Forum post numbering?

[internext]

Looking at this forum, I dont see post numbers in the threads. Is this a "feature"? Or have I gone blind? Or is this selectable on/off in the ACP?

 

I cant think of one reason you would not want to display post counts of each post in threads

 

Thanks

[Vikestart]

Why do you need the post #?

[internext]

Because I like having the posts numbered. Is this feature available still?

[Vikestart]

No, I don't think so. It was probably not put in for 4.0 because they wanted a layout as clean and uncluttered as possible. Post numbers served no functional purpose, and I'm guessing that's why they were removed. It's easy to share (link to) posts with the share button in the upper right corner of every post.

It's something a plugin can add though. You can request a plugin, wait for one to be made or try to make one yourself.

[internext]

No functional purpose in knowing where you left off in a long discussion you didn't finish reading and want to come back to?

I appreciate your feedback but I hope it can be toggled on for those of us who see a benefit to this very basic functionality.

[jackflash]

No functional purpose in knowing where you left off in a long discussion you didn't finish reading and want to come back to?

I appreciate your feedback but I hope it can be toggled on for those of us who see a benefit to this very basic functionality.

​Or when you tell someone to check out post # X

[Vikestart]

​Or when you tell someone to check out post # X

​Or better yet, you can simply do this

Much faster than finding the exact post #. I don't understand why you would tell someone to find post # X instead, that's just making things harder on for them 

Post numbers can aslo change, if moderation takes place. If some posts before the particular post is deleted/hidden, or the user decides to remove it, then all the concurrent posts would change their post #. Very inconvenient to rely on that.

[jaeitee]

Post numbers served no functional purpose, and I'm guessing that's why they were removed. It's easy to share (link to) posts with the share button in the upper right corner of every post.

​Generally prudent not to make grand statements on what does and does not serve a functional purpose on behalf of others.  Simply because you don't have a need for a feature does not mean that feature is not being utilised by someone else's community in a way you have not considered.

IE: Your advice does not reflect some communities that partake in activities offline, and the online activities are a reflection of those activities.  We reference for example directly back to posts in threads as some of them pertain directly to sporting rules.  

[Vikestart]

​Generally prudent not to make grand statements on what does and does not serve a functional purpose on behalf of others.  Simply because you don't have a need for a feature does not mean that feature is not being utilised by someone else's community in a way you have not considered.

​Usually when discussing things on a forum board, people have opinions. I have never stated that my opinion is an objective truth, but I am rightfully in the position to make a personal statement saying that I don't see any use for this feature.

Looking at it objectively thougn, I retain the same conclusion. There are better alternatives, such as linking to the post directly. It's faster, more precise (since post # can change) and generally I just don't see any reason to use post numbers. Feel free to enlighten me.

IE: Your advice does not reflect some communities that partake in activities offline, and the online activities are a reflection of those activities.  We reference for example directly back to posts in threads as some of them pertain directly to sporting rules.  

My advice/opinion reflects my own personal opinion regarding the matter, and as such and as previously stated, you're right it's not a universal truth. However, I am still not convinced that using post # is more practical. Direct links are, unless you can come up with a reason against it, much faster and better.

All I see in this thread is a few people holding onto an old obsolete feature without much argumentation as to why it's needed, when supposedly better alternatives are there. If you want to argue that this feature is needed, you need to make a strong case for it.

And if there is a reason to have post #, it seems like a very niche thing, which would probably be better suited for a plugin.

[internext]

Rather than just debating the merits of this feature, can anyone say whether post numbering can be enabled or not?

 

Thanks

[Vikestart]

Rather than just debating the merits of this feature, can anyone say whether post numbering can be enabled or not?

 

Thanks

It can't be enabled, you'll need a plugin/mod.

[craigf136]

This will inform you of the last post you read and the newest post in the topic (solid blue line).

 

[jackflash]

​Or better yet, you can simply do this

Much faster than finding the exact post #. I don't understand why you would tell someone to find post # X instead, that's just making things harder on for them 

Post numbers can aslo change, if moderation takes place. If some posts before the particular post is deleted/hidden, or the user decides to remove it, then all the concurrent posts would change their post #. Very inconvenient to rely on that.

​Yes, I am aware of that feature and it works for a particular post.

It doesn't work well if you are reviewing numerous posts though.  Let's say that we have a customer with a defective vehicle and he or she opens a topic and there are multiple replies that we are interested in looking at from a customer service perspective. Today, we'll communicate that we should look at post numbers 2, 6, 11 and 12.  That's how it's easier.

