KT Walrus

I hope Invision purchases the skin and includes it in the standard IPB distribution. Mobile access is increasingly important for many community boards and using the Lo Fi skin for mobile computers just isn't good enough. Count me in as one who will buy this skin on the first day it is available...

Not really. I just want my Admin CP password to be different than my board password. That's all. I already protect my admin cp using the webserver. I suppose I could add HTTP authentication for the webserver, but it would be simpler to just store the admin cp passwords separately and let me change this password independently of my board password.

Maybe I missed it, but I'd like to have a separate password for the Admin CP from the forum password for the admin account. I know I could probably just create a separate account for accessing the Admin CP, but it is more convenient to admin both the board and the Admin CP from the same account. Since you have to log into the Admin CP from a special login page, it makes sense to me that the Admin CP password be completely separate from the board password.

Probably just about as many as use the media link dropdown! :thumbsup: Actually, I'd trade the media link dropdown for a special characters dropdown any day.

I'd still like to see a user preference to enable HTTPS just for that user. HTTPS is slower and many users won't care to use this if it makes the board run slower. I also don't really want to enable it for everyone as it will just eat up more server resources for people who don't care about eavesdroppers. As for the ACP, I would think you would want the whole ACP covered by HTTPS since a lot (or some) of what you see and do in the ACP is sensitive. Of course, it is hard to see a hacker really going to the trouble to monitor all your traffic to and from the ACP. All they really would want is the ACP password. I restrict ACP to my IP (by configuring my webserver) so this is less of an issue for me, but I still wouldn't want my ACP password to be sent as plain text and subject to someone watching packets sent to and from my webserver.

In addition to the option to use HTTPS for password pages, I'd like to see an Admin CP setting to allow the user to access the board using HTTPS all the time (a per member preference). Also, I'd like to have a setting to force all users to use HTTPS. Also, the Admin CP should be accessible only over HTTPS (by a setting). This is the way my GMail company email works and some users would like to have the added security of accessing a board over HTTPS. I know HTTPS slows things down a bit and puts more of a load on the server, but I think it should be a supported option (especially for corporate forums or forums where content access is only by login and some content is only accessible to some members).

That set is pretty good. Maybe don't even need the Show All menu like the emoticons. That small dropdown would do for me. I want people to use symbols like

I'd like to suggest that you add a special HTML characters menu to the editor, like the smileys menu. For example, I'd like to see commonly used characters in the dropdown and all characters in a side menu. The editor currently doesn't allow these codes to be entered using their friendly name (you must use the numeric version) to get such symbols:

I'd like to have the ability to add a caption to each attached file (after the upload, but part of the post form) that would be shown instead of the "filename, size, downloads" default caption. If you are uploading a set of photos, it would be nice to be able to describe each photo individually (so the caption shows when viewing in the lightbox). The caption input box could appear between the filename and "Add to post" link when the uploaded attachment appears in the Attachments list. If the poster doesn't enter anything for a caption, then the default "filename, size, downloads" would be used.

Shucks.... :aww:

I'm surprised that no one has commented that this would be a good enhancement. My members are older and often don't have the skill to crop their own photos and it is important to me that all photos shown be cropped correctly to just show the head and shoulders of the member. Adding in JCrop to assist in getting properly squared and cropped personal photos would help a lot.

I'd like to see some sort of support for uploaded video streaming added in IPB. That is, if the user attaches a video file to the post, the video could be processed into flv or H.264 video (using FFmpeg - which would have to be installed by the server admin) and played in a free third-party Flash player (like the JW Player). FFmpeg could be used to generate a thumbnail for the uploaded video to show as the attachment (like photo thumbnails do now for photos). Video streaming is becoming a standard feature of many sites and I see no reason that it shouldn't be supported by IPB like photos are supported. Of course, the feature should be optional since this could eat up a lot of bandwidth and disk space.

This is only true for MyISAM tables. For InnoDB tables, count(*) with no where clause does a full index scan which can be quite time consuming for very large tables. You really should cache these values when their only purpose is for displaying stats (or cache them if the table is not MyISAM). MySQL has to do the full scan for InnoDB because InnoDB supports transactions.

I'd like to see the RTE supported for Safari and other webkit browsers. I don't know what the technical hurdles are in providing such support, but I have seen WYSIWYG editors for forums that have no problem with Safari. so maybe it is now possible.

I too have a need to add some filters to the topic view queries. I haven't looked into it yet since this is on my to-do list, but I would vote for some sort of query replacement/edit capability without modifying IPB source. Specifically, I'd like to see all queries labeled/numbered somehow and then an SQL hook that would feed the constructed query and the query label to the hook where it could be modified to add my extra where stuff or extra select columns just before executing it.

I can't seem to figure out how to set up an RSS feed that is specific to the member. On my board, the members are restricted to viewing different content (some members can view some content while others might be restricted but could view other content. So, my suggestion is to implement an authenticated RSS feed that is restricted to topic posts that the member has permission to view. I'm not sure if there is a standard way to implement this, but I could see the RSS feed having a key that is specific to the member and that IPB remembers the last IP Address that the member used to access the board. Then, the RSS feed could check that the IP Address of the RSS feed match the last logged in IP Address for the member and serve up only the topic posts that are visible to that member for the feed. If the IP Address match fails, then a message with a link back to the board could be shown instead so that they can reset their IP Address so the feed works again. Anyway, however this is implemented, I would like to see it since my board is restricted for guests and I really don't want to be responsible for some members only information escaping through a wide-open RSS feed.

