UBB.Developers Forums General Discussion Suggestions and Feedback What's next?

It's not that I've been ignoring you[]/testimages/icons/wink.gif[/], I just don't know how to pull this one off. In order to do this properly the current showflat/showthreaded scripts couldn't be used as they would need be grabbing different posts then the standard sort options and from different boards. The current show recent messages 24/48/7 is useful to see what posts are new but not to get from one to the other because of this reason.

All I can think of at this point would be to have 3 new scripts newpostlist,shownewflat,shownewthreaded which would kind of be a pain in the butt when adding new features so I've been trying to figure out if there is some better way to do this.

Would it be possible for the showflat/showthreaded scripts to display all posts from all categories/forums, instead of just for one forum? Not to replace the current scripts, but to use them just for the new messages, since they already do display which are new since last login and/or last view of the forum.

Wouldn't it make it easier if you had showflat and showthreaded be using a show.pm module that had the routines for showing a post in the two modes (header on top or side)? Then it would be easier to implement changes and we wouldn't have some of the code four times in the scripts... or even more if we added Muhammad's ideas which I really like... I know the feeling too well... my forum has picked up so much traffic that I'm worrying about my host, since I'm not on a dedicated server (don't have that kind of money). Have even been thinking about setting up a server at home for W3T... would be a tiny bit slower but no problems with too much bandwidth or resources!

1- Why you don't make the Markup Codes in the database
so the Admin can change add/edit/delete codes
It's good to edit your Markup Codes in the Admin section

2- Another suggestion, It is good to edit or add Questions in the FAQ page, so the questions will be in the database and the FAQ page will get them from the database then print them
and the Administrator can add/edit/delete questions in in the Admin Section

I hope from you to do this suggestions []/testimages/icons/smile.gif[/]

Regards,
eDeveloper

Scream,
Is there any changes in the database for version 5.4.3 ?
Because I'll develope an Importer Tool to Import Users/Posts/Forums from vBulletin 2

I think if you put Importer Tool in the orginal version it will make W3T more popular

Anyhow, this is not important suggestion []/testimages/icons/smile.gif[/]

Regards,
eDeveloper

for what it's worth, my users would adore this feature too, as I switched over from WebBBS, and they were used to such a thing in the old forum (the only real complaint anyone's had

Would love to see an easier way to add new post icons. Right now you have to manually edit a few files which is a bummer if you suck at editing perl.

Could you explain how you do that? I'd find it very useful.

Exactly! We should have had them last year - so let's hurry up and get them in now before moving on to something new.

>>Site integration won't require much modification of existing scripts as it would be a bunch of addon type scripts

Thank god for that. That means those of us who don't want it can safely ignore it.

Big things on my wish list:

-User selectable HTML or ASCI e-mail alert/subscription options with ASCI as the default. I tend to like to include lots of tags in some of my posts as the forum manager and they make the e-mail's look awful. Thanks to Garrit for the tag stripping hack.
-Easier to edit e-mail confirmation messages for newly registered members. Perhaps make the form fields like the random password, username, forum name, etc. markup tags on a simple form page where you could create the e-mail. While it might seem minor, that first message you get from a community you sign up for is critical and often has some bearing on whether the person ever comes back and participates. The more it can be customized, the better.
-Better help documentation. The current FAQ is not enough for forum novices. Eileen's context help hack is a great step in the right direction, but it needs to get updated for the new version and kept up to date as new features are added.
-More control over the 'user list' feature -- like being able to pick which fields are included. ICQ is not a big thing for my forum, but listing of location or company is... having more control over that would beat the heck out of trying to modify the perl on my own.. If anybody knows a good hack, let me know.
-Integration of the 'attachment icon' hack that Eileen came up with. Several of my users have not noticed that anything is attached to a post in the current approach.

Templates and site integration sound nice, but I'd take the above tweaks first.

And thanks for asking!!

Oh.. and one other thing:
-Better pointers to registration for guests who are browsing a forum. Right now, disabling the 'post' icon(and changing it's appearance) and generic error messages are not enough to let them know what they need to do to participate. I'm thinking something in the header area that would prompt you to register/sign in; and a different type of header is the forum is restricted to 'read only'. I'm probably doing a lousy job of explaining this, but I want more indications to help people understand why they can't post, or why they can't enter an area of the forum and easy paths to get them to registration.

I've updated my Help system considerably for Woody's Lounge. Unfortunately I'm so busy doing it all these days that I haven't had time to write any of them up...

The w3threads code is robust and it has everything we need to create new features (weblog, for example) but it needs modularity for doing that.

I wish to see a new code structure of w3threads such that it becomes as modular as possible (separate modules for authentification, database management and queries, posting, displaying posts, ...).

The idea is to have a flexible system that permits plugins and integration with other packages or our own modules without the need to hack the w3t code.

