Forum Prefix Filter

[Cyrem]

When it comes to Prefixes and Tags, IPSuite is absolutely terrible at managing them. We need third party applications to manage them and do things that should really be in the core, overall I think tags & prefixes are vastly overlooked and thus the power that they could have on forums is hindered.

This is just one example where your competitor is superior, you can filter a forum's topics by prefix and receive a list of topics in the default topic list view. You just click the prefix and it filter's the forum that you're in as you would expect it to, no messing around.

 

What is IPS's equivalent? You click the prefix and it takes you to the global site search, listing every form of content with this tag in the most irritating way possible. Yes if you go to advanced search and make a bunch of selections you can filter it down to just looking in that forum, however after spending your time doing this, it’s not in a topic list view... it's still the search view. Using Prefixes as a type of topic filter is extremely useful. If you have a Buy/Want/Sell forum, you can just look at the 'Sell' topics, if you forum supports many products and making forums each one is not practical.. Prefixes are the solution. However in their current state, they are not helpful at all.

My Suggestion: Make Prefixes a topic filter & Make clicking a prefix filter by the content type you clicked on.

BTW: Yes I have suggested to people like @Ryan H. that this functionality would be useful in his application, however he is not interested.

PS: I'd even be willing to throw a few dime towards someone making a plugin for this as I don't have the time to do so.

[Cyrem]

@Matt / @Charles I noticed in the blog for the 4.3 announcement "Forums has a new widget where you can filter by tags."... Does this mean 4.3 will filter topics like shown above?

 

If that is the case HOORAY.

[FFXIV RPC]

This is something my team is looking for as well. Assuming the 4.3 feature allows us to filter forum topics by tags and prefixes, that would likely fit our needs, but without that, it's hard to say we could reliably convert and keep users happy with the setup. Many of the users are already quite adverse to searching in general and having to use a search interface just to make use of tags would likely dissuade them from interacting on the forums.

[MMXII]

On 15.12.2017 at 12:25 AM, Cyrem said:

...overall I think tags & prefixes are vastly overlooked and thus the power that they could have on forums is hindered.

I totally agree on this and I'd love to see a better implementation of tags and prefixes as well! And, in my opinion, this is also true for all the other Apps that IPS offers.

[Cyrem]

Now that 4.3 is applied here, is there somewhere we can see how the supposed filter widget works?