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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Hi
is there an option in acp not to show first message at the top of every page for question and article thread.

i am afraid about duplicate content, for example an article with 30 pages of membes's comments who says thank you.
i am not sure that having the article on the top of this 30 pages will be a good strategy?

and if someone did not read the article, he better goes tp the 1st page?
Same for questions.

thank you for your wonderful job
 
Can we determine the Popular (in the filter bar) requirements for Question and Suggestion? None of us have seen the acp so wondering if there is a setting like: Popular: Votes in the last x days, etc. Overall can just bring up irrelevant dated stuff. Yes there is Latest but if those have 0 votes it is not the same. Popular would be a sort from highest to lowest, but we determine the # of days.
 
There's no option for that.
Thanks for the info.
So it is a suggestion
Yes. :D
 
Don't remember if this was asked in the previous 19 pages, and I'm not rereading them ;) , but does marking a post as an answer turn off the voting feature for the question thread? If not, is there a way to turn off voting on individual question threads?
 
How can we seperate a forum into articles and general discussions?
 
Does that say how we filter/seperate when we're in the node? I can't find it.
 
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