Suggestions for IPB 4

[EricGagne]

Here's three things I would absolutely love in IPB and I think many on my community would also use it.

1. An "Hide from new content" option on topics.  Very often there's topics I would prefer not to see in the New Content because they are of less importance to me and I'd rather just read them later by going through the forum index than seeing them on New Content many times a day.

2. A "Mark Priority" option on forums and topics which would make them appear at the top of the New Content page and be identifed as priority with some icon.

3. A "Invite people" feature on topics.  This would allow the "Invited" people to participate in a discussion when it's in a forum they don't see or in which they only have read-only access.  I'm not entirely sure how permissions would work on this but what I am thinking for now is two settings in the "Edit forum" page:

• Groups that can be invited.  Members of these groups can be invited to topics in this forum.
• Groups allowed to invite.  Members of these groups are allowed to invite people to topics in this forum.

Here's why we would love these features.

We currently have 133 forums in our community and many permissions groups depending on one's position in the organization (Administrator, Executive, club representative, club member, etc).  We plan on opening up the community to the public now and we will easily end up with 150 to 175 forums and an average of over 300 new messages each day.   Our executives have access to everything because they need to feel the pulse of our community but they can only spend so much time a day on the forum and they need to be able to filter out the discussions that don't specifically require them to read every new post.   This is where suggestions 1 and 2 would be an invaluable tool for them, making their lives so much easier by giving them tools to prioritize new content.

I don't think suggestion #3 requires any explanation.