[esquire]

It can't be enabled, you'll need a plugin/mod.

If this is the case, which I cannot believe it is, then I am truly frightened to see what other innovations await discovery. Hopefully someone at IPS will chime in since this really will throw people for a huge loop in certain communities.

[jaeitee]

then I am truly frightened 

​What hyperbole. 

[ptprog]

I agree that the post number may sometimes be an easy way to identify a post.  However, those are a little bit "fragile" to be used as identifiers: if you hide/delete a post, the posts numbers won't refer to the correct post anymore.

In any case, an easy way to copy the post ID could be useful.  It shouldn't be difficult to change the "Share this post" modal to show this information though.

[esquire]

​What hyperbole. 

I wish - Not in the slightest. Hard to believe anyone would do this, especially if you understand how people use forums. Forcing them to do it your way is ridiculous and the simple is now impossible, e.g. see post 3,4 and 8 Above.

I have already discovered that the cms / IPC isn't anywhere close to usable after waiting for years. Installing modules also is limited to subdirectory only. There are other innovations in the structure of the forum type options which are so rigid so as to make one wonder. Talking with active, experienced users is essential. Thinking you've invented the a new wheel and discussing it with no one before release is usually not a good idea.

[esquire]

One more question -- without post numbers, what is a forum owner supposed to do if he/she has 10 years worth of references to forum post numbers which are no longer visible? There is no way to convert text that refers to post numbers easily that I can see, e.g. "see what I'm talking about in post numbers 2 and 5 on this page." No post numbers means these useful posts are now deemed ridiculously difficult for users to follow (who will have to count posts from the top of the page and try to remember which number is which.) There is no way this can be any type of proper release without post numbers included, at least as an option or some type of promise that support will convert all those post number references to this new system.

[Vikestart]

Make a plugin. It shouldn't be hard to make a plugin like that, it's pretty simple in nature.

[Cyrem]

what is a forum owner supposed to do if he/she has 10 years worth of references to forum post numbers which are no longer visible?

​Not use silly methods like dynamic post numbers to identify posts. Alternatively you can sit in the past forever. Both work.

Talking with active, experienced users is essential. Thinking you've invented the a new wheel and discussing it with no one before release is usually not a good idea.

You talk as if they've ignored everyone and did their own thing for IPS4. They haven't, in fact the entire rebuild was a result of feedback from the 3x series. They aren't trying to reinvent the wheel, not even in the slightest. They're fixing a very old wheel and bringing it to the standards of today, not 10 years ago. Did you not voice your concerns last year when the development site was available to all users to see and give feedback on?, if you did, did you provide a compelling argument as to why they must exist?

IPS interact with "experienced" users every day, and "experienced" uses give them feedback all the time. It does not mean "experienced" users can't be wrong, it does not mean "experienced" users must always been listened to because there is no way they might be holding onto the past and could be afraid of change and everything "experienced" users say is obviously more logical, reasonable and compelling.

Please provide a compelling case as to why they must stay and why the alternatives aren't a good enough replacement other than "I built my forum around a pole and now the pole is moving but I think the pole should stay just because I like where it used to be". Thats the only way you might get IPS to change their mind on the feature in the next main release (because the feature addition stage for the 4.0 release has past).

[esquire]

 

​Not use silly methods like dynamic post numbers to identify posts. Alternatively you can sit in the past forever. Both work.

You talk as if they've ignored everyone and did their own thing for IPS4. They haven't, in fact the entire rebuild was a result of feedback from the 3x series. They aren't trying to reinvent the wheel, not even in the slightest. They're fixing a very old wheel and bringing it to the standards of today, not 10 years ago. Did you not voice your concerns last year when the development site was available to all users to see and give feedback on?, if you did, did you provide a compelling argument as to why they must exist?

IPS interact with "experienced" users every day, and "experienced" uses give them feedback all the time. It does not mean "experienced" users can't be wrong, it does not mean "experienced" users must always been listened to because there is no way they might be holding onto the past and could be afraid of change and everything "experienced" users say is obviously more logical, reasonable and compelling.

Please provide a compelling case as to why they must stay and why the alternatives aren't a good enough replacement other than "I built my forum around a pole and now the pole is moving but I think the pole should stay just because I like where it used to be". Thats the only way you might get IPS to change their mind on the feature in the next main release (because the feature addition stage for the 4.0 release has past).

So how does on intuitively break up this quote easily to answer each point? Whatever. Maybe I'll tell my users what you told me - if you're not going to be progressive, you can cling to the security of your limited silliness. Not. And it appears you didn't actually think about my example in the 32 milliseconds of time it took you to read and type.