<p>Things I would like to see for my board ( http://www.honorableplayers.org are:</p>
<ul>
<li>Second what Flint said about changing so moderators only sho wup as moderators in their own forum</li>
<li>For site integration, IMHO it is pretty good right now for users, but the ability to link the forums to new sitems etc is lacking. Because you cannot know what exactly will be done in other areas, rather than hardcoding some functionality for say news items, or whatnot, just create clean API to allow people to integrate it as they will. Don't reinvent the wheel by making yet another weblog, just make it easy for people to tie functionality in from the tools fo their choice.</li>
<li>Add support for AIM like you have ICQ support. I know AIM isn't as easy to do, but AIM is very popular as well. This might require some active polling of an AIM server, but go ahead and tie it to a cron job.</li>
<li>The ability to have private messages forwarded to an email account would be very nice.</li>
<li>Allow HTML in signatures</li>
<li>Mark All Read Functionality easily accesable</li>
</ul>
<p>Thanks for the great softare (though I guess we paid for it, but still, thanks!)</p>
<p>Brian McCallister</p>

Scream--Your idea (and forrie's) of e-mailing to the forum is one that I would dearly love to have. Right now I am getting people sending replies to the forum (when they have e-mail me all replies on), and all these come to me. So I need to respond to them, and also usually post them myself for them, when I find time.

Razvan--Your editing of Moderator's privileges is high on my list.

Flint--I would like to have your Moderator's don't carry the Mod flag into other forums--as an option.

Avolia--The newsletter sign up, if customizable, would be grand.

Yes, please. Everything Modular - and Templates to pull them all together.

Here's my 2 pennies......

1) Templates. This would include the ability to have each board act different from each other. So one board coulld be a straight flat view...another be a threaded view and yet another would be a new view which would be strictly linear chronological. The reason linear chronological is good is for conversation stlye boards where you wouldn't want threads......Each post and reply is put to the top of the listing in a chronological order. It would be good to have the ability to force these views so they either could or could not be changed by the end user in the Control Panel on a per-board basis. I am affraid I may loose my visitors without the incorporation of a linear chronological view (For that one board they are using)....it's what my visitors are used to and they're getting flustered with the current setup.

2) Site integration. The only thing I can think of in this regard is so I can put a line of text on the front page, or other pages, that would say how many people are on the site or that particular web page. Also to be able to have the flashing envelop in pages to tell someone they have a private message waiting for them in the forum.

3) Existing hacks. As I've said many times here....I would like to see the inclusion of the existing hacks successfully incorporated into w3t. Like that Bozo hack that I've yet to get to work for me with ver 5.4.2 []/testimages/icons/frown.gif[/]

To add to the mix:

- Intergration of searching in the user listing, esp. searching on different criteria.

-I haven't had much of a chance to really fiddle with ezboard, but I think how they handle their board to email gateway, and board to NNTP gateway is worth taking note of. I'm not sure how valuable a NNTP gateway would be, but I can vouch for an email gateway. Much of the community that I am developing internet infrastructure for really enjoys the ease of mailing lists. While mailing lists leave much to want, and w3t really fills in alot of the gaps, exclusive web based discussion forums still are not as conveinent as the average mailing list for the end user in many regards.

- Intergration is a big issue for me. Creating hooks so I could intergrate w3t with other membership based components of my web site would really help alot. Templates as well plays into my understanding of intergration, on an aesthetic level.

- more flexibility with the user profile fields (make all the possible fields alterable, and expandable beyond the 5 empty slots) with the ability of users to deside who gets read access to different fields of there profile (perhaps based upon groups).

- archiving of old threads. Perhaps such an archive would commit old threads to static files, taking them out of the db.

- w3t is already very fast, but with templates on the horizon, perhaps caching is a worthwhile persuit.

- declutter the button bars. Don't show buttons that aren't avaliable (or at least code in an option that alows admins to choose to have dead buttons visible or not).

- intergrate spell in the php version

- make it more clear to new users (first time visitors particularly) that they must loggin if they wish to post.

Yeah, we went dedicated a few months ago... our traffic instantly doubled thanks to the faster server. Our old host just couldn't handle the W3T traffic, even on their most advanced hosting plan.

my requests arn't for new features but things that should be added/deleted.
I believe that cleanup of the html should be first. there are alot of empty or non existant </td></td></table> code that should be cleaned up.
registration page needs to be upgraded so people can add certain info. homepage bleh blah bleh.
i think the are you over the age of 13 should be upgraded so that the user puts in his birthday and checks to see if he/she is over the age of 13 automatically?
the ability to edit the logged in and not logged in menu above.
the ability to edit the Welcom pm screen, Welcome email, a new user has replied to your post, Everything that gets sent out.
site integration and that stuff should be included as an addon by soneome else, i don't think that you should be working on that. it is not for everyone.
user customizable markup tage for posting code/html/pl/php
search by username search by certain fields search posts by username search for users that match p search users who have a www in there homepage field
SPELLCHECK FOR PHP
instead of form buttons how about a nice drop down menu for admins and mods to do admin mod things
the ability to have a mod do so and so duties. allowed to delete users, but not allowed to delete a thread. user customizable features per moderator.

