Lack of interest [Suggestion] Showing all threads in a forum and its subforums - Digest Button

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Stuart Wright

Well-known member
Managing your forums is something that needs constant attention.
If everything goes well, your forum will grow and you will get more and more threads in each forum every day.
This becomes a problem, however, when there are so many threads that new ones are bumped off the first page in just a few hours.
So what do you do? You either split the forum into two, or create a subforum. We have had to do this a lot, and it's the natural way a forum grows.
The problem is that your members, having been used to seeing all the threads from your single forum, now complain about having to surf two forums. Sometimes threads don't get seen by members who would otherwise have seen them.
We had this problem when we created a Photo Sharing forum under our Digital Photography forum when it got too busy.
The solution?

Digest.

I propose having a Digest button/link in the title bar of every forum which has subforums.
When you click the link, you are shown all the threads from the current forum and all its subforums.
It's not quite the same as a search because it would use the normal template for showing threads rather than the search results template.

Another application would be in our classifieds forums. We had to split our classifieds forums up into multiple sub forums based on the type of products being sold. Now there is no easy way to browse all the classifieds quickly without doing a search, and no way at all to view them using the 'forumdisplay' template.

So I respectfully suggest a Digest button to present users with a display of all the threads in the current forum and its subforums using the standard template. Please like this post if you agree.
 
Upvote 6
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It would be' amazing if this could be done trought page nodes. I set a page to act as a forum for cat_id 1, 5 and 16.

Would love this.
 
I made a variation of the same suggestion a while back, which was a filter tab to only show the new posts in a forum. I like the 'new posts in forum/subforums' much much better.
Hadn't put two and two together re using 'What's New' in specific forums to achieve this. But yes, that would be perfect.
I am not sure what the answer is. The pattern I've been seeing in many suggestions is that people start threads, get a few likes on the first post, then discussions ensue. Often times making the idea easier to understand and worded in a way to make the suggestion more desirable to more admins.

By now many people have already read your suggestion, and may not read these follow up posts.

Possibly a new thread with this type of wording?

Suggest a Whats New button from within a forum and not just in the breadcrumb, the results should show all subforums beneath that forum (if any). That would:
  • Filter out already read posts from within a forum, so if there are many of pages of mostly read threads, people would not need to scroll back to see the unread ones. In addition to making things more enjoyable for the normal users, that would greatly help moderators be able to spot check older posts.
  • It would also show the subforums underneath, which would allow people to view all variations of a topic. For example if there is a forum called 'primary colors', which eventually got really big and needed to be separated into red, green, blue - then anyone interested in all primary colors could quickly see all 3 primary colors threads that were new.
  • <insert Stuarts reasoning here>
My wording is probably not great, but maybe something like that in a new suggestion thread?
 
phpBB does something similar to this with Categories.

Clicking on the category link will display all the forums and sub-forums at the top of the page and all the threads from every forum below them.

I use this view quite a lot and was at first confused why clicking on the category link here didn't appear to do anything.
 
phpBB does something similar to this with Categories.

Clicking on the category link will display all the forums and sub-forums at the top of the page and all the threads from every forum below them.

I use this view quite a lot and was at first confused why clicking on the category link here didn't appear to do anything.
Do the threads show up sorted in chronological order?
Do they all show up, or just the unread ones?

Perhaps if you understand and agree with the suggestion, maybe suggest better wording? Whats New per forum with the description/reasons in my last post was the best I could come up with at the moment.
 
Do the threads show up sorted in chronological order?
Do they all show up, or just the unread ones?
All posts from the last 24 hours, sorted by latest post first.

So it's similar but different but it would be very simple to edit the code to make it for new posts only to match this feature request.

As far as I can see, your condensed description is fine.
 
I suppose a forum could have Whats New and also a Latest (which would show the read posts too). I personally think both have there uses, but the Whats New would be used far more often.

I believe the 'ball' is in Stuarts court how he wants to proceed with this. He could start another suggestion, edit & change title with a mods help, etc.
 