Ah... hubris. Perhaps you're much younger than myself. Some of us have actually been running forums close to the dark ages, back when the thing called "the World Wide Web" began. That's the silly "www" you see at the beginning of some wasteful people's websites. Backlinks looked really ugly and didn't auto-shorten with pretty little icons at the beginning of URLs. Post numbers were used very often and still are in certain niches, demographics and certain by ages. Unfortunately, very few were as keenly brilliant and insightful as you are and they posted many years worth of silly/crappy looking URLs.

Hmmm.... So trying to just post in an old IPS URL results in just a topic "Driver Error" in this Release Candidate. No useful information whatsoever displayed in this rather large waste of space. And the "share" URL goes to the wrong post. So I will have to post in a URL with spaces because doing the simplest, most obvious action doesn't work any more. Fail.

ht tp://community.in visionpower.com/topi c/297903-driver-error/#comment-1874433

Hmmm... looks like IPS customers weren't that smart back then either... Now in that forum post (which IPS now calls a "topic" in search so as to be indecipherable from "articles") user Bubba says:

So there were two problems, the first was the issue as it was concerning the Messenger and that was fixed by IPS Staff. The second pictured in post number 6 is a bug in 3.0.4 that is a false report and has been fixed in 3.0.5 so if you see that but your board is not broke dont worry about as it will magically go away on the next update.

The disease of refusing to provide post numbers is worse than the cure. Most of us can't "upgrade" to a site whose most obvious features are no longer present.  And no forum owner wants to be paying yet more money after IPS 4 upgrade costs for unofficial third party plugins for visible functionality which was (for many years) and still should be in the software. I will assume that this was a most unusual oversight by the IPS team which they will correct and include, at the very least, as an option in the admin CP.

PS - Yes, I donated enough of my valuable time here to give feedback. But when it was clear there was no discussion, I lost interest, especially after someone promised that IPS would have a beta to show us definitely no later than the very beginning of 2014. IP.C is a shadow of its former self and not a viable upgrade. And I sure wasn't going to pay to renew my IPS 3 licenses in 2013 just so that I could donate yet more of my valuable time - which I did on the test site and gave a list of a dozen items wrong with the Gallery module which received no answer from IPS and many users in agreement. Compelling enough for you?

[Cyrem]

So how does on intuitively break up this quote easily to answer each point? Whatever. Maybe I'll tell my users what you told me - if you're not going to be progressive, you can cling to the security of your limited silliness. Not. And it appears you didn't actually think about my example in the 32 milliseconds of time it took you to read and type.

Ah... hubris. Perhaps you're much younger than myself. Some of us have actually been running forums close to the dark ages, back when the thing called "the World Wide Web" began. That's the silly "www" you see at the beginning of some wasteful people's websites. Backlinks looked really ugly and didn't auto-shorten with pretty little icons at the beginning of URLs. Post numbers were used very often and still are in certain niches, d....

​Your second paragraph is as amusing to read as is your assumptions of my age and knowledge of internet history. My first reply was pretty blunt, but that's because I think it really is silly to state "go to post 5" in a post and always assume that post 5 (at that moment in time) is going to be what you think it is forever after. Post numbers are in no way linked to post id's, post numbers are dynamic. If a post goes missing (moderation, corruption... whatever) or if someone requests their account and all their posts be deleted, all your the post numbers which you have written in your topics will be invalid on that topic. But perhaps you have a very special case where nothing ever changes, if this is the case your forum is different to the general majority of forums in which 10's or 100's of posts are moderated everyday. Post numbering is simply not reliable.

If it was intentional, and you don't want to deal with changing numbers in your posts. get a plugin or switch software, what choice do you have other than using the old software? As I said, sitting in the past.

You shouldn't need to spend a cent on a third-party mod to do this if it doesn't get added back. A theme hook adding post numbers is probably one of the simplest mods you can make for this software. If no-one else makes one, I'll probably do it myself. Regarding the display of embedded topic links, that's an issue that can be discussed separately to this.

I thought I made it fairly clear by the last sentence, but I looks like I wasn't clear enough. The "compelling case" I was asking you to provide was not for me, I was asking you (since it's so "frightening" as you put it) to provide a quality argument to go into this topic, something that may make IPS reconsider things because this topic did not have one. This wasn't just said by me. Vikestart above also mentioned the lack of a good argument here. So far the only reasoning for keeping it that I'm seeing is built upon habit from past days. I think BBCode is a good example of something we'll be saying goodbye to come IPS5, there will probably be many complaints on this, a lot more than post numbers being removed. While I don't believe there is a good reason to keep them anymore, If IPS adds the little numbers back, I won't mind, they don't annoy me.

