New Forum Features | Site Updates | Forums

So, I thought I’d talk a little bit about the new forum features we’ve gained.  The first, as I mentioned to Chev of @grimm-brothers, is the new Preview feature.  The second, which I have just demonstrated, is twitter-style @notifications for pinging another user who you are mentioning in your post.

Next is an expanded forum search function that lets you search for individual posts, topics, or even search the rest of the site at the same time.

We’ve also gained the ability to set expiration dates for topics, at which time they will be either automatically deleted or moved to a specified forum.  I’m still looking at this one and trying to figure out which user-groups should have access to this, and if there’s a way to make it so that expired posts can ONLY be moved not deleted.  I’m not big on deleting forum posts in general, I prefer to keep a record if at all possible.

We’ve gained the ability to see upcoming member birthdays (and a place to add one to your profile.)

We’ve gained a nice display of forum “ranks” for anyone who is interested.

We’ve gained a listing of posts which have gone completely unanswered.  I may need to modify the forum theme to add a link to that one; it doesn’t seem to do so automatically.

We’ve gained a share button to share forum content via social media or email.

We’ve gained the ability to create topics which are redirects to static content.  I’m not sure if we’ll need that or not, but it may come in handy.

I think that’s the main stuff.  There’s also some other admin-backend type stuff that I’ve gained which should be helpful.