Add-on Permanent Redirect with Updates

[CivilWarTalk]

For @Nobita.Kun , or any other add-on author that wants to take on this challenge:

Currently when you move a thread to a new forum you can create an expiring or permanent redirect from the origin forum to the target forum. However, in a busy forum, this redirect will quickly fall down the list of active threads, even though the actual thread may have many recent replies.

I'd like to add the ability to create a permanent redirect to a thread that gets bumped to the top of the stack any time the parent thread is replied to.

Here is an example of why I want this:

I have a Civil War forum, and someone posts a Photograph of Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg. We have a Gettysburg Forum, a Robert E. Lee Forum, and a Photographic Study Forum, and members who frequent each of these forums would be interested to know that the thread exists, and that it was recently updated.

It would be awesome if the redirect included some information that the parent thread was located in "Robert E. Lee Forum" or where ever it actually is. Right now redirects have a blue arrow to indicate "Redirect" but no info on where it's actually located.

Another awesome feature would be to include a 2nd and if needed 3rd breadcrumbs in the thread back to the redirected forums. I'm not sure the best way to accomplish this task, but, it seems like a feature this type of redirect would require.

 

[Daniel Hood]

It actually sounds like, better than redirects, you would like a thread to be able to belong to multiple nodes which is a very interesting concept.

 

[CivilWarTalk]

It actually sounds like, better than redirects, you would like a thread to be able to belong to multiple nodes which is a very interesting concept.

Yes, well, I tried to explain it using existing features of XF, but if you want to look at it that way...

It's not a feature I've found anywhere else, DigitalPoint has created an add-on to share a forum in multiple nodes, but I don't think he released that to the public. It's sort of similar, but has a different function.

I'm not sure how many forums would find the feature useful, but mine would.

 

[CivilWarTalk]

One issue I've thought of, and I'm not sure how to handle, you'd want to suppress multiple alerts and entries in "Recent Threads" (as in xenPorta) because it is only one thread. That's one of the reasons I think there needs to be one primary forum for the parent thread, and then other instances only be "identical sibling" threads.

I'm not an add-on creator, so I'm not sure what concept would work best, or would be the easiest to create...

 

[Daniel Hood]

I'm busy right now so I won't actually be working on it. However to any developer considering it. To allow multiple nodes, I think the best bet is changing the field type of xf_thread.node_id to varbinary (since that's what xF uses in other places for comma separated ids), and then rework the model to search if the id is in the set instead of =. I'm not sure how'd you go about the user/admin interface though.

In this method, you wouldn't get multiple alerts because it is still a single thread. It's just found in each node, the thread always has the same amount of views/replies/likes/id.

 

[primemedia]

+1 for this feature!

Has anyone come up with anything?