread Creation From Thread View 
A new feature we added is the ability to start a brand new thread from thread view.  For example, let's say you're in a thread about buying and sizing ski poles; however all of the posts are about sizing poles for adults and your question is about sizing ski poles for your 8 year old son!  Now, instead of having to navigate back to the main forum, you can create a new thread without clicking away from the one you're reading.


Signature Functionality
Signatures are now supported with text, links, bolding, and italics.  Functionality to include images in signatures is still in development.

Each community determines its own signature policy.  For example, the Green Home Huddle permits all registered users to use their forum signature with links.  EpicSki members have access to text only, while Supporters have increased functionality with access to live links.

Site Specific

• The Green Home Huddle was completely reskinned.  Instead of having a green and black theme, the skin is much lighter with a blue and green skin.
• EpicSki's header now has a button directly to the details on becoming an EpicSki supporter.
  

This Thread Is No Good Without Pictures: May 5th Updates

It's Cinco de Mayo, and to celebrate, we've updated the Huddler Platform to capitalize on and encourage the non-verbal side of community: the images. 

Often within a discussion thread, folks will talk about what they did, what they bought, what their new set up looks like, whether it be about their ski quiver, their new solar array, or their brand new surround sound speakers.  But as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.

 

Community Wide Updates

Updated Image Handling and New User Galleries

Since the launch of the Huddler platform, we've had on site image hosting.  However, with the May 5th update, image handling is very much new and improved.

1. Each user has a gallery of images on their Profile page.  On each user's page, you'll see thumbnails of 10 images that user has uploaded and you'll have access to all their images.
   
   
2. Within the forums, clicking an image will open it up within a lightbox, keeping you on the same page.
   
   
3. You can now add descriptions to your images.  Now you have the option to add an image description when you are uploading photos directly to the community.  Within the forum image lightbox (as pictured above), the description will display below the image.  The description also appears on the Image Info page and can be edited by the uploader at any time.
4. You have access to updated Image Info pages.  On the Image Info pages, you have access to information about when the photo was uploaded, who uploaded it, how big it is, etc.  Now you can view the full-size image, report the image, and generate a thumbnail of any size.  If you uploaded the photo, you can edit the description here or even delete the image completely.
5. Tag images directly.  From the Image Info page, any user can tag the photo so that it will automatically display on any Product Page or tag page.

 

Talk About Wiki And Product Edits In The New Talk Forums

As Wikis are collaboratively edited articles, many users at any time will contribute to one piece. With the Wiki Talk forums, you can now discuss rationale behind editing a Wiki, what contents belongs there, what doesn't, how it should be structured, or any other editorial decisions about the Wiki.  To access these forums, simply click the "Discuss" button at the top of each Wiki article.

There are also now similar forums dedicated to the updates and editing of information on Product pages.  These forums are best used to talk about why you edited a product's description, information that would be great in the Product Wiki, etc.  To access these forums, click the "History" button above the Product description - here you'll find the "Discuss" button to access the Talk forums.

The Wiki and Product Talk forums work just like the main forums, except each one pertains to a specific Wiki or a specific Product.  Keep in mind, these forums are designed to talk about the editorial contents, not the Wiki subject or Product itself.

 

See Where You Have Posted In The Forums At A Glance

We've made some slight modifications to the formatting within forums. Now you'll see a slightly thicker grey bar to the left of each forum post you have posted in.  When you are within a particular forum (or on the New Posts page), you'll quickly be able to notice which threads you've actively participated in and which have new content. 

 

Moderation Updates

Moderation and administrative tools have also developed to include:

1. Checking a user's IP history and placing an IP ban
2. Cleaner tools for editing product names, manufacturers or moving products to a new Category
3. Streamlined tools to update Topic Tags
   

April 7th Huddler Platform Updates

Yesterday, we pushed new updates to all the sites on the Huddler platform.  While most of the changes are seamless with the last iteration, you might notice:

1. A preview button on forum posts
2. Autocomplete tagging
3. The ability to search individual forum posts
4. The ability to see who is currently active on the site
5. In-line private message responses

Preview button on forum posts

On your forum posts, along with the "Use Full Page Editor" button, you will notice the button now says "Use Full Page Editor / Preview." 

As soon as you enter text into your reply box and click the full page editor/preview button, you will have the ability to preview exactly what your post will look like in the forums and edit it with the full page editor which appears directly below the preview.

