My Other IPB suggestions (reposted from before)

[cheatmaster30]

I already posted this on The Admin Zone when IPS asked for feedback, but in case anyone at the official support forums has any comments on it or can correct anything I got wrong, or in case IPS stopped looking at admin forums recently, I'll post it here too:

Make profiles much better. Seriously, just the ability to customise part of the background? How about letting users change the colour schemes/CSS like they would with their blog? Embed a video or two? Heck, make it a bit less confusing too, calling comments a 'profile feed' makes no sense whatsoever and reminds me of how Youtube seems to be trying to hide channel comments nowadays.

Add forum icons as a default option. See those different images used to represent subjects on my site? Why is that not a default option by now? Why is vBulletin literally the one forum script in history which integrated such a simple feature despite how much better it can make your site look? Just let us choose a different icon or set of icons to display beside the forum description instead of the default for every forum/section.

An improved way to edit the menus at the top. No, not IP Content, those people out there who don't want to use IPB's content management system because they have no need for it should still be able to edit the menu in a simple way like how you can edit Wordpress navigation links.

Have an unencoded version of IP Nexus. Or at least, one which has the front end files entirely unencoded. Because at this moment in time, this is probably one of the main reasons I have zero interest in the software, because I don't particularly trust encoded scripts. Heck, it's why I don't use IBP Arcade or whatever now too. I know security is meant to be an issue, but as far as I know the script never actually saves card details to the database and merely sends them to third parties like PayPal to process, so it's not like it's the worst thing ever. Besides, you can get other scripts that do the same with no coding, and security through obscurity or whatever it's called is a terrible idea in the first place.

Another app suggestion is to do as someone said on the official support forums and sell a self hosted version of IP Chat. Yeah, it's not a good idea for shared hosting, but for anyone on their own server or running a community for a large company, being able to host it themselves would be much more practical, much cheaper and allow them to actually modify it significantly.

Improve the HTML/CSS so it meets standards. I know that some third party systems IPB integrates with are poorly coded and that 3.4 seems to massively improve the HTML/CSS quality (at least according to the W3C validation tool), but it'd be nice to have it so IPB has no HTML/CSS errors whatsoever.

Make registration quicker. As of now, if I have e-mail validation, when registering I need to go through a seperate page with quite a few fields to fill in, whereas ideally you should have something like a drop down box that lets you register in seconds. Not sure how this would be done (presumably through javascript of some kind with the old style registration as a fall back), but anything to make signing up for a forum quicker and easier would really help forum owners.

Add in an option for a guest welcome message, as well as notices to display different text based on various criteria. So for someone not logged in it'd give you reasons to register, and for someone with no posts it'd encourage them to post.

Bring back avatar galleries and traditional avatar options. I don't mind the same picture being used for profiles, posts and everything else, that's just logical. But being able to select avatars from an onsite gallery is really, really important to certain types of communities.

For example, on a gaming forum, a lot of the time people are used to being able to select an avatar related to the site's topic/niche. To remove that just makes it more inconveniant for some people.

And for other sites, they don't allow ANY third party avatar/profile picture uploads. For example, the old Nintendo forums only allow people to use Nintendo related avatars to stop any trouble that could be caused by letting people upload inappropriate pictures. And another site I'm on uses neon sign versions of Donkey Kong and Banjo Kazooie characters for their avatar gallery and doesn't allow user uploads either, to make everything keep to the site theme. For sites like this, IPB is completely impossible to use/upgrade.

Oh, and a spellcheck feature might be nice. That always comes in handy when using Wordpress.