Greetings. I recently migrated my forum from vBulletin 3.8.2 to IP.Board 3.3.0, and while it has been by and large a positive change for both me and my community in general, there is however one aspect of IP.Board that everyone in my community is unhappy about compared to how it used to be in vBulletin, and that is profile feeds (or "Visitor Messages", as they're called in vBulletin).

The vBulletin admin control panel offers full control over VMs. One can choose both the maximum allowed VM character length, as well as which BBCodes are allowed. IP.Board on the other hand has a strict 500 character limit on all profile feeds (a limit that cannot be configured, apparently) and absolutely no BBCode support. One can't even enter newline characters in a feed (unless it is a comment to someone else's feed).

I suspect that all this is no mere "accident", but a deliberate decision by the IPS dev team in order to make users try the IP.Board private messaging system more (which, compared to vBulletin PMs, are vastly superior). However, there are cases when users prefer not to go private when chatting with each other. So, in conclusion, I would like to ask: Is there any chance of "loosening up" the restrictions on profile feeds in future versions of IP.Board?

Thanks in advance.

my error please delete

Oh, I forgot to mention one additional (and very serious) problem with profile feeds: No one has edit privileges on a feed, not even admins.

Well I thought I'd look at this and it looks like there's also a hard coded limit of 100 replies to a status update. Anyway to bypass I think you can literally go into your ACP and create a new setting with the setting key 'su_max_chars' and set that to whatever you want.

Or you can open (not going to recommend this) /admin/sources/classes/member/status.php find

protected function _cleanContent( $content )

{

  /* Just cut off after X chars. */

  $content = IPSText::truncate( IPSText::getTextClass('bbcode')->stripBadWords( $content ), $this->settings['su_max_chars'] );


  return $content;

}

and replace the $this->settings['su_max_chars'] with a number of your choice. I feel like this was supposed to be a setting in IPB and they just forgot about it..

As for bbcode I think there's a hook for this.

Thanks for your response, Shigure.

I tried creating a new setting just like you advised me to, and here is what I got:



How can I find where that key is used?

Thanks for your response, Shigure.

I tried creating a new setting just like you advised me to, and here is what I got:

How can I find where that key is used?

you are not meant to add that setting.
is IPS power setting, changeable in a permanent survivable manner...
also, is support, not feedback, ask same in a support topic, and I would be happy to provide the actual factual method to permanently change it for the installation in a manner that survives upgrades.

Sorry for bumping this thread, but I have one more important inquiry. How can I disable a certain member group's privilege to delete profile feeds from their own profiles?

It is extremely important, because certain members can abuse the system by using the feeds to insult another person and then delete all feeds before any moderator notices, and then there's no evidence by which to apply any punitive action.

There's no option for that unless you want to skin the button out which isn't exactly the most effective.