It could very well be an oversight, there are other issues that exist which I think could be oversights (e.g just tonight I noticed the Who's Online widget does not have configuration for a timeout.)

[AtariAge]

Well, this is a bit disappointing for me, as people on my forum refer to posts by the post number all the time.  Often someone will ask me directly (as admin for the forum) to do something to a specific post number in a thread.  Not everyone knows you can click on the post number to get a link to that post.  And not everyone is going to know that in IP4 you can click on the "share" icon to get a link to the post.  And I'm sure there are tons of references on my site to specific post numbers.  Sure, post numbers may change when a topic is moderated in some fashion, but that is rare overall, and especially so for older threads.  

This does make me wonder how many such omissions there are in IPS 4.0.  I'll have to upgrade a copy of my forum to the latest RC so I can compare 4.0 to 3.4.7 side-by-side. 

[esquire]

​Your second paragraph is as amusing to read as is your assumptions of my age and knowledge of internet history. My first reply was pretty blunt, but that's because I think it really is silly to state "go to post 5" in a post and always assume that post 5 (at that moment in time) is going to be what you think it is forever after. Post numbers are in no way linked to post id's, post numbers are dynamic. If a post goes missing (moderation, corruption... whatever) or if someone requests their account and all their posts be deleted, all your the post numbers which you have written in your topics will be invalid on that topic. But perhaps you have a very special case where nothing ever changes and chance of anything bad occurring is 0.1%, if this is the case your forum is different to the general majority of forums in which 10's or 100's of posts are moderated everyday. Post numbering is simply not reliable.

If it was intentional, and you don't want to deal with changing numbers in your posts. get a plugin or switch software, what choice do you have other than using the old software? As I said, sitting in the past.

You shouldn't need to spend a cent on a third-party mod to do this if it doesn't get added back. A theme hook adding post numbers is probably one of the simplest mods you can make for this software. If no-one else makes one, I'll probably do it myself. Regarding the display of embedded topic links, that's an issue that can be discussed separately to this.

I thought I made it fairly clear by the last sentence, but I looks like I wasn't clear enough. The "compelling case" I was asking you to provide was not for me, I was asking you (since it's so "frightening" as you put it) to provide a quality argument to go into this topic, something that may make IPS reconsider things because this topic did not have one. This wasn't just said by me. Vikestart above also mentioned the lack of a good argument here. While I don't believe there is a good reason to keep them, If IPS adds the little numbers back, I won't mind, they don't annoy me.

It could very well be an oversight, there are other issues that exist which I think could be oversights (e.g just tonight I noticed the Who's Online widget does not have configuration for a timeout.

I think gossip sites are the silliest waste of time - ever. Ever. Yet I absolutely acknowledge them as a huge niche that must be acknowledged as a legitimate customer group that demands attention. There is nothing that I can do to force people to stop wasting time at gossip sites and become more productive. If I make my forum software unusable for that demographic, they will just find another forum software to use, end of story.

People have used forum posts in text for 15+ years because it was the way to do it and also easier (not because they were silly or stupid.) The older the forum, the larger and greater chance this has occurred. Sticking your head in the sand to be "progressive" isn't going to change the fact that you have 15 years worth of posts, "hard coded" as text using the "old" method that suddenly become totally useless. There is also the ease in which professional forums may identify posts on a single page in email, etc. I'd take the minute chance that one of my threads might change post numbers than having a big fat zero. The head shaking factor is that many big boards have been around for a very long time and exhibit this behavior. If IPS wants to only focus on new sites and tell their largest and oldest forums to putter off and get a plugin -- hey, that's their decision if it was one. Having been developing sites for a very long time, this is the type of oversight you don't make when you have a dialogue with customers. What's frustrating me is that coming back to the product, I see this type of shortsighted, limited use mindset all over the place. As a result, IPS 3 >> IPS 4 due to foundation, not maturity of the product.

PS - And @AtariAge makes several good points. It's a lot easier to say "in Joe's post right above mine (#15)" as opposed to clicking the share button, clicking the hyperlink and either double clicking or using control-A to select all, then making sure you had text to highlight if you want to use anchor text, then highlighting that text, choosing the link icon, pasting the link into the box and pressing save. No need for all those gymnastics.

[Izaya Orihara]

Can someone just make an add-on for this so this can be over and done with.