Add tags with autocomplete feature

Tagging is now significantly easier.  While there are still the options to use the tag browser or search for tags, the new default option is to use the autocomplete tool.  When you open the tagging tool, simply start typing the tag and a list of the relevant product, category, and miscellaneous tags will appear.  Select the tags you wish to apply to the thread or wiki and continue as usual.

Search individual posts

When using Advanced Search on any of the sites, you can now search individual posts for keywords, etc.  At the bottom of the advanced search form, you will see the Additional Search Options.  The last drop down menu allows you to search either threads or for specific forum posts. 

See who is currently active

At the bottom of the page above the footer, you may have noticed the status bar that lets you know how many users and how many guests are currently online.  With yesterday's update, now you can see exactly who's online at any given moment.

Reply in-line in private messages

When you open a private message you have received, you will automatically have a reply box embedded at the bottom of the message, as opposed to using a reply popover.

An Epic Transformation of the Huddler Platform

On January 30th, 2009, we went live with our partnership with EpicSki.com.  EpicSki, with its Barking Bear Forums, dedicated to all things skiing was previously operated on the vBulletin platform.

Throughout the partnership with EpicSki, EpicSki.com isn't the only one to see some big changes.  The Huddler platform has evolved as a direct result of the input and feedback from the EpicSki community.  For the next few weeks, EpicSki.com will represent the most up-to-date version of the platform, with adjustments to the forums, threads, message center, and beyond.  But you can expect to see these changes on the Green Home Huddle and the Mobile Huddle soon.

This is just the first round of changes to the Huddler platform.  We expect to guide the software development as we get feedback from the vibrant EpicSki community.  Stay tuned.

The Quick and Dirty List

• New views for the forums to show logged in users what's new since their last visit
• A "New Posts" page to keep track of all the latest forum activity in chronological order
• Tweaks to the design of the forum threads themselves (including avatar placement and display of join dates)
• Box of "quicklinks" added to the home page for easy navigation to the FAQ and more
  
• New terminology for the Public Profile and the Product Profile
  
• Revamped message center
  

Improvements to the Forums
As you can see in the Green Home Huddle forums, the main view simply shows the name of the forum, a preview of the last post, and the thread and post count.

EpicSki.com to Join the Huddle

Today EpicSki.com publicly announced a platform changeover to replace their vBulletin software.

This comes from Joan Rostad at EpicSki.com:

I am pleased to announce that we have found a new platform to replace V-Bulletin which we feel brings many new capabilities that we think will better integrate how members use, or have wanted to use EpicSki. Next weekend, our site will move to its new home. The URL won't change. This will involve a temporary shutdown of the site on Friday, January 30, as the new EpicSki environment is groomed and prepared. EpicSki has become familiar terrain over the years. The new site will retain much of what you found familiar, but will open up new terrain, conditions and challenges. We hope you enjoy exploring all the new features and capabilities this new platform offers.

We are bringing these changes to you with our new partner, Huddler.com, who created the innovative platform which will support the new site.

We're incredibly excited to be working with EpicSki.com - although none of our small team are expert skiers, we're all excited to learn from the EpicSki team.

Upcoming News and Events

The cogs have been turning here at Huddler, enhancing current site features on all of our sites as well as preparing to roll out a new site. Our lips are sealed on the type of site, but we are excited about it none the less and think it will be well received by the community. In the next few days, we will be launching the site and releasing it into the wild.

In the meantime, check out our existing sites and the new Facebook Connect feature. This allows you or your friends to login to any of our sites using your Facebook credentials and share your activity on the sites on your Facebook profile.

Bloggers and Huddler: A Happy Partnership

The goal of the Huddler platform is to effectively feature great user generated content and to leverage the opinions and experiences of real people.  However, expert content can and should be in the conversation.  To incorporate fantastic blog/editorial content in the Green Home Huddle, we have recently launched a new feature and a variety of partnerships with green bloggers.

On each product page, you'll now see Featured Blog posts along the right hand side of the page.  Similarly, relevant blog links will also be placed on category pages and other pages around the site.  Each blog partner has its own page on the Green Home Huddle where readers can peruse the most recent articles, similar to an RSS feed.

Likewise, bloggers and their readers can greatly benefit from the crowd-sourced knowledge from Green Home Huddlers.  On the partnering blog pages, relevant links to Green Home Huddle category and product pages are now embedded mid-post to provide another great outlet for information.

