Miss Moiraine

Just wanted to add to the request to also allow emoticons to be displayed on about me (profile) pages.  I still do not quite understand why it is necessary to prohibit emoticons in signatures/about me pages.

Personally, since I know where and what they are, I like them hidden and out of my way. However, I can see this being a concern for some end-users.

One might argue that finding these hidden gems is a treat while keeping the pages uncluttered in appearance. I agree. I love the new appearance and would rather not have all the clutter.

Others might argue that it makes it hard for some end-users to utilize these features because they are hidden. I agree to an extent, because I question if they would be utilized at all by end-users who are less savvy.

I vote to keep them hidden. Mainly because I don't see the need for end-users to have all these extra options showing. I honestly don't believe that they would be utilized as often as the more savvy users would use them. An example is the sidebar. How many big websites give you an option to close the sidebar? There are very few that I have ever seen. Most websites use sidebars to showcase navigation, information, ads, user options, etc. Having an "x" in the corner of it, looks tacky IMHO. I have always thought it was an eye-sore and I'd rather not have that option at all. Having it hidden is a plus!

I didn't think it prudent to mention it in the topic.

Done, thanks Michael.  I didn't know how the report file broken thing worked, I thought that was just for the mod itself.  In this case, it's the support that's broken.

Because I think we last talked about this on the old preview board, I'll revive the discussion here.

Why, oh why, can we not use emoticons in signatures?  All that has to be done to re-enable this feature is toggle a couple of flags that stop them from working, and after that they work just fine.  No additional queries are added to the page when viewing these signatures.  I think it's more of a legacy issue that they did cause problems in the past.

Last I recall IPS was going to look into this, but I don't think anything was ever finalized about it.

I use this after each upgrade to bring them into signatures: http://community.inv...ns-in-signature

IMHO they should already be enabled by default. It's just silly to disable a common posting feature from signatures. If you can use images in signatures, you should be able to use smilies.

Unless I am missing something it would be nice to be able to ignore a user directly from their member profile or card. Currently the only way I can see to ignore someone is to go into my settings and manage ignore prefs.

There are forums that are cool with animated avatars, and there are forums that aren't. This is up to the admins to decide. Rather than removing the support for animated avatars from the core entirely, IPS should simply add a switch to the ACP allowing them to be enabled or disabled at the admins' own discretion.

I mean, really. Why not?

Does the user being online or offline impact how you reply to the topic? I don't see how it does especially when you also allow users to login anonymously meaning they will always show offline.

The point of a forum, as opposed to a chat room, is that you don't have to be "online" to participate in a conversation. For example, I am often online but not on our forums here. Yet if someone posts a reply to a topic I am tracking I get an email and instantly read the topic. I would not want someone choosing not to post because the little indicator next to me name shows offline.


To summarize: the online indicator on a forum is misleading to the average user. The average user does not understand that, unlike your instant messenger application, the user could have signed off 15 minutes before and it would still show them online. So, in the end, the online indicator is not really telling you what you think it is nor is it bringing any useful information to you that will impact how you interact with the topics.

R1Lover, on 04 June 2011 - 08:06 PM, said:

As you say you can either make the simple change or there is a link to go to the first unread post at the top of the thread.

Biker.GA, on 05 June 2011 - 07:28 AM, said:

There is a top 'hidden' as it was in 3.1.4 which can be quickly altered from the template to show the top after every post. (it was showing briefly here when the CSS was failing to load)

I appreciate you are not keen on buttons / links appearing when hovering over posts, but this method keeps a thread looking neat in the same way as the user info pops up when you hover over the username in some locations on the forum.  I cannot see this causing an issue with many users (and we also have some older members).  It also allows for more links to be added without cluttering up the page.

Don't get stuck on version numbers. Us calling it 3.2 or calling it 4.0 does not change the fact that this is a big update.

Jonathan80, on 04 June 2011 - 10:20 PM, said:

But they are not integrated by default - you have to turn them on.

Not sure what all the moaning is about - it has barely changed from 3.1.4 - if you do not want people joining your site with a click of the mouse then fine - if you do not want to feed your topics to twitter and Facebook and increase traffic then fine. No body is forcing anyone to do anything they do not want to.

