I bought MOI and I like it.. but the presentation and accessibility of information about it ... even this forum is just awful. Everything looks it was made 1999. Most application have an auto update function or at least the developer publish the current version (MOI3d dont) on their website. MOI3D deserves a new Website and new Forum

@voto1979:MOI3D deserves a new Website

A website with a RESPONSIVE LAYOUT Michael ;)
also an automatic resizing of the images users post,often too big,forcing you to horizontal scroll

Yes, it does.
How much would it take? Maybe 1, 2 days with a WordPress+phpBB or similar solutions.
Come on! :)

Seems program has priority against a cosy skin web site! :)

Yes. MoI forum looks like one big shapeless pile of messages. It is very difficult to use.
I think it's not so heavy task to migrate to any modern engine.


>>Maybe 1, 2 days with a WordPress+phpBB or similar solutions.
I hate wordpress :) Heavy, slow, poor programming..
I prefer lightweight engines.

everything looks not up to date... even the application and as I saw some post here in the forum which reveal secret function which are not directly accessible through a command interface -list and I also found some good scripts in the forum which are not listed by the main website or embedded in the application. Dont get me wrong I like MOI ( easy to use ) but the developer should also take care about the presentation and the interface. After 3 version of MoI it is time to take care.

I hate it too. Programmed like a prehistorical monkey.

Hi voto1979 - I will be probably putting in some effort to update the web site pretty soon.

The forum though really works very well, I probably won't be switching off of it anytime soon. It's simple and effective - I'm more concerned with the basic functionality of the forum being easy to use (which it is), rather than making it all glitzy and showy without any real purpose to that.

So you can probably expect a web site theme overhaul in not too long but probably not any changes structurally to the forum.


> even the application and as I saw some post here in the forum which reveal
> secret function which are not directly accessible through a command interface -list
> and I also found some good scripts in the forum which are not listed by the main
> website or embedded in the application.

It's a very important priority for MoI to keep it's streamlined UI and ease of use and a big part of that is not just throwing a huge pile of features right into the UI which results in a very complex jumble of information.

Simplicity is very easy to ruin just only by adding tons of things at a top visual level.

So it's intentional that some functions that are only used by a smaller number of people are somewhat hidden rather than put into the top level command UI.

In the future I do want to make scripts and extensions more easily browsable - it will take quite a bit of effort to do that and it hasn't been a high priority quite as of yet.



Anyway I certainly do agree that the web site is old and clunky and needs and update, and I expect to get to that sometime here.

It's just something that I don't really like to mess with very much, I tend to focus my effort on the software and in replying to discussions here in the forum and the web site has just not received any attention for quite a while now. To tell the truth it does not bother me all that much that it's very basic though, having things clear and easy to understand are more important to me than just looking slick.


- Michael

Hi Max,

> How much would it take? Maybe 1, 2 days with a WordPress+phpBB or similar solutions.

The main thing that takes a lot of time is deciding on how to approach the marketing message. That's pretty much where I've gotten stuck before.

Switching to something like phpBB would be a big step down in forum usability, it doesn't have some of the basic usability for browsing a lot of messages like having a separated threads list on one side and a content view on the other side. That's why I didn't use it from the start, it's very annoying to browse through threads when you have to navigate back and forth for reading each message. Reading e-mail is not set up like that in any decent e-mail system and reading forum messages should not be all that different than a good e-mail reader.

- Michael

By the way I've already done some work a couple of months ago on a new website design, the main thing that I got stuck on is with what marketing message to put on the main page, I've hired someone recently to help with that specific part and hopefully that will help me get going again.

The page design that I came up with is like this:



- Michael

"It's simple and effective"

Which is what I like about it. I also frequent a number of scale modeling websites and message boards. That's what I do my CAD work for, little detail parts and such for scale models. The more complex and glitzy they make the boards, the less I use them. Sometimes, simple is best. I'd rather use a simple, basic layout that works than a more complex and yes, confusing layout that may not.

Simple gets used. Its that, "simple." Sorry, couldn't resist.

Bob

I like the current forum as it is right now. However one thing i would like to see in the future, if it's possible, would be a dedicated section for all the scripts that have been created, where programmers could upload their scripts, with a short explanation, and users could easily browse this section. Because i find it sometimes difficult to look for a script, which was posted in the past (and i have forgotten it's exact name) and it's not listed in the resource page.

Regards
Stefan

I jump into the forum everyday,often using my smartphone
It's hard to read when someone post also images:left sidebar start to move following the content.
Devices to navigate on the net are changed,that's why most of sites switching layout to responsive

Hi Mauro, basically since MoI is not itself designed to run on a smartphone it's also not really a priority to focus on optimizing the support forum for it for smartphones either...

