XF 2.2 Forum and thread types

Forums contain threads and threads contain posts. It's been the essential framework of forums on the Internet since the public migrated from usenet to the web.

The structure is well known and well understood - though the origins of some of the terminology are lost in the mists of time. Who ever came up with the notion of your site being a forum, but these separate containers for related threads also being forums?

But back on topic, and we all know that visiting a forum (the second type) will usually show a list of threads ordered with the most recently updated near the top, and that clicking on any of those threads will show a page with the oldest post first and newer posts underneath and on subsequent pages.

Bending discussion forums to varying purposes​

Over the years, forum administrators have been inventive and used the simple messages-in-named-containers structure of forums to build all sorts of content - let's look at the XenForo community as an example.

First, we have announcements and these "Have you seen" threads. These are quite focused on the initial post (or first few posts in some HYS threads), with these posts containing a lot of information... a bit like an article with subsequent comments.

Then we have the suggestions forums, where we ask people to up-vote the ideas they're interested in.

There are also support forums where people are looking for answers to questions or solutions to problems.

And of course there are also forums for general chat and discussions, which most closely fit the original notion of a discussion thread and where you can't really say the threads fit the same model as the other types.

Up until now, these forums and the threads within have all been displayed the same way.

But not any more​

With XenForo 2.2, we are introducing the concept of Forum and thread types. This is a massive change with enormous ramifications for forums. Today, we're only really going to talk about the admin and user experience of the new systems, but in a few days we're going to follow up with a developer-focused HYS where we will talk about what's going on behind the scenes here, because we're really rather excited about the potential it unlocks.

There is a lot to talk about, but let's just dive into some examples...

tl;dr​

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[Ozzy47]

No alerts for upvote/downvoted?

 

[beerForo]

No alerts for upvote/downvoted?

Yeah I hate having to check

I'm quickly reminded of this post:

Some of you might remember a time before alerts were a thing. Alerts and notifications are everywhere in 2020 but over 10 years ago they were almost entirely unheard of, especially in forum software.

That's right, kids, there was once a time where you'd need to regularly traverse the entirety of the forum tree to find out if someone had replied to you yet, or not. That sometimes involved having to remember where you posted and physically go there.

 

[sbj]

No alerts for upvote/downvoted?

Maybe you like this suggestion?

Send an alert when X amount of votes has been reached

It would be annoying if I would get an alert for each upvote/downvote I received. But I believe it would be great if we could get an alert every X amount of votes reminding us that one of our suggestions or answers are popular. Like very big forums could set it to 100 and when it reaches that...

xenforo.com

 

[Chris D]

No alerts for upvote/downvoted?

Some of the suggestions have been upvoted a lot today. I’m sure in that situation you wouldn’t want an alert per upvote.

The one every X concept is interesting though and @sbj has linked to it.

 

[CarpCharacin]

I think it does look a bit odd how liking a suggestion will upvote it, but how upvoting it won't like it, however I don't have a better implementation in mind.

 

[ge66]

Some of the suggestions have been upvoted a lot today. I’m sure in that situation you wouldn’t want an alert per upvote.

The one every X concept is interesting though and @sbj has linked to it.

It doesn't matter much to me, but shouldn't it work the same way as reaction alerts? I actually think they are less important than up and down voting.

 

[Paul B]

it does look a bit odd how liking a suggestion will upvote it

That is incorrect.

Existing likes on suggestions were converted to upvotes but liking does not upvote.

 

[Aivaras]

Hmm, it might be just me but Reply on articles does look a bit strange, I do not reply to an article - I comment on it.

You’re replying to the author of the article by making a comment.

 

[Alan_SP]

I clicked on article (this and others here) title, link led me to first post, not first unread, which is a bit strange. Before when you clicked on thread title, you went to first unread post.

I guess there's a place where you could click to get to first unread post, but well, this is a bit strange behavior.

 

[Ozzy47]

Some of the suggestions have been upvoted a lot today. I’m sure in that situation you wouldn’t want an alert per upvote.

The one every X concept is interesting though and @sbj has linked to it.

No different than a reaction.

