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Hey everyone - I could really use your feedback on something.
I know it's felt a little frustrating how the main site and the forum don't always work hand-in-hand. The coding miscues cause formatting issues if you predominately use the forum, and probably most frustrating for people is the fact the forum doesn't allow for the most recent posts to be displayed at the top. I've tried to troubleshoot these items, but I've hit a bit of a dead end. The funkiness caused by hosting both the site and forum is a hurdle we can't really get around.
The entire reason for the Forum was so members could create their own posts and drive conversation, instead of having to live in the comment fields of our articles. Recently, instead of trying to solve the issue with cross-platforming, I started exploring if we could create a plug-in that would enable our readers to create their own Blog Posts, stored as articles, which would essentially allow us to "live" on the HomePage instead of the Forum.
This would allow us to predominately chat in the "Articles" comment section, which in my opinion is far superior to the Forum platform. The comments are organized by most-recent post first, unread comments are highlighted in Yellow, and it auto-refreshes in the event a new comment comes in while you're browsing.
My question to you guys is - is this something you'd like me to keep exploring? I think this would greatly open up the functionality of the site and expand what we can do (for example, when creating those Scouting Reports and Draft Boards, formatting for both sides forced me to dumb it down), and the GameDay threads are way better on the Homepage/Article side of things.
The page would look something like this, with that column to the right populated by the articles you guys post (or if we continue to be slow on our side of things, we'll just open the whole thing up to one stream, but I think you're about to get a good amount of new content 
).
There would also be a button that would take you to this page, which hosts the editor that will enable you to create your own article/post. The toolbox is SUPER raw right now, I'm still working on additional formatting tools in there to make it as useful and customizable as possible, and enable our beloved Sarcasm button to return.
Let me know what you think! Personally, I think moving forward with something like this would make things way cleaner on the site, but I would hang onto the forum as an "archive" until we were fully committed to the change.
Based almost entirely on how much better the higher traffic threads ( game day, draft day) threads work on the main site, I'd encourage you to keep moving that direction.
Whichever you ultimately choose, continuing with both creates some confusion. My "vote" would be to pick the main site and enhance the usability there.
Kyle, the image you posted for the proposal looks very clean. I like it. Seems like going this route would be great. Seems like we would not be losing any functionality, so why not go for it. Thx.
@evolz3737 I have no idea why man, but the site won't let me just convert our theme into that format. It might be outdated or something. I have a staging site where I'm trying to (that image is from the visual editor side), but every time I switch to publish it crashes into lines of code. I'm getting real frustrated, but at it in 2-3 hour blocks whenever my daughter's been sleeping but I'm not making much progress. I'm trying to recreate a very similar look from the ground-up, but so far it's slam-my-head-into-my-desk territory. I'm plucking away.
@kylededi Hey man. No rush. It's not like we don't have a good thing going already.
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