It still works to view it on a smartphone, I do it myself occasionally you just have to do some zoom in/zoom out and panning when there are large images.

There is some support in the forum software for resizing images, but I disabled it early on for some reason which I can't specifically remember right now, maybe it did not work all that great. Maybe it could be possible for me to fix that up and re-enable that in the future though.

But I've examined what is involved in making a "responsive" site and came to the conclusion that it was just too much effort involved for me to pursue it, it's something that's great to do for people where the entire thing that they are working on is a web app. But for me the web site is a support thing, my main focus is on developing the desktop software and not on spending all my time just working on maintaining a super fancy web site.

I need the web site to be simple and easy to maintain, and having something that has totally different behavior on different devices is fundamentally a complex thing to test and deal with, it's the opposite of simple and easy to maintain.

But something more limited like enabling the image resizing just on mobile might be possible at some point.

- Michael

I love the ease of accessing new posts. Other forums that I use are much more cumbersome in this regard.

However I sometimes have difficulty in tracking down particular topics that I've half remembered and a more structured forum would make this a bit easier.

Hello,

I think the process of site and proper messaging is not nearly as trivial as some are thinking. It's certainly not a process of a few days to get it right. I'd like to see the messaging and delivery polished before anything with the forum is worked out. The forum works for now, updating it will not typically attract new customers. Articulating your benefits in an effective way to the correct audience spurs sales, which is a good thing.

Hi Mike,

> I love the ease of accessing new posts. Other forums that I use are much
> more cumbersome in this regard.
>
> However I sometimes have difficulty in tracking down particular topics that I've half
> remembered and a more structured forum would make this a bit easier.

Unfortunately these things tend to be pretty much at odds with one another - if you impose some kind of folder structure on a forum it has a substantial fragmenting effect and it becomes difficult to get in and easily see all the new questions. You might have to do something like go in to every separate folder - instead of one place to check there can now be dozens of places.

It also becomes less friendly for new users for posting as well, they have to figure out where in the structure their new message should fit, and if they make a mistake there is some administration overhead of moving things around. These are problems that are eliminated by the current forum structure.

On the other hand, structure can be good for browsing through old messages.

I think a good compromise could be to have a concept of "tags" and that a post could have tags assigned to it and there would be some way to view things marked with a particular tag. Unfortunately the current forum does not have that concept built into it and so it would need some extensive customization in order to provide that. That will take a fair amount of time to work on and so probably won't happen anytime too soon.

There is the possibility in this forum software to have a folder organization, but it's something that I had intentionally disabled early on so as to avoid that fragmentation problem. It could be possible to have some different folders at some point though, but it's not clear to me what they would be, I would only want to have a small number of them probably.

- Michael

Why not buying a template?
http://themeforest.net/item/alive-responsive-bootstrap-html5-app-landing-page/10397657
http://themeforest.net/search?utf8=✓&term=app&view=list&sort=&date=&price_min=&price_max=&sales=&rating_min=&platform=

I for example use MoI mainly for conversion from CAD to OBJ for rendering.
The reasons are obvious. Without MoI most of this pictures will not exist.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/voto1979/sets/72157650107273721/

I am sure your customers will surprise you with interesting things for your homepage.

Michael you should take a look at https://discourse.org I think it may fit the bill...

Some examples of their platform in use.

https://discuss.atom.io (GitHub)

https://twittercommunity.com

http://forums.sketchup.com

http://discourse.mcneel.com

Hi voto1979,

> Why not buying a template?

I looked into that a bit, but often times the templates are rather complex and can tend to be difficult to modify and maintain.

It tends to be easier for long term maintenance to just develop the full web site yourself.

The first links you show use the Bootstrap system which I looked into some, but it was complicated enough that I decided it would take too much effort to learn it properly so that I could do a proper job of maintenance and making new pages later on.

The part that is particularly bad about a complex system that has a lot of pieces to learn is at some point in the future when I need to create a new page for some reason, if the system used to set things up is particularly complex and I haven't been directly messing with it for a while that creates a barrier at that future time.

This would not be a problem if I was only focused on web development, but that's not what I do - the web site development aspect is very much a small part of my work and not something that I'm tweaking or working with every day and that makes me all the more hesitant to use complex systems to set it up.

Anyway I've already got a new design worked out, I posted it above in case you missed it:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=7321.10


> I am sure your customers will surprise you with interesting things for your homepage.

Yes, as you can see in the above previous message I've already collected several interesting model screenshots from PaQ to showcase on the new page.


- Michael