Not sure if this has been covered or not, but I just started offering a pay membership, I would love to see a easy way to add people to this group, kind of like the admin or moderators with small icon and a way to automaticly send them an email when their membership is about to expire. Right now I am going to manually change their title and user name color which is going to be a pain. Hell, you could even offer some kind of membership add-on package for an extra fee, I know I would pay for it, more and more sites are going to some kind of membership to help pay for the site/bandwidth so it could generate a little more coin for you, of course free is always good too. []/testimages/icons/wink.gif[/]

I know this one is probably not something a lot of people need but if you have the time it would be nice:

At registration, the ability to assign the registrating person automatic membership of a group using a list if IP-ranges. Of course, using wildcards (*) would be the normal choice but I would rather have the file with the ranges using the format:

213.237.152-4 NormalMember

or

213.237.152.0-255 AnotherNormalMember

As written above there isn't that many sites needing this kind of feature but I could use it... []/testimages/icons/smile.gif[/] Anyway, I'm probably going to implement it myself but it would be a lot easier to upgrade to new versions if this were included.

kdp

My another ideas comes as the followings:

* Like the Post icon, let users select what the type of post belongs to. Such as 'Question', 'Answer', 'Request'...etc. and these types could be defined by moderators on a board based basis. (Of course the administrators defines the priviliege to grant to the moderator or not)

Thus, we can easy find the types of posts we want. It can be used to narrow down the search engine loading.

* Add a user behaviors based credits system. To accumulate the user's behaviors and usages of the forum into a special credit system on a site basis. So each of you can define how many credits to grant on what behaviors the user had done. (The current user management is so simple as it has only counted the number of posts the user had posted.)

* Add a 'List posts replied to me' to show all posts replied to the thread you have joined. This is like the Email all replies to my real email address features but only activated when users request to list on their login time.

Ok, Old dead horse but somebody has to beat it.

Intergrate the spellchecker routines, and or put together a spellchecker standalone that corrects spelling.

I would love if you would add an option for the Admin to create Markup tags.

For example. (NOTE THIS IS JUST AN EXAMPLE COULD BE OTHER MARKUP ITEMS)

The admin can add a markup of [WINMEDIA]. W3threads would send the marked text to an html include file winmedia.markup

[WINMEDIA]http://forums.torbeckfamily.com/mashthemeMovie.mp3[WINMEDIA]

<object classid="clsid:22D6F312-B0F6-11D0-94AB-0080C74C7E95" id="MediaPlayer1" width="200" height="225">
<param name="AudioStream" value="-1">
<param name="AutoSize" value="-1">
<param name="AutoStart" value="0">
<param name="Filename" value=[MARKUPDATA]>
.
. LINES REMOVE TO SAVE SPACE
.
</object>

ktorbeck, look at my newest hacks []/testimages/icons/smile.gif[/]

http://www.wwwthreads.com/perl/showflat.pl?Cat=&Board=custom&Number=39970&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=&fpart=

Don't I wish! CIHost has been going through hell since the 1st - being bombarded by the Code Red worm trying to get in. Of course it can't because they use Unix machines but it is still effectively slowing everything to a trickle because it means all their ports are 'occupied' when legitimate rquests are made to them.

I look forward to seeing that code when things are getting through again.

And here's a demostration of a great community style:

www.104cafe.com.tw

They have a feature to allow users to apply to took a part in each board which is like a private club. That should be a better direction for w3t development which is what a community are for.

BTW, it's a Chinese BIG5 site.

I thought I need a feature like this:

* I can edit and define the required field on user profile. So that the required fields should be filled out by the user and would indicated with a * sign.

* I can define which field should be filled out even if it is not a required field. If the user did not fill out these field, w3t would informed the user by a POPUP private message when these fields were unfinished.

Thanks, but this is really not what I am looking for.

Maybe, I should explain what I need do.

Many of our users will be using adaptive equipment. Screen Readers, Braile Readers, etc. I would like to be able to add markup commands for the special functions of adaptive equipment.

I came up with the idea of using an .markup include file because this would make it more easy to upgrade.

I think a markup.pm should do the trick. Then we could pull all the domarkup/undomarkup stuff out of w3t.pm, put it in markup.pm and add to it easily.

I like the markup.pm idea... maybe overall it would be better to use more .pm files to make upgrading easier!?

This is something that I've been wanting to do for some time, since alot of people add custom markup it would make upgrading much easier.

Just remembered another hack I did that others might like if it was in the main distro... how about user select time format (choose in the preferences)? Check out my boards with username test and password test, and go to Edit Preferences > Display Preferences.

That's clever but it would play havoc with my board layout!

Well... I'm sure it could be made to fit the layout, I mean remove the extra long date/time versions from the options. However, users from various countries would appreciate a date format they can adjust to what they are used to.

I use "04-Aug-01 20:45" which means everybody can understand it, no matter which format they are used to or which side of the date-line they're on..

Please do it would REALLY HELP!!!