@Chris mentioned that 2.4 would be a "QoL" update for members (including administrators and moderators) and while there has been some negativity posted about the two features mentioned so far (not specifically here, but in the usual places by the usual people), it's worth pointing out that these were fairly high up on the suggestion list.
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Yes, there are suggestions (much larger features) which have more votes, but of the ones revealed for 2.4 so far, one of them was just outside the top 10 and the other two were within the first 2-3 pages.
There is more to come though.
Who knows, it may even silence (some of) the critics for a short while*.
* It won't.
If only they spent as much time as they do complaining on being relevant or successful, then maybe they wouldn't be such worthless wastes of air.
Well of the three named features the Update notifier is a - in my eyes - very welcome addition - and well perceived in the discussion thread though some seem to be worried a bit about possible ways of what it will do and what it won't do and how.
The other two - don't know. Probably useful if you do have a lot of DMs. I do have a considerable (but not enormous) amount but did not miss it. When I had a phase with even more DMs I installed to add ons: One that would allow sorting and labeling of DMs and one that would allow searching for DMs via the regular search. Turned out that I did not use the sorting/labeling function at all while the search function comes in handy at times, but rarely.
So of all possible features personally I would not have chosen those two. But others may have a different opinion. I think it's fair so say that these are not revolutionary features - absolutely adequate for a quality of life minor release, but nothing to get totally excited about.
This hints a bit towards the elephant in the room: All three feature requests date back to 2010 respectively 2011. This does not make them useless, not at all. But it gives a hint that they may be a commodity. Simply something other softwares have (forum software or not) for ages already, people got used to it and expect it as a standard from actual software. For years already. And that's the case with many features that XF lacks: They may be small or big, easy or hard to implement - but many have in common that from a market perspective they are commodities that XF ignored for years and years until they were kilometers behind the wave.
A very good example for that is the official Gallery add on:
• no drag and drop upload
• an interface that comes from the mid 2000s
• a strictly hierarchical album system that does not allow to create albums as virtual instances from existing pictures in various places but instead you have to upload from scratch into each album.
• no possibility to sort/arrange the order of the pictures
• no simple way to set a cover picture other than automatic
• no userfriedly permanently visible labeling of an album cover with the name of an album
• no bulk-labeling fields during the upload process
• a permission system directly from hell that does not uploads from anyone other than the owner if it is not a personal album
The whole thing is so clunky and outdated - when I started using it after buying it I felt cheated on as I bought a piece of software that was not cheap but turned out to be so far away (in the sense of below) from even the most basic modern standards and features that I could not believe that something like that is sold as an official company add on today. In my opinion it is horrible in almost every aspect (I did not start to talk about the optics, just about usability and technical things). Which - as a side effect - leads to barely any of my users using the Gallery. Which then has direct negative effects on the users, the usability and the intensity the forums are used. Even worse as there is no alternative from a 3rd party.
So while I absolutely appreciate the QOL approach with 2.4 I think this can only be a starting point as there is a long road to follow in that respect. And, at the same time, - while it requests no doubt relevant effort from the XF crew to implement those things - it is possibly a bit overdone to expect massive excitement and praise for many of those features and small improvements as they honestly should have been implemented a long time ago already.
github.com