It's pretty funny actually how people get so worked up. If you actually pause and look at 3.2 compared to 3.1 you will see that, while there are new features, most of what you see in 3.2 is the same stuff in 3.1 just presented better.

I assume what people are all about when comparing to Facebook is the "Like This" button on posts? Well that is just the same old reputation feature as in 3.1 in a "like" mode where instead of the +/- buttons you get a button that says "Like This" which is hardly worthy of dire predictions in my opinion. Also, as it's what the masses expect, it will be used way more than the +/- reputation. It already has on this forum by the very people moaning about all the "oh it's like Facebook" features:



Yes, we have added some "social network" sort of features because our clients asked us to it's what the general public expect. However, we are not forcing anything on anyone. If, for some reason, you loathe the idea of people being able to like things, share content, comment on each others profiles, etc. on your community you can certainly shut those features off in the AdminCP.

Hi,

Whilst I am looking forward to 3.2, I have a few concerns/questions the way the product is going.

IP.Subscriptions - Sorry to see this free app go and be replaced by a paid app @ $75 & $70 a year. If all a site wants is subscriptions buying Nexus is an expensive option, even if Nexus is great and offers so much more. We have moved on from Subscriptions, but it is a very useful app for sites just starting out to earn money from their sites and then be able to afford to upgrade to Nexus. Will the ability to show adverts in IP.Board remain as this is also within Nexus?


IP.Portal - a very useful and simple app to go and again being replaced by an app costing £50 and $30 per year. If all you want is a home page, buying IP.Content is an overkill. As far as I know one cannot create a simple home page and easily modify it daily as you can with Portal. Please if you can, show me how & prove me wrong.

IP.Calendar - this is being moved out of 3.2 into a separate app. Will this remain free and operate without the need to have support contract in place? The reason I ask is because it is mentioned alongside IP.Chat which is a free/paid app, but the free part is limited and requires a support contract.

Are any other apps being split off from the main IP.Board and if so will any of these cost money or require a support contract to operate?

Essentially depending upon the answer to the calendar, version 3.2 is going to cost at least $125 more and $100 a year more to run than 3.1.x - whilst I appreciate both these apps will be in the marketplace for a short time they are suddenly made EOL which means that there will be no update and no official support.

I am concerned that IPS is starting to go down the route that another forum company recently went down, i.e. seeing what else we can charge customers for that previously was free / included. And I honestly thought I would never think that.

The topic announcing items changing in 3.2 is being modified rather than being added to, therefore one cannot tell when it is changed and what is changed in it. Would it be possible for that post to be replied to with fresh changes, otherwise potentially large changes might be missed. What is large to one site, might be insignificant to another.

3.2 is already looking like an excellent product which will serve sites well and we have not yet got to the good bits being announced - however governments / companies are very good at hiding bad news alongside good news, so whilst the positives are great, it is the small negatives that concern me especially when they start costing a lot more money.

As we currently have 6 or 7 IPS forums, with more planned, I am concerned that we are looking at a large figure to do exactly the same as now. With some time before 3.2 we do not know if these costs will increase further. If there were no cost implications moving to 3.2 it would be excellent, but that is not the case.

Matt, on 04 February 2011 - 03:56 PM, said:

Does that mean avatars will be the default picture used everywhere (also in mobile skin) except within user profiles?
On an aside, thumbnails for those (like for photos) would be welcome.

Basing your livelihood on features that easily can join the core featureset any moment is bad risk assesment in the first place.
Even moreso with valuable basic functionalty. IPB still needs to provide a way for users of others scripts to migrate to IPB (not migrating prefixes would count in my book as data loss across migrations). For forums that significantly rely on prefixes, that alone would be a showstopper.

If you hate profixes, by all means dont use them, just as any other feature you dont feel like using (and which still dont constitue "bloat"). Its not like an installer for this mod is being snuck into IPB packages and needing to be separately installed.

Much more valuable functionalty was available as mods (commercial ones, even), and that didnt stop IPS from introducing the same, nor should it have, after all.