Lack of interest "Favorite" forums

[Wildcat Media]

I saw a similar suggestion here to bookmark threads or posts to keep track of them, but I feel that a useful feature would be to allow members to mark an entire forum as a favorite. Then, from a button or link from the home page, being able to toggle displaying only your favorites, or all forums. Either that, or offer a page listing only your chosen favorites.

The reason I mention it is because there are a few communities I visit that have only a small number of forums out of dozens that I wish to browse regularly. For instance, one of them has 62 forums and 26 subforums. I browse maybe a dozen of those at the most, or maybe more like nine or ten.

"Watching" a forum isn't quite the same. This is more of a way to display forums for those who regularly browse them.

An alternate method might be to offer a link on each forum to hide or unhide it. But that is tedious when you want only a small number out of many dozens.

 

[Chris D]

Watching sort of has the same effect, though.

It's exactly what the "Don't send notifications" option was designed for:



So you won't receive any notifications, but the forum will appear in Watched forums.

 

[Mike]

And new posts can filter to watched content only, which includes threads in watched forums (and watched threads).

 

[DragonByte Tech]

That's actually a pretty sweet feature, I say that in spite of the fact that's yet another one of our vB mods I can't port now

The only thing I can think of would be a per-user option to switch from seeing the existing forum list on the front page to seeing this list. The reason why I'm suggesting that is because you lose the widgets seen on the home page when viewing the Watched Forums page.

I had a brief look at the Widget Positions interface, and I don't believe that page has a sidebar option by default. If you can't be bothered / don't see the value of creating the front page setting, adding a sidebar to that page would be the easiest solution (for you) since admins could simply duplicate the forum home widgets onto that page


Fillip

 

[Sim]

There was an addon for vBulletin I used on one of my forums ages ago which allowed people to choose forums that they didn't want to appear in their "New posts" searches - basically an ignore feature. That essentially works the opposite way to Watched forums and I think would be a useful addition to complement this existing functionality.

For example, someone might find the off topic posts to be just clutter and would like to not show those posts when doing New posts searches.

Or perhaps there are more controversial topic areas (politics, religion, football, etc) which they find annoying.

Perhaps this functionality could be included in the existing "Watch" button (which would need to be renamed?) giving users an additional option:

• Send notifications for:
• Send notifications via:
• Hide this forum from new posts searches: (checkbox)

Maybe "Watch" could be changed to "Forum preferences" or similar.

The same functionality could be applied to threads too - it would be nice to be able to hide individual threads from appearing in new posts searches - essentially an ignore thread option.

 

[Wildcat Media]

Watching sort of has the same effect, though.

It's exactly what the "Don't send notifications" option was designed for:

View attachment 157217

So you won't receive any notifications, but the forum will appear in Watched forums.

Aaah, I see. I used Watched Forums so rarely that I didn't remember there being an option to turn off notifications. It does sort of have the same function, yet I did not exactly expect to be able to use it as a Favorites system. Neat-o!

Maybe, then, it would be possible to add a shortcut to the forum listing, to click on a star to mark it "favorite" (watched) and turn off notifications by default or, at the very least, click on an icon to watch the forum, perhaps with an overlay to choose the options. And to unwatch, a single click to remove it. I don't know how much other members would use it, to make this worthwhile, but it does feel like a lot of clicks to accomplish the end result of watching a forum. (On the other hand, we would probably only do this infrequently anyway.)

I could also rename Watch as Favorite in the phrase system. That might encourage usage.

Incidentally, having an icon to see if we are watching a forum would also be helpful, even if it were not clickable.

Just tossing out ideas.

 

[securedme]

Aaah, I see. I used Watched Forums so rarely that I didn't remember there being an option to turn off notifications. It does sort of have the same function, yet I did not exactly expect to be able to use it as a Favorites system. Neat-o!

Maybe, then, it would be possible to add a shortcut to the forum listing, to click on a star to mark it "favorite" (watched) and turn off notifications by default or, at the very least, click on an icon to watch the forum, perhaps with an overlay to choose the options. And to unwatch, a single click to remove it. I don't know how much other members would use it, to make this worthwhile, but it does feel like a lot of clicks to accomplish the end result of watching a forum. (On the other hand, we would probably only do this infrequently anyway.)

I could also rename Watch as Favorite in the phrase system. That might encourage usage.

Incidentally, having an icon to see if we are watching a forum would also be helpful, even if it were not clickable.

Just tossing out ideas.

any update on something like Rudy's suggestion?