Your two most important xenForo feature wishes

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Mr Lucky

Mr Lucky

Well-known member
The 2.4 feedback thread made me think it would be interesting to consolidate people’s “must have” wishes and suggestions. Can we keep it concise and say two each?

Maybe we’ll be surprised by the common ground or, I suspect, lack of it. I’ll start.
  • Prefix filtering in New posts list
  • More criteria in node settings for thread indexing/noindexing
 
  • Unified What's New page, which can be filtered by user preferences (i.e don't show reactions)
That's the main one for me. Don't need a second one. The Latest Activity page is very nearly there - just need to to be filterable by preference so that users can decide which forums to view, or people to follow or whether to see every reaction anyone makes around the site. It's kind of useless as it is.
 
Custom Fields:
  • Index custom field content in Search when creating (and editing) new content that has custom fields.
  • Filter by Custom Fields on content listing pages.
 
Basenotes said:
  • Unified What's New page, which can be filtered by user preferences (i.e don't show reactions)
That's the main one for me. Don't need a second one. The Latest Activity page is very nearly there - just need to to be filterable by preference so that users can decide which forums to view, or people to follow or whether to see every reaction anyone makes around the site. It's kind of useless as it is.
Click to expand...
Just to take this one further, if you follow someone, they should be able to "Share" to their newsfeed, which brings the content back to the top of the Whats new page for people following them.

"I've found an interesting thread, I'll share it to the feed so my followers can see!"
 
1) Ability to turn these additional links on and off (next to What's New)

Whats new.webp

2) A couple of out of the box style options - eg easily upload a photo as a header and icons or photos instead of node icons (and I know there are ways round this but a built in easy style option).
 
Powerful Feed feature
Powerful and customizable user profiles (most people don't pay attention but we are unable to use user profiles efficiently)
 
They are turned off in public navigation :-) I had a thread about this and those just stay there permanently.
 
  1. Unified content discovery pages (Whats New, Watched, Tags, Widgets, etc) with advanced filters. Make it look visually appealing to readers.
  2. Mixed content pages with Similar Content Widgets. Make it look visually appealing to readers.
The above two are very much the same concept of mixed content pages that allow for better content discovery and each contain multiple features.

It's really hard not to mention a better menu system. Having dozens of tabs with dozens of useless links that no-one clicks on serves no one. This thread made me realize that there is no suggestion for it yet, so here it is:
Alpha1

Thread 'Better navigation menu / content discovery'

If a site has more than a few addons then the navigation menu becomes unusable. You will get a mass of hidden tabs that users need to horizontally scroll to. Each tab has its own drop down and these can easily go below the fold. As a result users get lost and leave the site. The users that stay simply do not use the addon content. The most common complaint we get is that users cant find anything.

Here is a screenshot to give an impression:
Forum.webp
Please disregard the order of the tabs as its a screenshot of a development site.

My main suggestion is to improve the menu system so...
  • Like
  • Love
 
  • Comprehensive ignore/block for users and threads/nodes
  • Custom fields for posts (with proper group permissions)
If I were allowed a third I'd like to see the API extended so it had full coverage of all features.
 
Alvin63 said:
1) Ability to turn these additional links on and off (next to What's New)

View attachment 323256
Click to expand...
This can be easily done using LESS. For example add the LESS below to extra.less template:

To hide "New Posts" tab:
CSS: 
[data-template='whats_new'] {
    .tabs.tabs--standalone [href*="/whats-new/posts/"] { 
        display: none !important;
    }
}

Just adjust href above to target other tabs.
 
bzcomputers said:
This can be easily done using LESS. For example add the LESS below to extra.less template:

To hide "New Posts" tab:
CSS: 
[data-template='whats_new'] {
    .tabs.tabs--standalone [href*="/whats-new/posts/"] {
        display: none !important;
    }
}

Just adjust href above to target other tabs.
Click to expand...
Thanks. It's not that crucial - I'd just like to be able to turn it off in navigation easily as you can with other things.

People seem keen on ignore/block features - I haven't really seen any need for those personally but maybe they are more important on bigger forums? You mean users can block other users? Social media has that kind of thing and people get really upset about being blocked. Surely moderation keeps on top of any issues so no need to block?
 
Alpha1 said:
  1. Unified content discovery pages (Whats New, Watched, Tags, Widgets, etc) with advanced filters. Make it look visually appealing to readers.
  2. Mixed content pages with Similar Content Widgets. Make it look visually appealing to readers.
The above two are very much the same concept of mixed content pages that allow for better content discovery and each contain multiple features.

It's really hard not to mention a better menu system. Having dozens of tabs with dozens of useless links that no-one clicks on serves no one. This thread made me realize that there is no suggestion for it yet, so here it is:
Alpha1

Thread 'Better navigation menu / content discovery'

If a site has more than a few addons then the navigation menu becomes unusable. You will get a mass of hidden tabs that users need to horizontally scroll to. Each tab has its own drop down and these can easily go below the fold. As a result users get lost and leave the site. The users that stay simply do not use the addon content. The most common complaint we get is that users cant find anything.

Here is a screenshot to give an impression:
Forum.webp
Please disregard the order of the tabs as its a screenshot of a development site.

My main suggestion is to improve the menu system so...
  • Like
  • Love
Click to expand...
This would be amazing
 
.
Alvin63 said:
People seem keen on ignore/block features - I haven't really seen any need for those personally but maybe they are more important on bigger forums? You mean users can block other users? Social media has that kind of thing and people get really upset about being blocked. Surely moderation keeps on top of any issues so no need to block?
Click to expand...
It's explained in the discussion of this popular suggestion :
Razasharp

Thread 'Upgrade the ignore function to 'block' / Blocking Ignored Users'

I think ignoring someone on a forum has never really worked from a users perspective. On vB you could still see the 'ignored' person had posted, and on XF when you ignore someone it doesn't prevent them from quoting you, seeing your threads, posting in them.

Usually when someone 'ignores' someone, what they really want to do is block them.

Any chance of this being included?
  • Like
  • Love
 
I have a modified news feed/activity feed that works very well but with some tweaks it would be exactly what I'm looking for. I was told one of the filtering options I was hoping for was very resource intensive so went with another's filtering option.

I'm not one who wants to be able to reply directly from the news feed so this suits my needs. My site activity has definitely increased since installing the addon as finding content types or thread types is much easier.

The second thing I'd like to see is the ability to create multiple polls within a thread. That might be something I'd need a developer to make though.

My other "wishlist" features are in the process of being developed.
 

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Better email re-engagement mechanisms please.
  1. Thread re-engagement. At least two more email re-attempts to re-engage people in threads they are watching/participating in. Currently if you miss a new post email and don't click on it you'll never hear about this thread you were interested in ever again, even if there have been dozens of new posts and the conversation continues for months without your knowledge. XF doesn't even email you if someone @mentions you. One reminder after 3 days and one after a fortnight would be ideal.
  2. Personalized content recommendations. A periodic email that re-engages users in topics they are interested in and doesn't lose their interest by promoting content they are not interested in. A system that tracks the forums/tags/topics where members spend their time, weighted by how long and how often, and uses that to generate personalized recommendations would be a game changer for XF. Further reading: on trending content, on proactive email outreach.
 
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