Today, we have some more improvements coming in XenForo 1.4. Individually, these features are not big enough to dedicate an entire HYS thread, but some of them have been heavily requested nonetheless.
Limiting watched content notifications to active users
As you can probably work out from the screenshot, if this option is enabled, users that have not visited recently will not receive (or be considered for) alerts and emails from content they watch. This is mostly done for performance reasons. However, you can probably assume that if a user doesn't visit your forum for a long period of time, they aren't interested in the content they're watching and are unlikely to return. Stopping emails to them may prevent an invalid spam report.
While this situation can happen with watched threads (such as a long dead thread being updated), the situation more likely comes up with watched forums -- especially if you actively encourage watching a particular forum (or even use an add-on to automatically watch that forum).
The performance benefit comes from two parts: these users will not be selected when checking who to notify (reducing memory usage) and simply not notifying someone (reducing the amount of work necessary).
Limit auto-complete and birthday lists to active users
Similar to the previous option, username auto-complete and birthday lists are now limited to only showing users that have been active (somewhat) recently. The goal in both cases is to filter out users that are unlikely to be contacted or sought out.
As it stands, this is not option controlled and defaults to users active in the last 180 days.
Member list viewing permission
A very common suggestion, a new "View member lists" permission has been created to cover a number of places, including:
If a user does not have this permission, they will not see the members tab but it doesn't necessarily control 100% of the content within that. The permission does limit access to the full "recent activity" page as well, partially for technical reasons and partially because it can "surface" users that may not have been obviously active otherwise.
This permission does not control access to the full profile pages itself and the content on those pages; you should use the existing "View member profiles" permission for that. If a user without the "View member lists" permission but with the "View member profiles" permission sees a post by a user, they can get to the poster's profile. In normal cases, you would likely disable access to profiles if you disable access to member lists but the permission doesn't mandate it.
User title ladder flexibility
Until XenForo 1.4, user titles were based only on trophy points. If you didn't have a specific user title, as you got more trophy points, you worked your way up a "ladder" of user titles.
The point of using trophy points for this was to make it much more flexible than just a simple value based on the number of posts you've made. Trophy points can be awarded for a range of behaviors and actions, so this would indirectly allow you to attach titles to these behaviors (such as maintaining a good like-to-post ratio over a length of time, etc).
However, we often received feedback that this was too complex. Now, you can define your user title ladder based on one of several fields:
While trophy points is still the default, "messages" allows you to use a simple message count-based ladder. Similarly, "likes" is based on the number of likes a user has received.
Online status indicator on messages
Another very common suggestion was to indicate if a user is online right now when you view a message. This can now be seen in the upper right corner of the user's avatar:
When the user is not online (or invisible), no indicator is shown.
We've taken an understated approach to this as it's information that can be useful in specific situations but is not normally fundamental and we didn't want it to draw too much attention.
If you wish to customize the look of this, there is a new style property (Author Online Status Indicator) that controls the visual aspect of it. Additionally, the "messageUserBlock" HTML element also gains the "online" class which can be used to customize any element of it or within it.
As you can probably guess, there is an option to control whether this indicator is shown:
That's all for today. Still plenty more to show though, so until next time...
Just a reminder: Please do not post suggestions in this thread (even if you feel they are related). Use the dedicated suggestion forum so they can be tracked; suggestions made in this thread are unlikely to be implemented.
Limiting watched content notifications to active users
As you can probably work out from the screenshot, if this option is enabled, users that have not visited recently will not receive (or be considered for) alerts and emails from content they watch. This is mostly done for performance reasons. However, you can probably assume that if a user doesn't visit your forum for a long period of time, they aren't interested in the content they're watching and are unlikely to return. Stopping emails to them may prevent an invalid spam report.
While this situation can happen with watched threads (such as a long dead thread being updated), the situation more likely comes up with watched forums -- especially if you actively encourage watching a particular forum (or even use an add-on to automatically watch that forum).
The performance benefit comes from two parts: these users will not be selected when checking who to notify (reducing memory usage) and simply not notifying someone (reducing the amount of work necessary).
Limit auto-complete and birthday lists to active users
Similar to the previous option, username auto-complete and birthday lists are now limited to only showing users that have been active (somewhat) recently. The goal in both cases is to filter out users that are unlikely to be contacted or sought out.
As it stands, this is not option controlled and defaults to users active in the last 180 days.
Member list viewing permission
A very common suggestion, a new "View member lists" permission has been created to cover a number of places, including:
- Online user lists
- Notable members list
- Full members list
- Full recent activity list (see below)
If a user does not have this permission, they will not see the members tab but it doesn't necessarily control 100% of the content within that. The permission does limit access to the full "recent activity" page as well, partially for technical reasons and partially because it can "surface" users that may not have been obviously active otherwise.
This permission does not control access to the full profile pages itself and the content on those pages; you should use the existing "View member profiles" permission for that. If a user without the "View member lists" permission but with the "View member profiles" permission sees a post by a user, they can get to the poster's profile. In normal cases, you would likely disable access to profiles if you disable access to member lists but the permission doesn't mandate it.
User title ladder flexibility
Until XenForo 1.4, user titles were based only on trophy points. If you didn't have a specific user title, as you got more trophy points, you worked your way up a "ladder" of user titles.
The point of using trophy points for this was to make it much more flexible than just a simple value based on the number of posts you've made. Trophy points can be awarded for a range of behaviors and actions, so this would indirectly allow you to attach titles to these behaviors (such as maintaining a good like-to-post ratio over a length of time, etc).
However, we often received feedback that this was too complex. Now, you can define your user title ladder based on one of several fields:
While trophy points is still the default, "messages" allows you to use a simple message count-based ladder. Similarly, "likes" is based on the number of likes a user has received.
Online status indicator on messages
Another very common suggestion was to indicate if a user is online right now when you view a message. This can now be seen in the upper right corner of the user's avatar:
When the user is not online (or invisible), no indicator is shown.
We've taken an understated approach to this as it's information that can be useful in specific situations but is not normally fundamental and we didn't want it to draw too much attention.
If you wish to customize the look of this, there is a new style property (Author Online Status Indicator) that controls the visual aspect of it. Additionally, the "messageUserBlock" HTML element also gains the "online" class which can be used to customize any element of it or within it.
As you can probably guess, there is an option to control whether this indicator is shown:
That's all for today. Still plenty more to show though, so until next time...
Just a reminder: Please do not post suggestions in this thread (even if you feel they are related). Use the dedicated suggestion forum so they can be tracked; suggestions made in this thread are unlikely to be implemented.
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