[Feature suggestions] Automated prefixes

[LaCollision]

Hi there,

Here is a feature request which is, in my opinion, at the core of a board usability.

Question : What is the goal of a forum ?
Answer : To let users create topics.

So the topic creation process has to offer great functionalities to organize them.

I started my community 8 years ago, and I realize only now that an often used process is still manually (and very poorly) done : the topic prefixes.
I can't count the pinned topics in each of my forums, where members are kindly asked to add some prefixes to their topics titles, depending on the content of their topics.

Let's take an example, with a forum of old cars.
The members would be asked to put prefixes before each of their topics titles, with , for instance, the name of the brand, like : [Chevrolet], [Chrylser], [Mercedes] or whatever.

Then, after this brand name, members are asked to put the model of the car : [SLK], [A Class] and so on.

Then, after this model, members are asked to put the matter of their topic : [Design], [Engine], [Tuning], and so on.

So, finally, a well-done topic title would be like this :
[Mercedes] [SLK] [Design] What do you think of the new 2012 model ?

This kind of classification is widely used in boards, and can be applied to very diversified subjects : cars, sports, games...

But, as you can guess, there are 3 issues to this method :

• members often forget to add the prefixes to their topics...
• or members make plenty of mistakes, like spelling : "mercdes" instead of "Mercedes", and so on...
• moderators spend an incredible amount of time correcting it... time that could be used for something else far more useful.
  

I also would like to add that this classification can't replaced by the creation of a sub-forum (for my example, i don't want to create 50 sub-forums, 1 for each cars brand : there would be too few topics in every sub-forum, and above all, i want all my topics to appear in the same forum).

So the question is :
Would it be possible to create prefixes in the ACP, that would be available in one or several forums ? Ideally, these prefixes would be categorized (for instance : Car brand, Model, and Matter).
Then, when creating a topic, members would easily check the prefixes (in each category) that apply to their subject.

I'm not saying this implementation is the best, but this is a way that could work.
It would be very interesting to imagine a very user-friendly solution for that.

Do you face this kind of issues in your board too ?
Do you have better ideas on how it could be done ?

Invision team, do you plan to add such a feature any soon ?

Thanks a lot for reading,


PS : sorry for the pretty poor english