Feature Requests and Suggestions Thread

Is this a bad thing? I can disallow links in subtitles, but it seemed like kind of a neat feature at the time.Or are you saying that it is confusing in the links to messages that are provided with thread lists, and that the link in the subtitle should be disabled when displayed with thread lists?

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

I think you are missing what Ben is trying to point out.He has, within the subtitle, a link. This subtitle is itself a link, such as at the all topic page. Thus you have a link within a link. Click on one part of the link and you go one place, click on the other part of the link and you go somewhere else.He also supplied a like example within his message.Adminnemooseus

I understand what Ben is saying, and I reproduced the "problem" before replying to him. As I said, I think allowing links in subtitles is a neat feature. In the thread lists the link to the message becomes two links, one to the message and the other to the linked webpage. This also seems kind of neat, since it means you don't have to visit the message to visit the link in the subtitle. But do others see this as a problem?Even if the subtitle consists of only a link and no other text there's still no real problem because the "Message ddd" link would still appear between parentheses, so there would always be a link to the message.I guess I'm having trouble seeing a problem.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

The second thing.Also, now that I got an email notifying me of your response, it looked like this:Your message 117 titled "Linking to website overrides Topic link (click here-><-)":
http://EvC Forum: Feature Requests and Suggestions Thread -->EvC Forum: Feature Requests and Suggestions Threadprobably best if the UBB code is not showed there; I never typed anything like that, and it's just really hard to read.Ben(escaped tag markers to properly show the content of the email)This message has been edited by Ben!, Tuesday, 2005/03/15 01:37 PM

Thanks for letting me know about this. At some point I plan to change email over to HTML format, and that should take care of this.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

In an attempt to find a way to reduce the "he-said she-said" naure of threads involving posters like Faith (which is hard given the hostility, arrogance, dishonesty and the attitude of "I didn't do what I did! I'll pretend you did it !") I propose a measure found in other fora whereby posts can be reported to the administrators for special attention.Hopefully this will allow the administrators to find and deal with disruptive posters and threads more quickly than at present.

Yes, I've seen this feature at other boards. I'll add it to the list. Do you know the method these boards use to notify moderators that a post has been reported? Email? An alert? Access through the control panel?

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

I don't know what they use, but I would not be surprised if they use the "Personal Message" feature found in many fora.For this board I would suggest discussing it with the other administrators and moderators. Within the technical limits, the solution that best helps them do the job is the best solution.

At the board nerve center, one of the reply permissions settings options is: I was going to try to use this setting, to restrict the non-admin posting to the "Great Debate" forum (which only has one active topic). Faith and Jazzns would get special authorization.Problem: I don't know how to set up the special authorization. Is this something that was lost in the software transition? I seem to recall being able to find the method, pre Christmas 2004.The ever fat-headed Adminnemooseus

The capability can be created in a new forum, but existing forums can't be modified to have this capability. This is an improvement that's on the bug list.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

You know what would be freakin' awesome? Is if instead of generating HTML, you generated an XML RSS feed. I think that would give you a lot of the features that people want (let's say there's an RSS feed per forum; then people could subscribe to forums for free, without any programming done by you).Plus RSS gives you a lot of the basic functionality that people want--like notifications of what's new, what's unread, etc) without you having to program it and support it. It's inherent in the RSS format and the RSS clients.Just a thought, as I looked into doing some RSS for my English teaching website. That might be a really interesting way to go for forum software...Ben

I've never heard of RSS. Does it require servers running it in the same way as SQL or php? One of my requirements is that the software be able to run on even the most minimal of servers. Boards that require SQL are very popular, but one thing I've noticed is that sites with such boards have a very short lifetime. I'm not sure of the reasons, I haven't investigated yet, but I speculate it might be due to two causes: the additional expense of including SQL server support (most webhosting companies charge extra) and the small amount of disk space usually made available for SQL databases, greatly limiting the number of messages that can be submitted before one has to start deleting.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

Jeez, you gotta get out more .Go to The Panda's THumb and scroll down some to see the "RSS Feeds" box on the right side to see what's going on. I bet they'd be glad to dispay the EvC RSS feed as well.Firefox can display RSS feeds as "live bookmarks" which present a drop-down list of the current content of the feed. If you have Firefox, go to Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines and notice the little orange thingy at the very lower right corner of the window. Click on it and select "Subscribe to RSS". In the "Create in" drop-down select "Bookmarks Toolbar Folder" and pick OK.Opera v7 and up display RSS feeds much like email and newsgroups. See RSS Newsfeeds In Opera Mail.Mozilla allows installing RSS feeds as sidebars, and I bet Opera does too: see Install a Mozilla Sidebar.RSS feeds can also be displayed by standalone programs called "aggregators" and websites often display other website's feeds, as at the Thumb.It's just scripting language to create some XML. I bet that the code that generates the "Topics" page could spit out a feed as a side effect. See Set Up a Simple Syndication Feed Using RSS, Publishing Through A RSS Feed - Quick Guide, What is RSS?, and many more that Google can turn up.

JonF basically says what I wanted. I wouldn't say that RSS is a scripting language; it's just a standard format of XML.Basically, you could spit out the RSS format instead of the HTML format. There are clients that understand RSS (just like HTML). So, you could keep your existing pages, and simply have a different URL to a different CGI script, except that the new CGI script generates XML. The underlying data doesn't change at all. So, basically you can do RSS in whatever language you want. Just spit out XML in the proper format.The good thing about RSS is that it's basically used for event-based information (i.e. NEWS FEEDS). You get a lot of functionality for free, such as clients using the specified date of RSS items (speaking loosely here, I don't know RSS very well yet) to tell you what items are new.Basically all a user has to do is use their RSS client to "subscribe" to the RSS feed that they want. I'm sure all the big news websites have RSS feeds.The RSS client also displays HTML (i.e. you can embed HTML into your news items, as far as I understand). The point is just that instead of using static formats such as HTML, where you have to PROGRAM in the event-based and subscription-based functionality, you may want to look into RSS as an existing alternative.But I don't know. Maybe the RSS clients don't support a rich set of HTML features... that would suck. I am not THAT familiar with it. But I think it's worth a look, when you start looking into making dBoard2.0 and when looking into implementing / updating some of the event-based and subscription-based features that have been discussed.Ben

I didn't intend to say that RSS is a scripting language. I meant that the means of generating RSS is a scripting language.