Today, we have some more improvements coming in XenForo 1.4. Individually, these features are not big enough to dedicate an entire HYS thread, but some of them have been heavily requested nonetheless.
Limiting watched content notifications to active users
As you can probably work out from the screenshot, if this option is enabled, users that have not visited recently will not receive (or be considered for) alerts and emails from content they watch. This is mostly done for performance reasons. However, you can probably assume that if a user doesn't visit your forum for a long period of time, they aren't interested in the content they're watching and are unlikely to return. Stopping emails to them may prevent an invalid spam report...
Have you seen...?
This forum spotlights some of XenForo's interesting features. Spotlights on features in upcoming releases will be posted here.
Tags are a common method of adding keywords to content to aid searching and discovery. In XenForo 1.5, we're adding support for applying tags to threads, as well as a framework for add-ons to add tags to their own content types.
Thread tags apply to the thread itself (rather than individual posts), so they are displayed at the top of the thread view, independent of any post.
Clicking any tag will take you to a page displaying all content that has that tag attached to it:
These results pages will be accessible to search engines (and of course end users) to help them relate the tagged content to each other.
To edit the tags in an existing thread, clicking the "edit" link shown in the first screenshot will bring up an overlay with...
As with many of our previous releases, XenForo 1.4 is adding more options to help prevent spam from being posted on your forum. Our focus here is mostly directed towards preventing automated bot registrations.
Additional CAPTCHA Types
Out of the box, we now support a number of additional CAPTCHA providers:
Text CAPTCHA -- this is a service that provides Q&A style CAPTCHAs like "Which of 47, sixty two, 18 or 59 is the smallest?". Essentially, this isn't really different from the built-in Q&A CAPTCHA system, except this system has a large number of questions built already -- over 180 million. Q&As are potentially easier to solve for humans and have fewer accessibility issues, but the trade off is that they can possibly be machine read...
Much of this information will be familiar to those who were following the development process over at the XF2 Demo Forums, but this is something of a ‘greatest hits’ list of some of the important changes and improvements to XenForo since the 1.x generation.
Greatly-enhanced mobile-friendly style
The new XenForo 2 style is the first thing you will notice in XF2. The entire style has been redesigned with a fresh new appearance, but also with mobile browsing at the forefront of the design. When the viewport shrinks, on-page content shrinks, shifts and reorganises itself automatically to optimise the browsing experience for small displays.
A sticky header automatically activates when the window is scrolled, allowing the most important...
Welcome to XenForo 1.5. We're now ready to upgrade XenForo.com and start putting the new code through its paces. Following this, we will start the public beta process. All customers with active licenses will be able to download and test the new version. However, please be aware that beta versions are not supported and should not be installed on production sites.
There are still some other assorted improvements coming in XenForo 1.5 that we haven't covered yet, so let's look at those...
Link title conversion
When a post is made, links can automatically be converted to show the title of the page they link to. If enabled, a "simple" link like this:
https://xenforo.com/community/
Would be automatically converted to:
XenForo Community...
Most forums need to deal with members whose email address becomes invalid. Sometimes the user will go ahead and change it, but other times your forum will fire off emails to this now invalid address. When this happens, if you have a bounce email address setup in XenForo (and possibly with the -f option enabled in the mail configuration), you will receive an email telling you about the failure.
Email delivery failures can happen for a wide variety of reasons. If you continually send to an address that has been disabled, for example, this can count against your domain/IP's email reputation. A lower email reputation can lead to reduced email deliverability as your domain may appear to be a spammer.
Therefore, when you are notified that...
Today, we're showing you some exciting changes to Notices that we're bringing to you in XenForo 1.5:
Displaying an image
With the introduction of the above option it is now possible to display an image on a notice. You can either display the current visitor's avatar or provide a path or URL to one:
This addition should help draw more attention to your notices.
Visibility options
It is currently possible to hide notices with relative ease using some custom CSS. You can still do this to have tighter control, but the new option makes it even easier.
The exact breakpoints will depend on the properties set on the style used.
Floating notices
In XenForo 1.5 there are now two types of notices. Block notices behave in the familiar...
XenForo 1.4 includes a handful of useful improvements to help you manage and monitor the user upgrades you have set up on your system.
Watch on Vimeo
I'm attempting a new recording system with this video - the main thing you should notice is the improvement in audio quality, but if you have any other comments do let me know.
However, please don't post feature suggestions in this thread, even if they are directly related to this system! Any features suggestions should be posted in the appropriate feature suggestion forum so that they can be properly assessed and catalogued.
Today we'll be talking about some smaller improvements that we have made in XF 1.5 which have been heavily requested.
Ability to disable trophies globally
The above option appears below the Trophy list in the Admin CP and in the User Options option group which makes it easy to switch off the Trophy system.
When disabled, trophies will no longer be awarded, nor will the UI display anything that mentions trophy points. The "User Title Ladder Field" will automatically switch to "Messages" if trophies are disabled.
No "Most Points" tab on the Notable Members page.
No Trophy Points stat on the visitor panel...
...or the member card.
Threads with the latest posts in the sidebar
In XenForo 1.4 we introduced the "New Profile Posts"...
Welcome to the first Have You Seen for XenForo 1.4. We'll be posting plenty more of these over the coming weeks so keep checking back for more.
First up, we're going to cover the wide variety of improvements we've made to the poll system.
New Poll Options
There are a number of new options and controls when you create a new poll:
Polls are no longer limited to one or multiple choices. The creator can now control exactly how many responses a user can select. If they select the maximum amount, the other options will automatically disable to indicate this.
Voters can now change their votes, if the option is selected. This is useful to handle cases where people make mistakes, a response is missing, or if people just change their mind...
The ability to Email Users from the Admin CP based on user search criteria has been part of XenForo since its very first release. In XenForo 1.5 we have enhanced this and added some additional ways of contacting your users.
Alert Users
Using the same search criteria that can be used to email users, you can now mass send Alerts to your users. By default, an alert will appear to be from your own account. Alternatively you can leave this blank (a default avatar is shown instead) or enter the valid username of another user.
Most alerts sent on the forum have at least one "PopupLinkItem" link. The purpose of this is so that when the alert is clicked, it is that particular link which is navigated to, e.g. if you click on a watched thread...
Hot on the heels of our XenForo Media Gallery 1.1 announcement, we are now also ready to show what's coming in XenForo Resource Manager 1.2.
Resource Manager 1.2, like Media Gallery 1.1, will require XenForo 1.5.
Resource tagging
As we mentioned in the thread tagging announcement, tagging support would be coming to our official add-ons. Resource tagging thus works very similarly to thread tagging.
Tags can be displayed at the top:
Or at the bottom:
When tags are at the top, they will be displayed on all parts of the resource (other than in the discussion thread). When tags are at the bottom, they will only be displayed on the overview tab.
Editing is otherwise identical to thread tags.
Latest reviews
You may now display the...
Welcome to the first Have You Seen thread for XenForo 1.5. Over the next few weeks, we'll be posting more of these to show you how the new features in XenForo 1.5 are going to work. We expect to install XenForo 1.5 on XenForo.com for initial testing by early July, with a public beta process to follow.
Today, we're going to look at the responsive admin control panel. XenForo 1.2 made the public-facing components fully responsive, supporting screen sizes from desktops and tablets of varying sizes to phones. The admin control panel remained designed solely for full-size desktop screens. If you were in a pinch and needed to make a change in the control panel on your phone, you could, but it was far from efficient as you zoomed in and out...