I'll just hope that the skinning community comes up with a decent iPhone skin. It can't be that hard to do. Make some buttons that look like the iPhone theme and then put out very simple html for the various pages. Maybe I'm over estimating the job, but the iPhone is the majority of mobile browsing and deserves a decent experience.

I'm revising my suggestion. I just visited webhostingtalk.com in Safari (spoofing my user agent to pretend to be an iPhone) and the skin they use is fantastic. Lo Fi just won't cut it in comparison. Everything is laid out very nicely. So, I'm upgrading my feedback to request that IP.Board come with a default skin designed just for iPhone/mobile users. Maybe Lo Fi is it, but it should have buttons and even the colors that iPhone users expect and can have Javascript. The iPhone just has a small screen so the skin should be written with that in mind.

Just tried adding the viewport code shown above into the Lo Fi skin on my board and it works much better! There will also need to be some header changes so the Signed In line doesn't overwrite itself with the left and right links all smashed on top of themselves and the App Menu wraps badly (because I have installed a lot of apps), but these things are probably easy to fix in the skin for mobile users. So, my suggestion stands. I'd like to see a better Lo Fi skin for mobile users.

I'd like to see the LoFi skin work better on the iPhone or maybe a new skin derived from the LoFi skin for iPhone use. The main problem, at least when using Safari on my iPhone, is that the fonts are so small and the page so wide that I have to keep zooming in on each page to see the text and choose links. I haven't researched it, but there must be some way to make this work. When I browse to m.google.com with my browser user agent set to pretend to be an iPhone, I see that the page is formatted specifically for the iPhone so that the page fits the phone's screen exactly and the fonts are large enough to be seen. Just a quick look at the source for the page as seen by an iPhone, shows: meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=0" There is some other header html that might be making this work better. Anyway, that is my suggestion... make Lo Fi work better on the iPhone.

Why not? I'd like to see a fully functional Lo Fi skin, especially since it is the skin for us iPhone users. Is this limitation just because you haven't gotten around to writing such support to the Post form or is there a fundamental limitation here (I can't image why it can't be done).

Actually, the feature I want is the "View my topics" as the "View my posts" includes comments/replies in the list. But, on my test board (3.0.1), the Gallery doesn't list anything (I think it is broken) and the Tracker doesn't even get a tab (I suppose that is a feature). I guess I could just change the lang bits to make "View my topics" become "View my content" and change the Gallery to consider an Album or a Photo in the Gallery as content and posts (and replies/comments as only posts). I'd also like to see the Messenger as a page (although is a conversation you started content?). It just seems to me that one of the primary things I do on a board is to check whether anyone has commented on my threads, blogs, photos, etc. So, I think this feature is mostly there, just a bit incomplete.

Well, I'd just put it on a switch (an Optimization Switch) then. The result of the search queries could be cached so that they are done only once on initial load of the View New Content page. Most users probably wouldn't refresh this page that often and if they did, you could place a limit on the number of seconds before they can check for new content again (and just use the cached data in the meantime). Also, I bet most of these queries are pretty fast since they are just using the thread's last update times (which I think is an index). So, doing 5 or 6 of these might not be too bad. If you did them using AJAX (so there were 5 or 6 AJAX calls fetching the data for the tabs that are hidden and update the New Counts through the AJAX), you could spread out the queries with a few seconds delay between them so they don't monopolize the server. One other approach would be to only ask the app whether there is newer content and not return the count or the actual data. Such a query should be even faster due to being an index query and the case of "no new data" might even be faster by checking already cached data for the area. Anyway, there are all sorts of ways to implement this in a fashion that the user gets the best information and the server load can be "managed". Still, the default action in situations like this is usually to put the feature on a switch so it can be disabled if there aren't enough resources available for the feature. I just hate having to go clicking on all those tabs! So much so, that I don't think I will do it very often.

Since my content is now spread around multiple app areas, I'm finding it hard to keep track of when there are replies to my threads/content. I suggest that a new link be added somewhere to show me my content (topics, blogs, photos, issues, events, etc) in one nice page (similar to the style of the View New Content page). I realize that the profile page has recent topics, posts, etc., but these aren't presented as a list so I can see if any one has commented to my threads or blog entries or whatever. While I am primarily wanting this feature for the current user (me), I would also like to see such a link to such a page available on all profile pages. If such a page already exists, then I guess I missed it. You almost get it by clicking on the individual links (to blog, gallery, etc) in the profile/mini-profile pages, but I would prefer a single View My Content page. And, like I just posted about View New Content it would be really helpful if counts were shown by the tabs in the View My Content page so I can easily tell if it is worth the effort to peek inside the tab.

Since my suggestion to have all content (for all apps) stored into a single topics/posts table for better searching and tighter integration of the forum and other apps is not going to be acted on, I'd like to make another suggestion in this area. As a user, I don't like the way View New Content is presented to the user. You have to click on the individual tabs for each app to see if there is new content for the content that the app manages. Obviously, the forum is probably the most frequently updated area, but since other areas, are less so frequently updated, I rarely think to click on these area tabs. This results in missed content. At the risk of slower performance, I'd like to see all the new content for each app fetched when the View New Content page is first loaded and cached. Then, the tabs could at least show the new content counts in each tab. Ajax (or even full page subsequent loads) could be used to fetch the cached content for an app and display it. The cache would be refreshed if the user clicks on the original View New Content link again, otherwise, the content of the page doesn't need to change (maybe update the unread topics markers). Anyway, I'm not advocating any specific implementation. Rather, that the page the user sees for View New Content should have new content counts for each tab as well as the list of new content in the active tab.