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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But are there thousands of forums? I believe that converting to a specific forum type such as question, will automatically convert all the threads within. So you don't need to convert the threads individually.
You don't understand my question. Nevermind.
 
You can change the forum type or use batch update for bulk threads in a mixed type.

I'm worry if my connection get disconnected during running either both functions. Just asking whether XF coded some cli command into PHP like other existing such install/upgrade addons, reindex ES etc etc
 
It will be processed as a job so even if the web page times out, refreshing should resume it.

You can always use list to display the CLI commands available, but there isn't one for what you are asking.
 
Keep in mind Poll is a thread type. So if you are converting Discussions to Questions/Articles you will lose all the polls and you may want to move them to another discussion forum first. This is just a heads up, I lost a ton of polls. ;)
 
Keep in mind Poll is a thread type. So if you are converting Discussions to Questions/Articles you will lose all the polls and you may want to move them to another discussion forum first. This is just a heads up, I lost a ton of polls. ;)

Definitely a valuable reminder for me. Thanks a lot for the sharing.
 
Keep in mind Poll is a thread type. So if you are converting Discussions to Questions/Articles you will lose all the polls and you may want to move them to another discussion forum first. This is just a heads up, I lost a ton of polls. ;)
We were bitten by the very same issue. It would be lovely if Polls could somehow be excluded from the conversion, or at least there was some kind of "undo" capability to retrieve the lost info when (days/weeks later) someone says "hey where's my poll?".
 
Keep in mind Poll is a thread type. So if you are converting Discussions to Questions/Articles you will lose all the polls and you may want to move them to another discussion forum first. This is just a heads up, I lost a ton of polls. ;)

We were bitten by the very same issue. It would be lovely if Polls could somehow be excluded from the conversion, or at least there was some kind of "undo" capability to retrieve the lost info when (days/weeks later) someone says "hey where's my poll?".

I liked it better when a poll was an addition to a thread like it used to be, not a thread type. I tested this and we lost a poll also. Maybe we should make that a suggestion. Especially since sometimes, we need to have a poll as part of an article (which is common in blogging).
 
Thank you for Question forums. They really are awesome. I find they work even if not asking a question, the up/downvote is not a hinderance in many situations, so those hesitant to enable them, or thinking to choose the multi-type forums, should give a second look to dedicated Question forums where questions will be 80% of the threads.
 
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