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A few suggestions


Guest HighlanderICT

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Posted

We have recently moved over from SMF to IPB and although IPB is a superior product, there are a few features of SMF that I miss both in terms of the admin side and also the user side. Wonder if there is any merit in trying to include some of them.

ADMIN FEATURES

  • The ability to look up and edit an account more easily. At the moment, there are only certain things you can do to a user account but in SMF when you look up a user account from the back-end you are basically inside the account and can change virtually everything if you need to. This may be a little overkill, but I will give you one practical way in which we used the SMF system. We had a situation where we felt that one user was bullying another user so after warning the user we informed both users that they would be set to ignore each other on the boards and then used the back-end to edit each account so we could set the ignore option. We cannot do that on IPB
  • Global / Local permissions - the ability to set individual boards with local permissions that are different to the rest of the forums. For example, we want all users to have access to a forum that allows them to predict the outcome of a football (soccer) game but once they have predicted, we do not want them to be able to edit the post, instead they must add a new post if they want to change their selection before the cutoff time. This has been requested by the mod for that board as it makes his life easier. In SMF we can change that forum to use local permissions and then adjust that (and other) permissions for all users on that single board. In IPB - as far as I can tell - we only have the option to turn edit post ability on/off on a global basis



BOARD FEATURES
  • display last 'X' topics/posts on forum index. This can be achieved by a mod but should perhaps be a standard feature.
  • option to be warned if someone else has posted while you were writing your message. Our users had this feature on SMF (and many say they miss it). It would update the topic preview to show the last answer, and take them back to their post so they could edit if required and re-submit. The option was enabled or disabled from user profile.
  • Better Stats - as well as the 'Top 10' stats SMF also added things like average posts per day, total page views since forum started, average page views per day, male-female ratio and a forum history section that showed a dynamic table that could show a lot of this information on a per diem basis from the start of the board to the current date. Very useful for keeping track of posts/visitors/pageviews per day.
  • Add "All unread posts" - this is different to 'view new posts' as it would show actual posts that were unread, once you read a post and clicked on the link again, the list was 1 item shorter. The current view new posts is not a true reflection as many of them have already been read by you and are not really "new".



just a few things on my wishlist. ;)
Posted

[b]ADMIN FEATURES[/b]


The ability to look up and edit an account more easily. At the moment, there are only certain things you can do to a user account but in SMF when you look up a user account from the back-end you are basically inside the account and can change virtually everything if you need to. This may be a little overkill, but I will give you one practical way in which we used the SMF system. We had a situation where we felt that one user was bullying another user so after warning the user we informed both users that they would be set to ignore each other on the boards and then used the back-end to edit each account so we could set the ignore option. We cannot do that on IPB

Yes and no, I'm not sure that this would be severely necessary only because this could be an unintentional security risk. I think that a few more options should be available without logging into the ACP, like usergroup, but not everything. Truthfully that is probably one of my least favorite features of SMF because the profile is disgusting because of it.

Global / Local permissions - the ability to set individual boards with local permissions that are different to the rest of the forums. For example, we want all users to have access to a forum that allows them to predict the outcome of a football (soccer) game but once they have predicted, we do not want them to be able to edit the post, instead they must add a new post if they want to change their selection before the cutoff time. This has been requested by the mod for that board as it makes his life easier. In SMF we can change that forum to use local permissions and then adjust that (and other) permissions for all users on that single board. In IPB - as far as I can tell - we only have the option to turn edit post ability on/off on a global basis

Though this would be nice I know that it was very TEDIOUS on SMF. A way to put a check to enable local setting instead of having them default to have both types of settings would be nice because I know I could only use this in like 3 out of the 30 forums I have.

[b]BOARD FEATURES[/b]


display last 'X' topics/posts on forum index. This can be achieved by a mod but should perhaps be a standard feature.

I don't like this mod but they are creating a few things similar to this (I hope) for blog and Gallery so perhaps they will make this enablable for those that want it.

option to be warned if someone else has posted while you were writing your message. Our users had this feature on SMF (and many say they miss it). It would update the topic preview to show the last answer, and take them back to their post so they could edit if required and re-submit. The option was enabled or disabled from user profile.

Yet another feature I did not like about SMF, it was aggravating and I always globally turned it off.

Better Stats - as well as the 'Top 10' stats SMF also added things like average posts per day, total page views since forum started, average page views per day, male-female ratio and a forum history section that showed a dynamic table that could show a lot of this information on a per diem basis from the start of the board to the current date. Very useful for keeping track of posts/visitors/pageviews per day.

This has been debated before. A lot of people are for it but then others, with larger forums, are very much against it. Some of the Stats would be ok but I know some are just overkill.

Add "All unread posts" - this is different to 'view new posts' as it would show actual posts that were unread, once you read a post and clicked on the link again, the list was 1 item shorter. The current view new posts is not a true reflection as many of them have already been read by you and are not really "new".

I don't know if I care for this. I do know I used to love the "New replies to my posts" but after having 3000 posts already on my forum I don't think I would like to see that list. <_<

Just my thoughts. :D

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