 

[ibnesayeed]

I remember @Brogan had some notes in his profile years ago and one of them was an idea to make any comment sticky to the first post. I think it make even more sense in the article type to have a few subsequent posts stick to the first post or even those that were posted later after some feedback.

I was referring to the following suggestion.

Thread starter should be able to add posts at top of thread anytime: Getting rid of the "Reserved"

If you start an important thread, and have lots of replies ... ... wouldn't it be sensible to allow the OP / Thread starter to add a post under his/her original one .... say for documentation, screenshots, etc. Kier called this idea "First Post Footnotes".

xenforo.com

 

[HotRodCarts]

I clicked on article (this and others here) title, link led me to first post, not first unread, which is a bit strange. Before when you clicked on thread title, you went to first unread post.

I guess there's a place where you could click to get to first unread post, but well, this is a bit strange behavior.

I noticed that earlier today but found if you click the replies link on the lower right it takes you to the first unread reply.

 

[arn]

Is it possible to turn off “top answer” on the q&a threads?

 

[Kier]

Is it possible to turn off “top answer” on the q&a threads?

At present, no. Right now you can turn off voting, but not the concept of a Q&A thread having a solution selection.

 

[Kier]

At present, no. Right now you can turn off voting, but not the concept of a Q&A thread having a solution selection.

Though, @arn I've just implemented a new permission to allow admins to prevent users from being able to mark the solution to their own questions, so if this is disabled and staff don't select solutions, no solutions will ever be selected and the entire concept of 'solutions' would be more or less invisible.

 

[Alpha1]

Please also implement Reddit Style up/down-voting for Discussion Threads. This is what this suggestion with 41 votes and various duplicate suggestions asked for:

Implemented - [Suggestion] Thread voting / rating feature

As I'm browsing through the suggestions forum, I constantly find myself liking posts that I agree with and want to voice my approval for. While this is great (and intended behaivor) it would be really great if you could create a thread voting feature where users can "upvote" a thread. This...

xenforo.com

IMHO this suggestion was not implemented yet.

There is very little difference between Suggestion thread Type and what a Discussion Thread Type with upvoting would look like. The only differences seem to be that Discussion Threads would have:

• No forum tabs OR forum tabs but no 'Implemented' tab.
• Upvoting is for the Thread. Not for the first post. So it would make sense to place the votes next to the thread title instead. But no big deal if placed at the same location.
• Discussion Threads Voting would need a setting in admincp so the admin can turn it on/off.

Please consider implementing this.
Because it would have massive benefit to be able to measure the quality of threads: Consider how much more effective we can make email digests, or Search Engine Indexing. We can surface our best threads. We can consider deleting or improving our worst threads. Something that is not possible now. Sites migrating from other platforms could import their thread ratings, the same way reputation can be imported into likes.

I may well be wrong, but it seems to me a small step to take with very large improvements for communities.

 

[Ranger375]

Apologies if this was covered but I can’t seem to find it. Can we disable the article option?

 

[Mike]

It's more of an opt-in. It isn't enabled anywhere unless you take steps to use it.

 

[Chris D]

IMHO this suggestion was nto implemented yet.

There is now a framework to have different thread types and a framework to aid in the implementation of thread and/or post voting.

I don't personally think we'll ever have a concept of a general discussion that has some sort of voting metric unless that voting metric actually has a clearly defined meaning.

To have a clearly defined meaning, and then presumably custom behaviours to be triggered by said meaning then you would be better off having a dedicated thread type for that. Perhaps custom developed if needed.

So that is worth a new suggestion but as it stands at the moment the original suggestion is implemented at a high level.

 

[Kirby]

Some of the suggestions have been upvoted a lot today. I’m sure in that situation you wouldn’t want an alert per upvote.

Hmm, I also missed alerts and I don't think this would be different from a post that does get a lot of reactions.
IMHO it would be nice to have an option to receive alerts for up-/downvotes, if the user is not interested he could always turn them off.

But not getting any alerts at all feels a bit like being left in the dark, especially as on XF 2.1 the suggester did get alerts for likes on the first post.