Implemented Bookmark posts for future reference - Bookmark Center

[Grover]

I am a member of the biggest social networking site in The Netherlands and there you can bookmark someone. Normally when you want to be a friend of someone, you send a request to that person. This person can either grant or deny your request. But what if you are not interested to become a friend of someone at that point in time? You just want to bookmark a person because you find them interesting, and decide later maybe what to do with it.

I was also a member of a very popular dutch dating website and there you have 'Favorites'. You can browser through millions of Profiles and add the ones you like to your Favorite list. This Favorite list can be sorted subsequentially on different fields (try doing that with your browser favorites....).

Furthermore, I also often have the need to bookmark a thread or even just a single posting.

Ofcoure you can use your browser bookmarks. But it is much more handy to have a dedicated bookmark section (on your profile or wherever it fits best) really where you can manage those bookmarks to your likings. (We could even have privacy-options for it, so we can share our bookmarks with whoever we wish, but that may take things a bit too far... just keep it basic is my opinion).

You know the 'Favorites Center' in Internet Explorer? Simple and very useful... it would be great if we have something like that, so we can manage different kinds of Bookmarks, being it Profiles, Threads, Posts, or even Private Conversations... and in the future Blog entries/comments and CMS Articles/comments. Any content type really. Divided them into different subfolders and we are ready to go!

How many times on a sophisticated board like for example vBulletin you find yourself you need to reply to something, or see an interesting thread or posting or CMS article, or Profile and you think... I need to get back to this at some point. What to do? Most of the time I mail the URL of that content to myself...

It would be much better if we can do all this on the platform itself. What do you all think?

To the Moderators: this thread should be called 'Bookmark Center', because I am not talking about Favorites only here. Bookmarks fits the bill the best.

(edit: Maybe odd to say in my own thread , but this functionality is not one that is essential to me on a day-to-day basis. Just sometimes think it might come in handy).

Please do [like] this first posting if you think it is a good feature suggestion for XenForo

 

[James]

I think it'd be an idea to be able to bookmark a post for future reference.

I found this idea when I saw this post:

That option will be coming when I figure out a good approach to allow members to opt in and out of the alerts they choose.

I wanted to bookmark it for anyone who asked about alert opt in/out so I thought I'd suggest a bookmark feature (though it's probably best as a modification)

 

[Lawrence]

Done! Pretty good suggestion. I can see this being used a lot, especially by Mods.

 

[James]

I suppose it could work like standard thread listing and be something like:
www.xenforo.com/community/members/james.908/bookmarks
www.xenforo.com/community/bookmarks

 

[Paul B]

I would expect a bookmark feature to be standard rather than a mod.

I use this quite a lot on other forums.

Edit: Why does the first URL in your post above have a break between a and r?
www.xenforo.com/community/members/james.908/bookma rks

I think it must be related to the 50 character limit.

 

[James]

50 character limit, I guess it forces a space after 50 characters

 

[Enigma]

Fully agree. I see two ways of implementing this.

#1 Add a "Save" button to every thread/post. If you click it then the thread/post shows up in your User CP in a list of "saved" items.

#2 Use tagging for this. Allow all major pieces of content (currently threads/posts/pages) to be tagged, and have a full User CP section for your tags where you can search/organize/view them. You can tag items you want to come back and read later etc.

 

[James]

Fully agree. I see two ways of implementing this.

#1 Add a "Save" button to every thread/post. If you click it then the thread/post shows up in your User CP in a list of "saved" items.

#2 Use tagging for this. Allow all major pieces of content (currently threads/posts/pages) to be tagged, and have a full User CP section for your tags where you can search/organize/view them. You can tag items you want to come back and read later etc.

I was thinking something a lot more subtle. Just an icon in the upper corner of a post that resembles bookmarking (star, pin, etc).
Click - bookmark post, set the post in a higher opacity, display a tooltip "You have bookmarked this post".
Click again - unbookmark, lower opacity, tooltip "You have removed this post from your bookmarks".

The database could just contain a list of bookmarked post IDs and it'll fetch the posts as you view. Alternatively, you could store an extra column named "bookmarks" in the posts table and just put the userid of all users who've bookmarked it.

 

[Paul B]

This is how my forum handles bookmarks, subscriptions, drafts, etc.



