Impressions of Lefora?

Registration not required?

This system is really easy to use, I am very impressed!

Jon
http://dreamclue.com ...get the message!

that's up to the forum admin if they want to allow anonymous commenters or not. It's to help lower the barrier to participate on some forums. Just like wordpress/blogger, we'll ask for the email address but never publish it and you can even link to your own website.

Looks great, and easy to use. Can a Lefora forum be embedded into our site? We would be very interested in this - but as a content provider, we wouldn't want to lose the traffic by sending users off our site to discuss our content.

Looks good, Paul. Is it possible to authenticate users in Lefora if they're already authenticated on the main site?

TRYING YET AGAIN
The editor dropped a whole paragraph and cut off the top line. I think this may be because I used Outlook 12 to check my seplling then copied/pasted into the WYSIWYG editor. Perhaps some characters from Outlook confused the editor. This time I'm pasting from Notepad into the text editor. So if my paragraph spaces disappear. Sorry, no preview.

Rob:-]

TRYING AGAIN

I am reposting this because what you see in the post above is not all that was in this tiny reply box when I hit the submit button. So there are bugs. It dropped two paragraphs. With no preview capability my only recourse is to repost and try again.

Well you wanted our impressions. As I type this only the top half of this line is showing. Another bub. My first impression ... not ready for prime time.

Peace,

Rob:0-]

So I think navigation is confusing. I posted (below) to the Forum Discussion when I though I was posting here. I was given a choice (checkboxes) of several places to post. I guess I wasn't posting a reply. Also this reply window is tiny. Is there some way to make it taller than four lines? I switched to the text editor and back. That made the font smaller so now there are five and a half lines showing but the window is still tiny. (I have a big screen. Why do these programmers think I want to work through a knothole? This is not WYSIWYG 'cause I can barely see anything!) Is the reply window size configurable?
Rob:-]

REPOST FROM FORUM DISCUSSION
Well, until there are more comments in here, it's hard to tell. So far no surprises ... which is a good thing. It seems that http://meetro.com is blocked from my company. It says because it's an IM site. I can reach http://lefora.com, however.

So would you say that Lefora is comparable to Google Groups or Yahoo Groups except without the email component?

I was reading their feature list. They follow the current trend of light documentation. I'd like to learn all about a product before I buy in. Okay, it's free but if I have to invest in setting one up just to discover the features, well, it has cost me that time. I think it's faster to read about the features instead of performing experiments to discover what they are.

For example, they don't say what types of membership they support. Can I make a closed, private, invitation only forum? What are the moderation features? What if I don't want "thumbs-up, thumbs-down" democratic moderation? As far as I can tell, I've got to create a forum and experiment to discover what it can and can't do.

Lots of stuff I don't really think I need in the forums I create/moderate. I'm not much interested in setting up some kind of social networking forum, which I think this is aimed at. The things I do are tightly focused and usually interesting to a very small group of people.

RSS sounds useful and embedded multimedia. I see from this page that YouTube is supported but I use blip.tv. Can I embed that? (Features page just hints at it.)

WYSIWUG ... excellent! But I don't see it here.

Peace,

Rob:-]

I tried to set up my own forum on http://lefora.com but finaly had to give up. It can't seem to remember any of the settings I put in. Who knows what the problem is but I can't get it to do the simplest things. I think I'll stick with Google Groups. Not pretty but it does work most of the time. (By the way, I'm the same anonymous "Rob:-]" that had all the trouble posting earlier in this topic.)

You can drop it in an iframe and you're good to go.

Could you please elaborate? If you're asking if there are global profiles and people only need to register once then yes you can. If not then I didn't understand the question.

Hi Rob,

Thanks for the feedback. I've noted this and we'll work on presenting things more clearer to people that want a more detailed feature list.

Okay, I lied ... I didn't give up. After trying the setup again I was able to get through the whole process. When I first started setting the forum up I skipped around from one item to the other. They have a wizard kind of a process but I didn't follow it. That may have been the source of my problem. When I used the wizard all the way through the setup it worked.

Anyway, the forum is now set up. I'll have to decide if I want to keep it or scratch it. I didn't see any way to delete it.

Anonymous replies? can you turn that off?

Yes, you can =]