Actually, I don't just want to see what's new, I want to see everything. All the threads in chronological order exactly the same as if you were viewing the threads in a single forum.

Showing only new threads, I think, can be very confusing unless the user is specifically aware that they are only viewing new threads.

The purpose of my suggestion is to offer people a way of viewing all the threads in the current forum and its subforums merged together.
 
Actually, I don't just want to see what's new, I want to see everything. All the threads in chronological order exactly the same as if you were viewing the threads in a single forum.

Showing only new threads, I think, can be very confusing unless the user is specifically aware that they are only viewing new threads.

The purpose of my suggestion is to offer people a way of viewing all the threads in the current forum and its subforums merged together.
The "Latest" described here, correct?
I suppose a forum could have Whats New and also a Latest (which would show the read posts too). I personally think both have there uses, but the Whats New would be used far more often.
 
Actually, I don't just want to see what's new, I want to see everything. All the threads in chronological order exactly the same as if you were viewing the threads in a single forum.
Thats what i tried to do with my sports site.
I could not make it look very elegant so i ditched it.
The basic premise was like this...

Lets say i have 4 main forums for the four core US sports leagues.
Inside each of those forums i have 30 odd subforums for each particular team in that league.
Now thats a lot of subforums, i know. And as my member size decreased i kinda wanted to consolidate a bit.
I had a few subforums with lots of activity, but about 70% of them were pretty slow.

For example in the NBA forum i wanted to have all of the posts that appeared in my NBA team forums to also appear there. Not as a double post, but sort of existing in two places at once. That seems like a violation of the time space continuum... so i had to do something else.
I eliminated the subforums temporarily by closing them down.
Then i used the Prefix system to create a prefix for each team.
Forced all new threads to be created using the teams prefix for that particular thread.
So if it was an article about Kobe Bryant it would have the Lakers prefix on it.
In retrospect it would have been better to use the Tag system, that way i could have multiple tags for one thread.
But i liked how each prefix could have a small icon that corresponded to it that showed up in the threadlist area.
So when i clicked on NBA league forum i was presented with all of the NBA related threads, each of them with a small icon representing what team the thread was about.

Anyhow... i then created image links of each NBA team logo under the NBA league forum.
They ended up looking as if they were links to subforums in a way.
If you clicked on the Lakers link it would take you to what looked like a forum filled with only Lakers threads.
But there was no Lakers forum in reality... just a list of threads with Lakers content.
These links also showed up at the top of the threadlist area.
So when people were browsing the NBA league forum they could also just click on any of the Team logos and be taken to a list of their teams threads/news. And it looked nearly identical to an actual forum. Except there was no sticky ability and what not.

Well... i still wasnt happy with it, so i changed it back to normal, although i kept the icons image links as nice shortcuts for people to find their respective forum.

But wouldnt it be nice of XenForo had something that allowed you to do this kind of thing without all of that craziness?
 
Another thing i tried was to modify something called vB iSpy.
It creates a real time list of your forums last threads.
I thought it was an awesome compromise, and it looked really cool as it generated new threads.
One problem of course... how to get it to work inside a section or forum AND how to make it pull only the threads from a particular set of forums.
That way i could have all of the NBA Team Forum threads show up in real time within the NBA League Section/Forum.

Whats cool about XenForum is that the Pages system can sort of be used as a nice landing page for these types of sections.
The NBA Page could then house its collection of Nba Team subforums, while at the same time display a list of the last 20 or so threads being created within those NBA Team forums in real time.

Digital Point released their version of the mod, knowing the quality of their work im guessing its better than the iSpy one.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/spy.php
 
vB iSpy made my life so freaking simple moderating the forum while working on other stuff.

i am hoping that the developers would consider making the news feed option auto-updatable for admins and mods at least. or some mod would appear after XF is launched.
 
vB iSpy made my life so freaking simple moderating the forum while working on other stuff.

i am hoping that the developers would consider making the news feed option auto-updatable for admins and mods at least. or some mod would appear after XF is launched.
+1

Worth a bump (and a mod request?).
 
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