Posted on July 1, 2008 - by Jordan H

The New KidChat

Well, I’ve been working on a new KidChat for ages. It’s taken a long time to decide where to go with the site. Do we want it to be more than a forum? If so, how much more? We knew our users were finding the current software (phpBB3) complicated to use, we were averaging about 5 posts a day. For a forum, that wasn’t good.

After the great big data loss we were pretty much back to square one with KidChat. No posts. No users. No existing site. So, we thought we might as well go ahead and put up what we’d planned for KidChat there and then.

Our solution was using Vanilla, an extendable open source forum application. It’s very plain and lacks some core functionality of a forum (memberlists, private messaging) in the beginning, but we added a lot of addons together and came up with what we now call “KidChat2″.

So what have we done? The first change you’ll probably notice is the News Blog. This is displayed to everyone on the homepage for the site. It helps us to let our users know what we’re doing with KidChat. Its prominent position means that users are more aware of the stuff we’re doing for them, and gives them the opportunity to ask us about things and suggest new ideas.

Then we’ve simplified the categories. No categories, no sub-forums etc, just forums. Vanilla, by default, lets users just browse the topics. It’s made it much more simple for our users. Replying is much easier to use and that’s been shown in the stats - over the last 5 days we’ve been running the new site, we’ve had 500 posts!

I hope that we’ve chosen the right direction for KidChat, and I’m sure that these new changes will encourage new members to join and for the forum to grow even more.

>Jordan