[Strike3ForumsMH]

Originally Posted by jdelasko

The ultimate point I am trying to make is that the developers of zoints local are shooting themselves in the foot by not making the features I mentioned an urgent priority. I realize how much development time must have spent on this product. The plain and simple fact is, that if someone wants to create personal pages that include photo albums, they will go is myspace.com. Whether you like it or not, that is who zoints local is competing with. The myspace concept is completely integrated, and very intuitive. It is what the vast majority of forum members that would even consider creating a detailed profile are used to, and they will turn away from anything that is not as easy to use. As a forum owner, I am not able to present my members with a good reason to create profiles and blog on my site, because there are too many better places for them to do it easier. I have been hoping for the last year that the zoints product would change that.

Whether you believe it or not, I probably want zoints local to be a successful product as much as anyone on the zoints team. That is why I have been so persistent about implementing features that translate into ease of use by forum members. Not to sound too crass, but a lot of forum members or potential members couldn't find their butt if it had a bell on it... they can't even figure out how to complete the forum registration process 25% of the time, so they surely will have a hard time using, an antiquated text editor.

As far as a photo album, it's NOT about who has the better implementation. It's about the end users perception of seamless integration of album pages into their profile. Profile pages are, in fact, a mini-website, and as such should be a congruous collection of pages, including the photo album. If a visitor to any given zoints profile pages must navigate away from the profile to view a photo album, they have in effect, left that mini-website. That's not good because the congruity of profile pages is then broken. I have Photopost installed on my site and it's a better photo album solution that anything built into vBulletin will ever be. Even though it's the best photo forum available, it's useless as far as an integration into profile pages goes... it's a seperate product.

Bottom Line: Integration of features and ease of use is the key to making zoint local a highly successful product. I want zoints local to be a successful product, don't you? This thread had about 10 unique posters in th month of May.... that's a pretty low turnout. This thread should be going nuts with questions if forum members were using the zoints profile system.

First off JD, I appreciate your passion for the product. Secondly and before I possibly bore others with a wall of text, we are looking into it (the editor.) Like I mentioned, this has come up recently again and I think it's something we all want solved. I don't know when or how or even if, but I believe there will be a good effort made toward this.

And I understand your point about photo pages and I agree as a Zoints Local Photo Album would be great. In the future? Who knows. But I think you misunderstood my point a bit. Photo pages to us were "pointless" (probably not the best word) when compared to revamping the blog and developing blocks for it. A lot of of time alone was spent on thinking how an entry would be spaced out or where should the tags go, etc. We felt that as not all forums would have the blog, in fact many do not, that it would be the more heavily desired feature as it is another form of content. So in essence, it was a very utilitarian type of thought, which of the two would bring the greatest joy to the most. With any feature development in the future, I am sure a photo album solution will be heavily discussed (it was discussed in the last round) as we knocked off a lot of potential additions with the 2.0 changes.

- Reid