Downloading Topics - Bring back the old way!

[ptrader]

My organization conducts online workshops for writers. When the workshop is over, we (pre 3.0) downloaded each topic and compiled them into a single .doc file, .pdf'd it, and put it up for our members to be able to download the entire workshop. These then went into our archived library area.

However, my librarians are complaining since the change in the way things are downloaded/printed. In fact, it's downright annoying. In the land of BEFORE, we were able to hit the download link once and get the entire topic. Now each page must be done separately. In BEFORE, we could automagically send it to a .doc file, now both downloading and printing both do the same thing - open up a browser page and displays the text stripped of the boards skin. It looks great - but a copy/paste is required (and it doesn't look as good) to move it to a document. Even saving the HTML means a very tedious process of combining many pages together.

Is there any chance IPS can give us back our old printing/download method? At the very least, can we download/print a full topic, not just one page of the topic at a time? I'd even be happy with a print to PDF function...

Any tips, tricks, or ideas on how to make this function work easier? Or any chance it can go in the enhancement requirements bucket for a future release?

[Kessler]

This appears to be a feedback and feature request topic, so I'll move it for you so the developers will be sure to see it.

[Abuzaid]

I fully support this need ; I hope IPS can cnsider bringing back the feature as it was.

I knew many users of the board who are serious users otherwise the board will turn to be more or less chatting tool.

please reconsider adding this feature back.

[Abuzaid]

for serious users IP.Board not a chatting tools we need to to format the whole topic and print it in decent format ; this used to be achieved through the topic print option which can download the whole topics in microsoft word document.

although we expect a big list of improvement by the upgrade - we got already - but the drawback is taking-off the feature of download the topic as Microsoft word.

I hope IPS reconsider this decision.

[ptrader]

While the integration of social media into IPB is nice, it's coming at the removal of other features. That's bad. In my IS world, you can improve existing features, but you can't take them away!

[Abuzaid]

we use to be able even to download the topic as microsoft word file

making good use of such download facility;

I'm IT man since late sixties and I'm 68 years old the basic thing with software development is to improve all the time ie adding features not stripping ones;

any chance to have this feature back

[Abuzaid]

I got the following reply on my support ticket :

As far as I know, there are no plans to add that back in. It *may* not be possible to do, just not sure.

However, that's something that you should post as a suggestion in the Feedback section of our forum, here:

http://community.invisionpower.com/forum/298-ipboard/

where other community members can add their support for it. Customer demand does factor into future versions.

so please gather here and support this issue

[Kamil_K]

Hello, how I can create a new Forums ? Please help me ...

[ptrader]

Seriously, it may not be "possible" to do? If a developer reads this, I hope they realize that as a minimum, you need to make the "print a topic" function pull the entire topic contents, not just one page at a time, or else remove that so-called feature altogether. There's nothing more disappointing to me then to try to use what seems like an obvious feature and find out it works nothing like what you'd expect it does. Getting the whole topic would, at least, make the convoluted process much easier.