XenForo 2.0 Discussion

[Joe Blow]

After more than decade of being a full time forum administrator I've figured out one important thing: people want to be able to customise their forum experience to their personal preferences. People want to be able to ignore other users, specific threads, and entire forums or sub forums. They only want to see what they want to see and they want the power to customise that. I'm on vB 4 and I get requests all the time from people who want to control more aspects of the way they interact with others and the forum in general.

So I hope Xenforo 2 heads in a direction of increased user customisation. Unlike social media, where a lot of crap is forced upon you, it makes sense to allow forums to head in another direction, where users have more control over their own experience and interaction with the community.

 

[TickTackk]

entire forums or sub forums

Then why join the forum if they don't want to communicate or discuss?

 

[Davyc]

Xenforo already does a lot for user customisation, but that doesn't mean that it can't be expanded upon. The only downside to this is that the more options you throw at people the less inclined they may be to take the time to set them up, so anything that allows for more customisation needs to be in a separate area of its own and not mixed in with the already plethora of options available.

I understand that many people may not wish to see everything and being able to filter their preferences is not a bad thing, however it's not something that I would actively encourage because if someone joins your forum because they are interested in what you are offering, to start closing doors once they are in is restricting their opportunities to learn more and view opinions from different angles.

The one thing that I do believe should be a considered option (one that is also filterable) is a general site activity stream - I don't mean shunting every single thing that happens on the site (such as Joe Soap changed his avatar, so what lol?), but new content that has been added since a members last visit; new discussions, new replies, new media and even if new forums have been created or old ones deleted/merged etc. This pushes new content to the visitor/member so they don't have to go searching for it. Again it can be optional. CTA featured threads kind of moves in this direction, but it's only for threads and doesn't cover the whole gamut of what's been going on since a previous visit.

I would also love to see (mentioned again) Pages being ramped up into being something more along the lines of a CMS so that special content can be created and commented on; full WYSIWYG editor available too with perhaps some control over layout, menus, sidebar blocks etc. I know that's a big ask and it's not something that can be just thrown together, but I do believe that it's important to have this as a Xenforo product rather than a third party add-on. I also understand that this move could pull the rug from under some truly excellent third party add-on developers (some of which I use myself), the issue I have here is that if the third party developer decides to move on with no further development to come it leaves you dead in the water if there's nothing to fall back upon.

Whatever the future holds it needs to move away from the 'old school' establishment and embrace the new - of course if I knew what that 'new' was I'd be rich lol.

 

[Walter]

People want to be able to ignore other users, specific threads, and entire forums or sub forums

Then why join the forum if they don't want to communicate or discuss?

They want to ignore certain sub forums they are not interested in (e.g. chit chat forums).

 

[jauburn]

The editor should be user upgradeable and customisable - using the plugins that are available from the editor creators
The terminology needs to be adjusted to follow continuity - Discussions rather than threads, replies rather than posts, followed rather than watched and so on
Copy and Paste needs to be ramped up, so many people are used to C&P and they get frustrated when they have to resort to pushing buttons and hunting for files on their computers (I know it's laziness, but that's how it is)
A calendar is a must for any site that promotes events - I know not every forum owner will want a calendar, but it should be a core feature that can be used or not depending on the owners preference
We already have pages in XF - they need to be expanded upon following a similar (though I'm sure can be better executed) route to IPS Content (now Pages)
The user drop down box needs to be less intimidating - have a link to the users settings, a link to the users profile and perhaps a link for their conversations - leave the rest on the relevant pages that are linked to (user friendly)

Excellent suggestions. As to editor, I use tinymce in poetrycircle, with the option activated to preserve user-inserted spaces--critical to creative writers. (Without that option, in fact, I could not use xenforo at all.)

And I second your comments regarding the need for a calendar.

 

[Davyc]

This is how I've got my User drop down menus looking. Had to make some edits to the template but this is how I envisage it done without having to edit templates.


I was using the TinyMCE editor too, but I've reverted back to the XF editor because when XF2 comes out the TMCE may not work and it may not be updated. It is very good though.

 

[jauburn]

I was using the TinyMCE editor too, but I've reverted back to the XF editor because when XF2 comes out the TMCE may not work and it may not be updated. It is very good though.

I can't live without it because it provides the option of retaining user-inserted spaces. (Try to do this with redactor and you'll see what I mean.) Jake Bunce once provided a fix for that issue in my site, but I have trouble keeping track of the changed code through updates to the forum software, so I rely on the tinymce.

 

[Paul B]

If the posts on that thread are supposed to support the argument for preserving spaces, then they're not doing a very good job.
This post for example is impossible to read: http://poetrycircle.com/forum/threads/concrete-poetry-discussion.13294/#post-100533

 

[TickTackk]

I could read it clearly.

 

[jauburn]

If the posts on that thread are supposed to support the argument for preserving spaces, then they're not doing a very good job.
This post for example is impossible to read: http://poetrycircle.com/forum/threads/concrete-poetry-discussion.13294/#post-100533

I'm not sure "reading" is what some of these concrete poems are about. See the others, for example. Form supplies meaning. Some are more successful than others, of course.

But concrete poetry aside, the lack of support for user-inserted spaces (and tabs) means that even the standard first-line indent in conventional essays requires awkward workarounds. I see no reason not to support it--except for the "technical" reason that HTML strips out spaces, which is not a good reason at all from a user's point of view (a techie's point of view, yes). The free Simple Machines forum's editor supports this, so it can be done.

 

[Valhalla]

I think it's termed graphology with respect to the poetry - and the whitespace would be intentional in that case.

 

[Omar Bazavilvazo]

Well.. that's the beauty of it: options

I won't use it myself, but I see for some people is very important. Now the question is if is worth putting that capability mainstream and that is a subjetive matter.

Those texts looks fun the shape

 

[jauburn]

Those texts looks fun the shape

And you couldn't do that here without embedding the text as a graphic.

My sense is that the forum (xenforo and any forum made with it) should allow maximum creativity from its members. Since writing is the primary mode of communication in forums, maximum creativity should be allowed in written expression. Xenforo (and html) forces the most rigid way of composition on users: block-style text with primarily in-text options for stylization (plus smilies).

But whatever. The suggestion I made about this long ago was labeled "lack of interest" by whoever. Someday soon enough there won't be anyone old enough to care about the creative visual presentation of language in print because print will have been something from father's era, so it won't matter to anyone, including me.

 

[Omar Bazavilvazo]

@jauburn how were you able to get that effect? With the code posted in your thread?

 

[Joe Blow]

Then why join the forum if they don't want to communicate or discuss?

My forum is a financial one with a very active general chat forum that has a lot of discussion of politics and religion. Some people just want to read financial posts and threads and get irritated by posts on controversial social issues. They would prefer to filter them out.

As a forum admin, my job isn't to tell people what they should want but to find out and implement ways of making the forum more useful to them and to serve their needs better.

 

[D.O.A.]

Someday soon enough there won't be anyone old enough to care about the creative visual presentation of language in print because print will have been something from father's era, so it won't matter to anyone, including me.

Are we going back to hieroglyphics?

 

[PatrickGER]

Any new News about XenForo 2.0?

 

[Naz]

Any new News about XenForo 2.0?

Nope.

 

[PatrickGER]

ok

 

[imthebest]

Any new News about XenForo 2.0?

It will be released sometime this year for sure (at least as Beta), but you need to be patient.