XF 2.2 Forum and thread types

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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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I like the article support. If someone such as themehouse will extend the system to allow for thread promotion to an article and some beautifying of the article forum display then it will work well.

Question, is the image used on the article forum view the same high resolution image inside the thread or is there a lower resolution 'thumbnail' generated?
 
I have some questions about "Question threads".
  1. Replying to an answer creates a new answer or a new comment like on Stack Overflow?
  2. how quote will work in them?
  3. is it possible to disable reply to answers and quote in them?
 
Unlike the previous sections, we're going to talk about suggestion threads and forums together because they only work that way.
Sooo... My understanding is that you can only create suggestions in a "suggestion type forum", right? I assume it's hence not possible to create a sticky thread "How to suggest new features" that in itself is not a suggestion but rather an ordinary "how to"?
 
I have some questions about "Question threads".
  1. Replying to an answer creates a new answer or a new comment like on Stack Overflow?
  2. how quote will work in them?
  3. is it possible to disable reply to answers and quote in them?
XenForo generally has no concept of hierarchy of post or commenting within a post or anything like that, so each reply is treated as a potential answer. Replying to a thread works as it does now, roughly with the addition of up/down voting (and for certain users to mark a particular post as the solution).
 
Sooo... My understanding is that you can only create suggestions in a "suggestion type forum", right? I assume it's hence not possible to create a sticky thread "How to suggest new features" that in itself is not a suggestion but rather an ordinary "how to"?
Actually moderators can set a per thread option surrounding this:

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Questions have something similar too for the same reason.

(We didn't actually show the ACP options for suggestions. We support the use of prefixes to mark suggestions as implemented or closed which then affects the behavior in the thread and allows more direct filtering. You can select any number of prefixes for each state if you have different reasons for marking things as such.)
 
Thanks XF team! Especially for the question and answer part. You don’t know how much we need that functionalit. Tried to solve our problem after a lot of (internal) discussion but it was never solved satisfactory.
(y)
 
Now you should think of calling it XF 3.0 instead of 2.2

It would need a style refresh though IMO, to call it a new major branch :)
But yeah, so far (with more features still to come, and we haven't even started on features for the official addons), it is shaping up to be a much more significant update than 2.1. It's awesome to be a XF user these days.

XF team 💕
 
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