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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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"?
You can use a notice (linking to a page for extended instruction) or template edit for that.
each reply is treated as a potential answer
😢
I think that the first thing I will do on 2.2 will be hide the “reply” to the answers.
One observation though -- I think the Q&A thread naturally lends itself to "post comments".
Yes... and I don’t want to use an addon for that because when will be implemented in the core (I hope) moving “answer that are comment” will be a pain.
Since we're already being a little loose with post order anyway in these Q&A threads -- IMO, the best solution would be when someone replies to an Answer by hitting Reply or Quote on that Answer itself, that reply gets nested under the Answer, and not in the thread somewhere.
I think you need to add a suggestion for that.
 
The new editor theme appearance looks so much like vB5 which I feel aesthetically sick of. Let me think of how should I deal with that in CSCN anniversary theme.
 
Those articles are great. I'm using the Q&A addon by Themehouse already, and something I noticed is that you can't let the user decide if a thread should be marked as a q&a thread, or a regular thread. They just don't care or they don't know the difference. I wonder if those tabs will be used, I'm guessing users will overlook it and go straight to the body of their post. Will it be possible to set a default per forum just to push users in the right direction?

Interesting how I will migrate all Q&A from TH addon to core one? :unsure:
Wondering the same, but since this is probably news for them too I don't think @Dalton Prock or other TH staff can answer this already.
 
Those articles are great. I'm using the Q&A addon by Themehouse already, and something I noticed is that you can't let the user decide if a thread should be marked as a q&a thread, or a regular thread. They just don't care or they don't know the difference. I wonder if those tabs will be used, I'm guessing users will overlook it and go straight to the body of their post. Will it be possible to set a default per forum just to push users in the right direction?


Wondering the same, but since this is probably news for them too I don't think @Dalton Prock or other TH staff can answer this already.

That's why nobody answered the question yet :)
 
We are using LiamW's thread-solution addon. Any idea how difficult it would be to migrate old solutions and per-user solution-counts to the new system ?
As he was close to the core devs, I hope the new OOTB functionality is not too different so that a migration-script could be developed (or hopefully provided by Xenforo).
 
One question, will be the votings displayed on the whats new / new posts page?
The answer would generally be no, though it's more nuanced.

What you're referring to is pretty much any context where we can't rely on all of the threads being of the same type (which is pretty much any thread list outside of specific forum types) and thus we have to use a more general display. Thread type-specific data can still be accessed in these cases (with some caveats), but the display structure for any additional things would have to fit in a generic context where not all threads would necessarily have that behavior. Taking the voting example, without that, you'd have the left side jumping about as most threads have no concept of score. Conversely, we can denote a question as being solved via an icon as the icon area is a generic thread thing and it's designed to only show applicable icons.
 
Thanks for the answer. Yeah, haven't thought that through I guess. Not all thread types have that as you say.

Perhaps a workaround solution would be possible? So display in the icon area (or a similar area) the votings? Not sure if that would be okay or not. I have to see it on a mobile phone first if there is enough room to fit it there and if the mix between different thread types is distracting or not.

Also will there be new widgets for the new thread types? So we can display only new votings? Will there be a new What's New tab for only threads with votings?
 
Also will there be new widgets for the new thread types? So we can display only new votings? Will there be a new What's New tab for only threads with votings?

Would be useful for sites that make use of Question and Suggestion threads a lot, eh.
 
Add my vote to the up/down voting to be on left side, left of profile info keeping profile on left too. Eyes read left to right top to bottom (unless a RTL country). Every other site in the universe puts these on the left, that's where they are expected.
 
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