The list of partnering blogs includes:

• Eat. Drink. Better.
• Feelgoodstyle
• EcoChildsPlay.com
• Gas2.org
• Cleantechnica
• Sustainablog
• greenUPGRADER

The Features Users Deserve

If you read my last post, How we got here, you hopefully have a better understanding of why we set out to improve online product-focused communities. I thought I'd go through some of our features and explain why we believe they're important to users.

Integrated Product Reviews - In traditional forum communities, when a user decides to review a product, they start a thread. Then if someone else reviews the same product, another thread begins. You end up with incredibly useful information scattered throughout the site with no simple way to find, normalize and interpret the information. If you're curious about the overall opinion of the group, it's nearly impossible to figure it out. Our review system structures the data, ranks the products and makes it all easy to consume.

Product Profiling - If you're researching a product, it's useful to actually seek out people that own it. Or maybe you're considering an accessory for something you already own. Within communities operating on the Huddler platform, users create a product profile showing what they own or once did. So if you're curious what environmentally friendly household cleaner other people are using, it's easy to find out, and easy to see what people actually think of each option.

As we get sufficient data in the system, Huddler is a powerful platform for personalized recommendation using the Product Profiles. Ultimately, we want to enable a user to say, "I have the Samsung SCH-u740" and be told, "People with that phone use these applications, these carrying cases, and these headsets. And if you're looking for an upgrade, people who used to use that phone have moved on to these..." The same concept applies with a TV (what speaker, receiver, universal remote, etc.), skis, motorcycles, cameras, and on and on.

Tagging - Each and every product within a community has a unique tag associated with it, rather than allowing users to manually enter tags. So if you're looking for all the content in the Green Home Huddle about the Tesla Roadster, just check out the Tesla's tag page. In traditional communities you're stuck with search which may or may not find what you're looking for. You often waste tons of time reading things that have nothing to do with what you're looking for. Tagging is an extremely powerful tool for associating appropriate content with specific products/topics.

Wikis - How often is there a topic that a single individual has all the answers for? The whole point of an online community is to share the knowledge of the entire group. In current forums you'll often see a post that is meant to serve as a reference for users. The poster will often say, "Let me know if you have anything you'd like me to add/edit" Could anything be more inefficient?  For a great example of a community generated resource, check out Green Home's Frugal Beginners Guide to Going Green.

Those are a few of the features that we believe make a huge difference to users and I hope it helps to explain why. Communities are for collaboration and sharing, we hope these features make it easier to do just that.

If you think there are other features that would make an impact, please leave a comment.

Offline Marketing meets Online Activity

My background before founding Huddler is in Sales/Marketing/Business Development at an enterprise software start-up called Integration Appliance. They're a great company and I loved my experiences there, but after flying all around our continent to meet various Legal IT Groups, I was thrilled to start a consumer web company where I wouldn't have to see my "clients" anymore. Now, I'm still a staunch supporter of the interwebs as the most efficient mechanism ever created for disseminating information to a mass audience, but I had a much-needed reminder of the importance of face-to-face communication last week.

Along with my faithful comrade Cristina, I had the pleasure of volunteering and attending West Coast Green last week in San Jose, CA. Now that Green Home has been around for 6 months (really - where is the time going!?) many companies at the show had heard of us and/or spent some time on the site. That said, while several of them remember receiving email correspondence from us about our new badges, or their ability to manage their product listings on the site, seeing us in person made all the difference. They eagerly devoured my business cards and helped brainstorm some cool ways that we can work together. They also generously donated they're products to the new Huddler Action Team we're starting up.

Similarly, I ran into the founder of GetWithGreen. He was incredibly pleasant to talk to and we obviously had a lot to talk about. Only after getting home did I realize that he had sent me a private message on Huddler weeks before that I didn't properly attend to. Having met him in person, I'm not much more eager and likely to follow up and hopefully find some interesting collaborative opportunities. Anyway, it seems like common sense that you can't forget about how much value there is in marketing your online world offline, but it's really easy to neglect when your head is buried in the weeds.

One more great lesson I took from that contest is that going green doesn't have to be a competition. Even at one of the nation's largest "Green" conferences, people still buy their coffee in non-compostable cups, drive SUVs, use old appliances, drive 85 with the windows up and the AC blasting, and a myriad of other "ungreen" things, but what's important is that we're all making some efforts towards sustainability where we can. I definitely didn't feel a need to be bashful about my "light green" status there and it was a refreshing feeling.

Lastly - thanks West Coast Green for giving me the most comfortable t-shirt ever made. Buy these things wherever you can get them. Something about mixing bamboo with organic cotton is absolutely magical.