4joys

Very disappointed that the Android app is so far behind. Seems like IPB is putting most of their focus on iOS.

Having a next step after registration is complete could be very helpful to end users. Optionally call it a New Member "To Do" List.

Include a list of optional things they could do to make their experience in the community more personal.
First in the list should be to verify their email (If admin required).
Optional ideas like uploading an avatar, filling out the about me for the profile, and any other "To Do" ideas you'd like to present to new members to help get them started.

This idea could also be included in a new Personalized User Entrance Page. Show the new users what they can or should do next. Then show current end users the content that matters to them on a personal level.

If you look at the major social networks you'll notice a little bit of hand holding to show end users what to do and how to do it. You'll also notice that end users are presented with the content that relates to them when they log in. We can learn a lot from the big social networks.

The search is my #1 complaint with IPB. When I click "VNC" or jump up top to search for something, I am NEVER looking to search ANYTHING, except the forums. SO... it makes no sense to have the search acting in a dynamic fashion.

I love that when we search, we see the additional options. Oh cool, let's see what new members we have, or new blog posts. Thats all good......

BUT... the search box, and VNC - these are CORE features. If we show them members just because they were just viewing a member profile, or we default the search to blogs because that's where they were when they clicked VNC.... we're limiting what they see! This goes against human behavior. When I click "view new content" I expect to see ALL NEW CONTENT! I don't pay attention to the fact that the software has decided to LIMIT my new content to "members only" or "blog posts" etc.

Can we not work on this a little bit? VNC and search both should be more user friendly. They should not DEFAULT to ANYTHING but instead show ALL relevant results with an explanation of where the content comes from.

Vbulletin handles this really well. All content is displayed in-line with different icons for each type of content.

Could IPB not do something similar?

I have been an IPS Customer for about 6 years and I don't recollect ever taking the time to say "Thank You!" so here is a long overdue...

Thank you!

I've put together a short list of things that I think make IPS and the IPS Community stand out:-

Product Set
The 3.2 product set is quite simply amazing, it was difficult to think back when I was installing version 1.2 that things would come along so
far in such a short time. Great Team, Great Product Set, Keep up the hard work!

Support
- Always timely - I don't recollect having to wait long for an informed response
- Excellent Knowledge - It's always a pleasure to deal with someone who knows what they are talking about!
- Excellent Value for Money - In all honesty I believe the support received for the cost is market leading

Community
- It's great to see a community of so many people who devote their time and expertise to IPS related products whilst not getting paid for their services!

Marketplace
- I'm really glad to see a Marketplace full of so many great add-ons, I've always found something to meet my requirements, I'm currently implementing
Social Groups, Classifieds and Links but I do have some other plugins too! Thank you to those authors!

I'm sure I can think of more things to add here, anyone want to point out anything I might have missed?

Thank you!

Don't get me wrong, 3.2 is looking awesome with many great enhancements. However there's been no word on a few basic clean up tools that would make managing forums so much easier. Things we need:

1. Ability to mass delete / prune old pm's / conversations. Currently the only way to delete them for your members is to do several MySQL queries. This is probably beyond many people's skill set to do.

2. Ability to mass delete / prune attachments that are over a certain date old. Currently you have to do a search and select and delete attachments page by page of results. This takes ages to do.

3. Ability to mass delete / prune topics and maybe posts of deleted members. I know a few of us hate seeing old topics by Guest_bauer_* or whatever their name was. I like to remove these but again it takes ages to do as you have to browse all forums and manually select each topic to delete.

Thanks

3DKiwi

I don't know where I've ever said "if you lost a feature you wanted, then you should make a hook for it".  The resource community here, people like myself, are the ones making hooks.  I understand it's not something anyone can just jump right into, and if I ever implied that anyone who lost a feature they depend on has to write their own hook to bring it back, I apologize.

I've tried personally to not only release hooks for some of these features lost, but have helped several others who were getting into hook making do the same.  If these efforts of mine are not appreciated, I'll stop, I've got other things I can devote my time to.

Ikadon, on 19 June 2011 - 04:20 AM, said:

I never claimed they were, and I'm frankly getting tired of people putting words in my mouth.  No, they're not the same, but topic descriptions are, for the most part, worthless.  You only ever see them in the list of topics in a forum, and at the top of the topic view page, they're not searchable, and they do little to add to any description of the topic (as your own example perfectly demonstrated).  If they are so overwhelmingly important to you, don't upgrade, because the new version won't have them, simple as that.

These arguments are getting silly.  People are panicking about features being lost, but it's no different than the feature never being there in the first place.  "I've gotta have feature X and it's not in the product!"  So, hire someone to develop that for you.  The only difference with these things being lost is that they were in the product, found to not be used or useful to most customers, and are being phased out.  Sorry to those who this affects, but IPS has to develop software to please the majority of their customers, they cannot make something that every one of you gets exactly what they need out of it.

And look at that, I managed to retort without once using an "it's bloat"-argument.

XiuzSu, on 13 June 2011 - 02:37 PM, said:

No, I don't think you can.  People don't realize how small of a percentage of IPS's customers actually visit the feedback forums.  And even based on what's been posted, just because 15-20 people respond saying they support a particular topic, there are likely at least as many if not more people who have no problem with the topic and thus don't even bother to come into the topic to talk about it.

In addition, these 'cram a bunch of things into one topic' topics are always a bad idea.  There's never any organization to them, people go off into their own little tangents, and it's impossible to maintain a coherent message.  Just talk about the individual issues in the existing individual topics.

EDIT: To clarify, I'm not saying there's no merit to any of these, but each issue needs to be discussed separately, and just because a handful of people agree does not mean it's a sweeping popular movement among the entire customer base.

Michael, on 13 June 2011 - 03:02 PM, said:

IP.Board was one of the first boards to recognise the importance of attracting visitors via popular social networking websites such as Twitter and Facebook.

We have matured this integration over the past few years and IP.Board 3.2.0 offers several new enhancements. Firstly, the pop-up dialogs have undergone a facelift to make them easier to use...

View the full article

To my mind something like social groups would be really nice as an addon as IP.SEO but only and only if it gets done by IPS and is properly maintained.

I am talking about the icons next to the topic titles in the forum view. Are they really necessary? I think it becomes obsolete and repetitive. I think that we should replace them with the topic starter's avatar and just bold the titles if there are new answers (like it is now). I also think we should just put a tiny icon next to the topic title so we know if we have replied to that topic.

I would love to see a like button on the Status updates in the future!

With my forum we have what is called a group buy store. This is a regular business that sells products to our forum at discounts for volume buying. It would be great if members could buy our group buy stores products from my site. Is this possible? It would be great if we could assign a paticular user group to upload to the store. Another suggestion if it is not already there is to allow that paticular user group to design a storefront or something similar. I would bet my group buy store would rather do that than have their own website even. This could be very promising for me, just not sure how it works fully.

Regards

erc, on 10 May 2010 - 10:12 AM, said:

Yes, this would be a HUGE deal for me as my members are always selling items on my forum (I have a very active Marketplace section).  If members could create their own shops that would be amazing, especially if I could get a small cut of the sales.  

..Al