Lack of interest Sort functionality for What's New

[Grover]

(Title should be: )
What's New: give forum-names their own column and make that sortable!

For me the 'What's New?' function is one of the most used/important functions of forum software. At least, it used to be, because I found this convenient function to become almost useless for me in XenForo, like I expressed earlier here:

What's New is almost useless to me

I wholeheartedly support this idea. To be honest, I can hardly use the 'What's New' here on Xenforo.com anymore! .

Why? Well... because the amount of subforums have grown exponentially overhere the last months and I am not interested in a large amount of them. So, since XenForo's [What's New] display all new postings from all the available subforums, the overview becomes... almost useless to me. Yes, I am serious. There is no easy way to distinct the new threads from eachother. A big reason for this is the fact that XenForo does not display the forumname inside a separate column.

In products like vBulletin 3.8 it was certainly easier to 'read' (and therefor use) this overview, because vBulletin provides us with a separate column for the forumnames, so our users could see at a glance which threads would be of their interest. This is much harder in XenForo.

I therefor hope this suggestion can be implemented soon.

Instead of -or in addition to- user options to exclude forums from What's New, I am requesting Sort Functionality on the Forum Name for the What's New results screen. I don't know if it is even possible (because of resource/performance issues maybe, I have no clue?), but it would be really beneficial for the value of use of this What's New screen if we would be able to sort this overview on the forumnames.

As I said, comparing to vBulletin (and please no comments about the value of comparisons and that XF needs to be unique!

) the What's New is a bit of a step backwards, because XenForo does not provide us with a separate column for the forumnames. Granted, in vBulletin it also was not possible to sort this overview, but at least we could see much easier to which forum a new thread belongs.

Especially now on XF.com (the only XF powered site I use at the moment) I almost never use What's New anymore and that's a pity.

Obviously the What's New results are displayed in the same way as a normal thread overview in a forum: the focus is on the Threadtitle (left column) and Poster (far right column), because those values are displayed in Bold. This works for the regular threadlist, however it just does not work so much in practice when it comes to the What's New overview. Let me explain why:

The reason is that when you are inside a forum and view the threadlist, you already know in what forum those threads belong, because... obviously you are already in that forum the moment you look at the threadlist for that particular forum. Dûh. But... when I am using the What's New I am not in a particular forum. In fact, I want to know in which particular forums new threads can be found: that is the reason why I am using 'What's New' in the first place: to give me that global overview! Unfortunately XenForo uses the exact same layout for the What's New results as the Threadlist, so it becomes really hard to see in what forums the new threads belong to. Since this is the goal for me to use this essential function, this XenForo function does not lead me to that goal anymore. The layout used here is not beneficial for the function at hand and I believe it can be re-evaluate to make it more useful.

Please do [like] this first posting if you think it is a good feature suggestion for XenForo

 

[Grover]

I see 0 pages of threads in What's New.
How many do you see?

10 full pages... (and most unrelated/uninteresting to me: I have no interest reading them, so I have zero interest seeing them appear on this list as well)

As I said, it's relative to the user, depending on which posts they've read.

Ah, I see.

 

[Grover]

Anything (being it adding a column, or sorting options or excluding options or a combination of them) that gives us a more useful/valuable What's New overview I welcome.

This screenshot is actually reason for celebration , and at the same time it's a good example...

I'm six pages deep in "What's New", and it still looks like this:

... of what has been stated in the discussions above and in other threads concerning the wishes of being able to columnize(new word)/sort/filter/exclude stuff in the What's New overview. Just me 2 cents for a future improvement.