My 3 wishes for IPB 3.2

[Enkidu]

Hello

I thought of sharing with you guys my personal 3 wishes for IPB 3.2 and I hope that IPS would become my gennie of the lamp :cool:

1- Notification Systems
IPS introduced their inline notification system in IPB 3.1 which is a cool idea. Many of my members are using it to get notifications about who have quoted their posts or who posted to their topics. But the the problem is: IPS presented this cool feature in the form of a nagging popup window. There is a reason why, for example, Microsoft doesn't use a popup message box any more because it's really annoying to the user. Popup messages appear from no where and in times that you might be posting a reply and they just block you from easily browsing the board. We now see that Windows notifications have been moved to the toolbar tray area and now they display as a cool balloon.

How come IPB doesn't have a bottom toolbar with integrated notification system? I'm talking about something similar to this. Surely, you can stop IPB from displaying popup windows but then the only way for you to access your notifications is through the notification drop down menu... so ninety in my opinion...who uses drop down windows like this nowadays? Can we get something more animated like drop down on hovering with some cool effects?

2- Caring about new members
For guests, registering in a website is just the start of a long journey to understand the culture and the technical details of a board. A new member needs to know how to post, what is the difference between qoute and multiqiute, where is this and that, and so on and so forth.

Some of my members keep ask me the same question over and over again, like how do I change my display name? yes I know that there is a help system available to them but they even don't know about that!

What I propose is a form of a walkthrough for new members. Something like we see in games. Imagine that when you sign in for the first time, you get a notification from your toolbar welcoming you and offering more help about basic account setup and posting ... etc, and when you click on a setting you'll get more info about that setting. When you post, you get a more info about posting such as BBcodes and how to use them or how to enable the rte editor. Basically a tutorial mode such as your first mission in a computer game!

3- Board index
why does the board index has to be the way it is right now? I mean everything in internet forum software has changed so why we still keeping this logical presentation of having forums wrapped inside categories? Especially when only few use them. You don't normally go through a forum topics to get what's new, but you rather click on VNC. This is the first thing I do here and at my board. So why do we present the board this way? why not use a frontpage that is more focused on what's new such as personal feeds that I'm starting to see more and more people using them.

Now I can think of another wish but hey! let's not be greedy

thank you

Enkidu

[3DKiwi]

This is the first thing I do here and at my board. So why do we present the board this way? why not use a frontpage that is more focused on what's new such as personal feeds that I'm starting to see more and more people using them.

Hence the reason I use the Portal as the front page.

My wishes for 3.2:

1. Image attachment control of sizes. I want to allow zip file attachments up to 2mb but restrict image attachment sizes to 400kb and 1280x1024. I am using a mod for this but this really should be part of IPB.

2. Revamped VNC and finding your own and other people's posts.

For version 4:

Complete tidy up of forum index page. e.g. have a look at the IPS forum index page. Scroll down and observe the huge white empty space.

3DKiwi

More obvious bread crumb. Many people are unaware that this can be used for navigating. The way Xenforo does it slicker. Yes this can be done now with skins but most don't.

[Taylor J]

The only reason there is the white space here is because the sidebar goes down further then the categories/forums.