Unified "New Topic"

[//Nathan]

Rather than a "New Topic" which has in its URL the forum number (I think that's how you have it), how about an additional field, "Post In:" with the caption underneath Please be sure to post this in the correct forum. Too often, people post in the wrong forum, and I wonder if part of it is the "confusion" of posting in several different forums, and hitting New Topic in the wrong one.

This could be expanded to allow mods/admins to create announcements, as they would be able to select multiple forums. I see 2.1 allows mods/admins to create topics with custom open/close date/times... we could take the announcement feature out of the UCP entirely and merge it with the New Topic function, as we have with Polls.

Also, bookmark nuts like me who have a board's every forum, forum index, Todays Active Topics, UCP, ACP, cPanel (the latter two only if it's your own, of course)... could add New Topic and just jump right to the topic posting page, and from there be able to shoot a topic wherever. (You think of these things when you're stuck behind dialup... and one thing I like about IPB is dialup friendliness... I have avatars, sigs, and images disabled on every IPB forum I visit now until I get broadband again.)

[ph_bradley]

+0.5

nice idea, not many drawbacks, but bloat!

[Why Two Kay]

Except for the Multiple-Forum posts, I dont see a real need for the feature.

[Michael_C]

I don't mind the idea but it's going to slow down some of the queries a little bit, the forum listing being the most important one. For this I think you'd need to make the forum_id column in the topics table a comma seperated list of forums and then you'd need to use IN() to see if the forum you're looking at is in the list for each topic.