There is a "Bookmark topic" and "Subscribe topic" link below every thread so it's easy to add new ones.

 

[James]

Yeah, but what if we want to bookmark individual posts in a 100+ page thread? Maybe bookmarking threads AND posts could be an option.

 

[Paul B]

Maybe bookmarking threads AND posts could be an option.

I don't see why not but eventually there are going to be more links in a post than content

 

[Brandon_R]

Isn't this what Watch is for?

 

[Paul B]

Not really.
Watching a thread will give you alerts for all new posts, etc.

Bookmarking is exactly the same as bookmarking in a browser: it's just a list of threads which you have stored for easy access to at a later time.

 

[Dean]

Bookmarking is exactly the same as bookmarking in a browser: it's just a list of threads which you have stored for easy access to at a later time.

I do see the point, but couldn't the bookmarks (in theory) go to a special post in a thread? Or anywhere on the internet, even information on a 'page' of content that was announced last week?
http://xenforo.com/community/threads/pages.489/

 

[Brandon_R]

Yeah i mean it's basically the same thing, just think of the "Watch Thread" feature as a more general feature than the "Bookmark Thread" feature. Reminds you of the PC feature, its like private threads and private messages in one which is a more general feature than the Private Message feature.

On a side note,

Couldn't you use the browser for this anyways since you mentioned it's exactly the same as bookmarking in a browser?

 

[James]

You could but then if you're visiting on another browser/computer you don't have access to the bookmarks you've set.

 

[Paul B]

You could of course bookmark posts and threads using your browser. Or in a post you create yourself.
Neither of those are very good solutions though.

I don't think pages would work as members can't create private pages themselves.

As I said, my forum has bookmarking and it's extremely useful.

 

[Dean]

As I said, my forum has bookmarking and it's extremely useful.

Can you add text of some kind? Such as "explanation of ___ feature"? Or does it show up as an url only?

If we had them on this forum then in theory helpful people could more easily keep track of the major threads regarding tags, prefixes, when it will be for sale, etc.

 

[Paul B]

It's exactly as I posted above.

There is a "Bookmark topic" and "Subscribe topic" link below every thread.
You click on the "Bookmark topic" and the thread is saved in your CP as shown in the screenshot.

It's like having your own personally customised forum with the threads you want in it.

There's not much else to say about it really.

 

[Grover]

I think it'd be an idea to be able to bookmark a post for future reference.

I found this idea when I saw this post:


I wanted to bookmark it for anyone who asked about alert opt in/out so I thought I'd suggest a bookmark feature (though it's probably best as a modification)

Already suggested: Favorites Center

I am a member of the biggest social networking site in The Netherlands and there you can bookmark someone. Normally when you want to be a friend of someone, you send a request to that person. This person can either grant or deny your request. But what if you are not interested to become a friend of someone at that point in time? You just want to bookmark a person because you find them interesting, and decide later maybe what to do with it.

I was also a member of a very popular dutch relationship/dating website and there you have 'Favorites'. You can browser through millions of Profiles and add the ones you like to your Favorite list. This Favorite list can be sorted subsequentially on different fields (try doing that with your browser favorites....).

Furthermore, I also often have the need to bookmark a thread or even just a single posting.

Ofcoure you can use your browser bookmarks. But it is much more handy to have a dedicated bookmark section (on your profile or wherever it fits best) really where you can manage those bookmarks to your likings. (We could even have privacy-options for it, so we can share our bookmarks with whoever we wish, but that may take things a bit too far... just keep it basic is my opinion).

You know the 'Favorites Center' in Internet Explorer? Simple and very useful... it would be great if we have something like that, so we can manage different kinds of Bookmarks, being it Profiles, Threads, Posts, or even Private Conversations... and in the future Blog entries/comments and CMS Articles/comments. Any content type really. Divided them into different subfolders and we are ready to go!

How many times on a sophisticated board like for example vBulletin you find yourself you need to reply to something, or see an interesting thread or posting or CMS article, or Profile and you think... I need to get back to this at some point. What to do? Most of the time I mail the URL of that content to myself...

It would be much better if we can do all this on the platform itself. What do you all think?

To the Moderators: this thread should be called 'Bookmark Center', because I am not talking about Favorites only here. Bookmarks fits the bill the best.

Maybe a Moderator can merge the 2 threads and call it 'Bookmark Center'?