Hey all.
No, it isn't just you Simon - I wanted to encourage a little more exploration of the topics as a lot of the time, the latest posts feature wasn't as useful as I'd like it to be in that it often showed a flood of posts from the same board rather than individual topics from each different board. You can see the most recent
posts here and it's in the info block at the bottom
20683 Posts in 2033 Topics by 674 Members. Latest Member: hoopie
Latest Post: "Re: Is it just me?" ( Today at 10:23:42 AM )
View the most recent posts on the forum.
The SMF software isn't as flexible as it could be in some regards; take the aspects that FCMF refers to on the right hand side of the main site. I had to mess about with an SSI and output the last post from the various topics to surface posts from other parts of the site.
Whilst site traffic is generally up, the forums have been quiet of late (possibly because many of the answers people need already exist in a forum or an article). A consequence of this is that 'latest posts' tend to be pretty much centered around one topic one or two people jumping on a thread. When the forums were busier, the latest posts were a whole lot more diverse as more people posted from different topics.
I've allocated some budget to Google PPC and Facebook to try and raise forum awareness. I've also made a few changes to how content is indexed by way of 'prettier URls' note the structure of this url
http://www.thinkfish.co.uk/forums/general-non-fishkeeping-chat/ more keyword rich than the old versions.
So in short, I'm working hard to improve things but accept that some changes may not be to everyones liking. I have taken what you said into consideration and will try and add a better output of those soon.
Meantime, if you go to the home page or any other internal page outside of the forum then you'll see the latest posts from all boards.
http://www.thinkfish.co.uk/Hope that helps.
Rob