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Topic descriptions no more


TCWT

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Tags are far more powerful - you can sort on them, show them in the sidebar, far more than you can do with the description.

However I understand that the description field has been kept and I am sure someone will come up with a hook to show it (in fact I seem to recall someone already saying they would)

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This was talked about on the preview. It was removed as it was found very few sites even used it. I my self hardly used it and I think I mainly used it if the title field was unable to hold the whole title that I wanted to put so part of the title was in the description.

Oh and tags are a must for both navigation and searching so I am very glad those were added. It is a feature I needed more then any other feature that was added to this 3.2

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I am running a genealogy forum ... the topic description was a very useful thing for adding the birth, death, engagement, marriage dates of the respective persons ... it would have been great if the admin could choose between topic description and tags within the admin area.

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I am running a genealogy forum ... the topic description was a very useful thing for adding the birth, death, engagement, marriage dates of the respective persons ... it would have been great if the admin could choose between topic description and tags within the admin area.




I personally think it would be better to have both not one or the other.
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We have no plans to reintroduce the topic description feature as, in our research, very very few communities ever used it in a useful way. When you add that it cluttered up forum view, was not searchable, and few users used it consistently we decided it was not worth keeping.

That said, we have not removed the database column for the topic description so I am sure someone will create a simple hook to re-add it if you like the little text field.

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I am running a genealogy forum ... the topic description was a very useful thing for adding the birth, death, engagement, marriage dates of the respective persons ... it would have been great if the admin could choose between topic description and tags within the admin area.




And imagine having these as tags instead and be able to search all topics with a specific birth, death, engagement, marriage dates, etc .. :) Tags makes that possible.
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And imagine having these as tags instead and be able to search all topics with a specific birth, death, engagement, marriage dates, etc .. :smile: Tags makes that possible.




Of course, it would be fantastic ... but as long as this option is deactivated here in the Beta phase and I cannot test tags, I will not be persuaded.
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  • 2 months later...

We have no plans to reintroduce the topic description feature as, in our research, very very few communities ever used it in a useful way.



That's all fine and dandy for a new forum but this change will impact my existing forum by excluding useful data that was placed into that field. Please consider making description=off as a default setting and allow legacy users to continue using the field until they are done with it.

I'm disappointed to see a feature relating to actual post data being removed in an 'upgrade' without at least having some kind of warning that the use of topic descriptions was deprecated... you've skipped over that and gone straight to obsolete without considering that you might be causing unnecessary problems for your (paying) customer base. Perhaps you should put customer data considerations as higher priority ahead of usability tweaks.

I'm all in favour of sleek, slimmed down looks but loss of data isn't acceptable.
(I'm aware the data is still in the database but that's of little consolation if it isn't being displayed)
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That's all fine and dandy for a new forum but this change will impact my existing forum by excluding useful data that was placed into that field. Please consider making description=off as a default setting and allow legacy users to continue using the field until they are done with it.



I'm disappointed to see a feature relating to actual post data being removed in an 'upgrade' without at least having some kind of warning that the use of topic descriptions was deprecated... you've skipped over that and gone straight to obsolete without considering that you might be causing unnecessary problems for your (paying) customer base. Perhaps you should put customer data considerations as higher priority ahead of usability tweaks.



I'm all in favour of sleek, slimmed down looks but loss of data isn't acceptable.


(I'm aware the data is still in the database but that's of little consolation if it isn't being displayed)



fully agree with you
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  • 2 weeks later...

How about this?

In ACP->Look and Feel->Manage Templates & CSS->Forum View->topics


            <if test="hasTags:|:isset($data['tags']) AND $data['tags']">

                  <img src='{$this->settings['img_url']}/icon_tag.png' /> {$data['tags']['formatted']['truncatedWithLinks']}

            </if>

If you change that to


            <if test="hasTags:|:isset($data['tags']) AND $data['tags']">

                  <img src='{$this->settings['img_url']}/icon_tag.png' /> {$data['tags']['formatted']['truncatedWithLinks']}

<else />

{$data['description']}

            </if>



That way, it shows tags, but, if the topic is a legacy topic and has a description, that would be displayed instead?

That seem like a happy middle ground? You get to keep the legacy descriptions, they will show on the list of topics, and no new ones can be added.

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I'm disappointed to see a feature relating to actual post data being removed in an 'upgrade' without at least having some kind of warning that the use of topic descriptions was deprecated... you've skipped over that and gone straight to obsolete without considering that you might be causing unnecessary problems for your (paying) customer base. Perhaps you should put customer data considerations as higher priority ahead of usability tweaks.



Agreed. What happens when IP decides that tags are old news?
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That's all fine and dandy for a new forum but this change will impact my existing forum by excluding useful data that was placed into that field. Please consider making description=off as a default setting and allow legacy users to continue using the field until they are done with it.



I'm disappointed to see a feature relating to actual post data being removed in an 'upgrade' without at least having some kind of warning that the use of topic descriptions was deprecated... you've skipped over that and gone straight to obsolete without considering that you might be causing unnecessary problems for your (paying) customer base. Perhaps you should put customer data considerations as higher priority ahead of usability tweaks.



I'm all in favour of sleek, slimmed down looks but loss of data isn't acceptable.


(I'm aware the data is still in the database but that's of little consolation if it isn't being displayed)




Topic Descriptions removal were posted in the Whats new in 3.2 topic months before the release actualy. (I am commenting only the bold part)
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