Forum (Discuss) Enhancement suggestions

Thank you VERY much for this dedicated forum!

I'd like to see these in the list of possible enhancements:

1) Allow sort by various fields, starting with date, board, and topic.
- Allow for multi-sort for limited cases: by board by date, or by board by topic

2) Document capabilities of search box:
- support quoted text: does "foo bar" work or will it do Foo AND Bar ?
- does it support + and - or other wildcards?
- is it based on some common engine where we can find docs?
- parentheses? (Foo AND Bar) -foobar

3) Add 1-5 or star Rating to postings (not threads).
- Does same job as threads I've seen for people to list their favorite threads.
- Total rating gets saved per-thread. Allow for sorting by-dsnd total rating.

4) Allow Subscribe (not just RSS) to boards.

I flagged this as a question and will mark as answered when the above are either confirmed as being in the tracker for the future, or when they're shot down as being lousy ideas.

Thanks!

[admin note: changed from Q&A to Discussion post type] [ed. note: rethrash last edited this post 11 years, 2 months ago.]

Quote from: captainstarbuck at Dec 30, 2012, 12:19 AM

4) Allow Subscribe (not just RSS) to boards.

Use the "by email" button next to the RSS button to subscribe to threads. It's a little obscure, but it's actually the subscribe button.

Quote from: frogabog at Dec 30, 2012, 12:47 AM

Use the "by email" button next to the RSS button to subscribe to threads. It's a little obscure, but it's actually the subscribe button.

I'm talking about subscribing to boards. For example, I want to know if there is a new posting just to this board about Discuss. I can't subscribe to threads if I don't know they're there.

Really, this one is at the bottom of my list considering we Can subscribe via RSS. I just prefer to get all notifications in one place (email) rather than having to open my browser for the RSS. (yeah yeah, I need to build an RSS reader into my email client, ok ok...)

Not to be pedantic, but if this is supposed to be a "discussion" thread, why is it marked as a "question"?

Yeah, could have gone either way. I was thinking I had points which could be addressed, aka responded to, and thus I punted and it came down as a Question. As I said above, if everything gets a response in terms of an issue ticket, a change, or some other confirmation, then I'll mark the inquiry as Answered. With respect for your thought process there I'll keep notes like this as Discussions and keep real app questions as uh, Questions.

Great suggestions (tho I don't exactly understand your first; it may need some additional contexts) but as you seem to know already, they need to go into the tracker

For forums.modx.com: http://tracker.modx.com/projects/discuss-skin/issues (basically stuff we need to do in the forums.modx.com theme)
For Discuss the Extra: http://tracker.modx.com/projects/discuss/issues

RE: 1) Allow sort by various fields, starting with date, board, and topic.
- Allow for multi-sort for limited cases: by board by date, or by board by topic

Awkward wording on my part. When you do a search, the results don't seem to be sorted in any way. Most forums have a dropdown before or after the query to specify a sort field and direction. So to spell out the options that I think would be helpful in the near-term:

Sort By Date (Oldest first)
Sort By Date (Newest first)
Sort By Board
Sort By Topic
Sort By Board By Topic
Sort By Board By-Asc Date
Sort By Board By-Dsnd Date
Sort By Topic By-Asc Date
Sort By Topic By-Dsnd Date

And when it's by topic, it definitely needs to group topic postings:
"AAA", "RE: AAA", "BBB"
not
"AAA", "BBB", "RE: AAA"
;)

• Sort by date. Yes. Yes. Yes.


• Provide some explanation of where you post an issue. If you have a problem with an new Revo add-on without its own board, should you post in "Revo Discussions & Support"? Or "Revolution 2.2", or "Revo Development", or "Using MODX add-ons", or ... you get the idea.


• Every add-on should have a forum board as part of the package, so that you could click from the add-on page right through to the forum discussion.

And set the default state of the "Email me new replies" to unchecked!!!

Quote from: sottwell at Jan 08, 2013, 12:52 AM

And set the default state of the "Email me new replies" to unchecked!!!

Now that's funny because I always want to see if someone has responded to something I post, so I'd prefer to have that always checked. Right now that setting is erratic and constantly annoys me. So perhaps the request there would be for a profile setting to allow the user to determine the setting.

I must say, with regard to this note I posted here recently, it makes no sense to me for CMS developers to once again try to re-invent this forum wheel. There are any number of great software packages out there which specialize in the nuances of forum management. Why are we asking CMS developers to spend time on a forum when (I believe) we would prefer for them to be spending time on the CMS. Other people have spent years coding details into forum packages, nailing down the UEX and performance and other features. There are only a few people qualified to work on the core of this software. And we're never going to catch up to these other packages. This task will never be done.

I think the #1 enhancement request here should be - spend more time integrating first-class FOSS rather than trying to re-write it. I would much rather be looking around for forum software (or blog or wiki or bug tracker or eCommerce or ...) that I can plug into this CMS, rather than seeing developers here trying to compete with what's out there. We've seen other CMS packages do exactly the same thing and everyone hates them for exactly these reasons - they do everything, but poorly. Let's not drive toward the same end.

Yes, I know that seems hypocritical from someone who started this thread. Wanting something better in the long run doesn't mean I feel any less strongly about having things work properly in the short-term.