Here's my current thinking about how to expand the forum. Please let me know if you think this makes sense:
1. If you create a new thread, you are listed as the creator of the thread and the subject you choose for the first post is what's listed as the subject of the thread.
2. If you are the creator of the thread or an admin, you can edit edit the subject of the thread by editing the first post.
3. If you delete first post to a thread and there are no other replies in the thread, the thread itself is also deleted. (My thinking is that we do not want to have empty threads lying around.)
4. Originally, I had thought that if you create a thread you should have the right to delete it regardless of how long it is, but after several conversations it seems that people don't like the idea of their posts disappearing. So, if you create a thread and someone else posts to it and then if you delete the first post, the thread IS NOT deleted. This raises an interesting problem, because now the first post in the thread will actually be the first reply BUT you, as the creator of the thread, will still be listed as the thread's creator and the subject you selected can now only be edited by an admin.
5. Should I build the ability to "disassociate yourself" from a thread? (i.e. you delete the first post and you no longer want to be listed as the threads creator?) My thinking is yes, probably.
6. Regardless of what path is taken, if you delete the last post in a thread, the thread is deleted.
7. An admin always has the right to delete a thread regardless of how many posts are in it.
8. The forum will support @mentions allowing you to let Duncan or anyone else know when they should take a look at something cool. When @mention'd the member gets a notification.
9. Notifications are being expanded in the following way:
All types of notifications the system send can be turned on and off individually from the new preferences screen.
Regardless of how many of these conditions are met, you are only sent one notification for a given post.
1. If you create a thread, you get a notification each time someone posts to the thread.
2. If you post to a thread, you get a notification each time someone posts to that thread from that point on.
3. If someone clicks REPLY on one of your posts, you are sent a separate notification. This means that you can select to have activity notifications turned off but still receive notifications if someone replies to you directly.
4. If someone @mentions you in a post, you receive a notification.
5. if you are "watching" a thread or the forum as a whole, you receive a notification.
As I mentioned, each one of these cases can, in the new code, be turned on an off individually.
10. From the thread view, you can jump to the first message, the most recent unread post or the last post.
11. The bug with regard to posting something new and the correct page not showing up will be fixed.
12. Admins have the ability to make posts sticky to they appear at the top.
12. The thread VIEWS statistic will be more accurate. Right now it's counting bots as well which sucks.
13. You will be able to LIKE posts which will cause a notification to get sent to the poster. NOTE: by default NO EMAIL is sent in this case.
14. You will be able to BOOKMARK/TAG posts. You will then be able to search for that post using that tag from the new search screen. (There will also eventually be a BOOKMARKS tab in your profile where you'll be able to see all your bookmarks. It will probably not make it into this upcoming release but you will be able to search your own profile for bookmarks from the new advanced search screen.)
15. Bookmarks that you apply to posts will be available for everyone to use. So, for instance, if I bookmark/tag a post with #DR650SE, everyone will be able to find that post by searching on the #DR650SE tag.
16. The forum will be using my newly created rich_textarea widget which will allow you to search for anything else on the site an "insert" it into a post. So instead of having to re-upload that cool photo that's already in the gallery, you'll be able to just insert a quick reference to it. "objects" inserted in this was can be 'liked' or 'bookmarked' separately from the containing post.
17. For the upcoming release my plan is to support INSERTing of Photos, Members (for meet 'n greets), Youtube videos and URLs.
18. A key new feature is that you're going to be able to go into the video gallery, the main links like or the photo gallery, look at a given entry and click a MENTIONS tab and see each post in the forum (or anywhere else on the site) which that thing is mentioned/inserted. This combined with the searching should go a long way to making things much easier to find on the site.
19. You will be able to upload/insert bunches of photos all at once, each with their own title and description. Photos, assuming you have a relatively modern camera, will auto-rotate the correct orientation. (That feature especially built for Josh.
)20. I want to replace the silly emoticons with better ones.
21. I'm not going to do anything fancy with quoting for this release. It'll work the same way as in the old system. Making something slick to do WYSIWYG quoting is actually a huge amount of work and probably not worth doing at this juncture.
22. Cross-posting to Facebook/Twitter/etc. will also not make it into this upcoming release.
23. Support for anything older the MSIE9 has been dropped. It's just too much additional work to support the older browsers. I am only one guy after all.
23. Pretty much every bug that I know of in the current live site has been fixed and replaced with even more insidious bugs that I do not know about.
My focus is to get the site updated with all this cool stuff sooner rather than later, but I wanted to ask, while I'm paying attention to this subject, are there any other major features you feel are missing or major annoyances that need to be fixed in this forum implementation?