RAT Community upgrades

[Epictetus]

Well, with apologies to Plato, but what is RAT? How do you define it? What are its goals?

I think different individuals have different agendas. Some are interested in re-enacting. Others are scholars. Even though I'm fascinated by military matters, personally I'm more focused on civilian issues, I suppose.

I started to write some suggestions several times over the past couple days but kept erasing them because they were all over the place. If we have a clear understanding of RAT's goals perhaps it would be easier to give some ideas.

[Jona Lendering]

If we have a clear understanding of RAT's goals perhaps it would be easier to give some ideas.

Well said. Still, I believe that the difference between, say, reenactment and the study of history is not as large as it sometimes seems. A person cannot study one of them and ignore the other; many reenactment groups show some citizens as well. Besides, the principles of scholarship are (or: ought to be) the same for both civilian and military history.

Yet, I can see your point. Jasper and I have often considered closer collaboration between RAT and Livius, to which we would like to add LacusCurtius. But Jasper and I are both general historians, and perhaps the reason why we haven't come to this closer collaboration is that we somehow sensed that not every RAT is looking forward to civil matters.

I need to talk to Jasper anyhow, we'll discuss this.

[Praefectusclassis]

But Jasper and I are both general historians

Am I? What would my mother say?! :wink:

David, Jona, please check the bottom of your screen on the RAT index page...

[Dave G]

I have a small request.
I find that links open in the current window and I often close them by mistake when I'm finished looking at them,only to have closed the entire browser,this then means having to start again from the start. Its only this site that seems to do this.
Would it be possible to have links open in a new window or tab?

[Praefectusclassis]

Would it be possible to have links open in a new window or tab?

In this forum, not without messing around under the hood. Sorry

[Gaius Julius Caesar]

A sword Data-base?

[L_CORNELIUS_CETHEGUS]

Here are some ideas:

1) Geo-Tagging: Some of the more interesting "mash-ups" (creating new services by combining one or more available technology services) I've seen are enhancing how people explore information through geographical coordinates. Exploring Wikipedia articles overlaid on Google Maps/Google Earth is a good example. I would suggest that a lot of good information with known find/event locations could be 'tagged' on a map, allowing people to easily pull up entries from the helmet, pugio, and other databases. So with an interface that looks like Google maps, for example, RAT members could locate 'Nijmegen', click the icon, and view a box which shows image thumbnails, a link to relevant forum entries, and possibly links to external content.

I think it would be fairly straightforward (as long as the hosting platform PHPBB allows for some customization) to give people a button to geo-tag their own posts if they want to. Another option would be to allow people to insert a clickable geo-tag inline into their posts, which would give people browsing the forums to travel the other way. It may be overkill, but once geo-tagged content exists, the whole thing could be navigated through Google Earth or Google Maps through a GeoRSS file.

2) Content Tagging/Predefined Searches: of the two main ways people access forum information (browse vs. search), search is by far the most effective for deep diving (although it's extremely basic and could be improved immensely). Ease of browsing on RAT is mostly affected by the nature of user-generated content -- compared to a site with a planned information architecture, valuable information is locked into a myriad of conversation threads. Obviously this is necessary to support the RAT model, but I think it could be improved by providing additional navigation tools. One way would be to have the RAT illuminati share the authoring of a landing page of pre-configured subjects which are sub-forum but cross-thread (e.g. segmentata, helmets, coolus, pugio, etc.) which serve as anchoring points for aggregating posts across threads. On those pages, in addition to one-click access to forum search results, RAT posters could post recommended valuable external sources of information that are useful to a researcher. These links could have a thumbs-up/down (a-la-digg.com) which give others an idea of how much the community values that content. On the back-end, these deep-diving forum links could function like search but from the UI would just be like traditional content navigation. Another way (perhaps more web 2.0) is to allow posters to tag their own entries (a-la-delicio.us). Visitors could then use the tag cloud to navigate to topics which have been tagged. This way would be more community generated and could be especially useful to newbies, who don't always know what to search for.

3) Collaborative Image Commentary: A third idea (which I haven't fully researched in detail) is collaborative input/comments on a single image. We currently rely on our writing skills to say "not that rivet, the other one", but I think there are plugins for some of the open-source platforms out there (e.g. Joomla, Drupal) which would allow RAT members to click the posted image at a specific spot and add a comment right there. Flickr is offering a similar feature. It would be nice to mouse over comments on the picture and see the commenter's name and their input.

BTW, I've done web development/project management work for about 12 years and have been doing web marketing/online strategy for about 4 years, so if you need a volunteer to help with the details of what you eventually decide on, you can PM me.

--Kelsey

[L_CORNELIUS_CETHEGUS]

Here's another one that's somewhat banal... I'm in the U.S. and when I'm eagerly awaiting feedback from posters in the U.K. or the Netherlands, I find myself counting on my fingers to know what time it is for them. The clock displayed in the RAT sub-header is my own time zone. It might be a nice feature to give quick access to current times abroad without leaving the page you're on -- it could even be a box which shows when you mouse over the time. That way the UI doesn't get crowded.

--Kelsey

[Praefectusclassis]

Hi Kelsey
thanks for the very useful reply and confirming some of my ideas.

[Praefectusclassis]

Bump! Input guys!

[jkaler48]

How about a Commercial paid advertising section to help support / upgrade RAT?

Annual best new product awards.

New roman themed smileys

Split Enemies of Rome into more sections. Celts Germans Dactians etc or maybe Western and Eastern

[jvrjenivs]

How about a Commercial paid advertising section to help support / upgrade RAT?

Personally I think one of the major advantages of RAT is the fact it is free from commercial influences, such as advertisements.

[L_CORNELIUS_CETHEGUS]

OK I'll bite :wink:

I think it might be common among users to finally locate a thread with the information you've been searching for, and the poster has placed an image... only the image is either no longer in the /files/ folder. Although infinite image hosting space would be awesome (hehe) that doesn't solve the problem for all the historical links and their 404 errors.

I don't know if there is such a plugin or one can be custom-coded, but if, at run-time, the display could insert a graphical 'X' icon or something like that next to links that go nowhere, rather than require RAT users to test the link and cross their fingers, that would improve the user experience. I did a quick search for PHPBB hacks and such and nothing jumped out at me, but it seems that as long as the PHPBB code isolates uploaded image links somehow (so you don't have to crawl all the HTML) and allows you to do a conditional check at run-time like this:

if (file_exists(/path/to/file)) {
...
}

I don't think there would be a performance hit.

--Kelsey