Not sure how horrible this would be to implement, but this is something we have on my board which is awesomely useful:

If you view a topic and click back to the main index, that topic name shows up as italic until someone posts on it. That way you know when you've read the whole thread and when there's something new you haven't read yet, and it ONLY shows up on threads you've already clicked on recently, so you're not seeing 230832 threads you don't care about in italics.

This would be especially useful when the forums are divided into 4 sections like on here. I don't have mine in sections because it moves really quickly and it's a pain to go look through 4 links to see if there's something new. However, with this forum, it'd make sense and be really useful as long as we had some way of knowing when we should click on a forum category to look inside (when there's new info).

If the whole italic/ non italic thing is too complicated and messy, can we at least have a "last post" column on the forum categories page? That way, if I check everything this hour, come back 5 hours later, and see that there have been no new posts in the past 5 hours, I won't go and click on 4 categories to see if they've been posted on.

Agreed.

Oh, we also have a • next to all topics we've posted on. And a ! next to "favorite" topics that we want to keep track of (with a link to a list of favorite topics)

We'll get to it -- there are a lot of things this forum is lacking. For the time being, it's more of like an organized chat session. More features to come, don't you worry your pretty little head.

Yeah, there are a handful of things I want to add to this. I don't want to commit to any dates or anything yet though until Eric and I have had a chance to get our 2.0 meetings/gameplan under way.

Oh believe me, I know how much of a pain in the ass these things are, I just thought I'd throw some ideas out there for the future :)

Another forum suggestion: options for how many to display on a page. or more than 20. or at least a "next page" button on the top so we dont have to scroll down to the bottom everytime we want to go to the newest post which is on another page.

Yeah, I agree matt. Because of limitations in the system, I'm not going to put the pull down box with the sorting/ordering/result size stuff on the individual posts page, but I will go ahead and duplicate the 'page' bar at the top and then throw in some next/previous links.

There are a couple things that I think would be easy to put in.

The first is, when viewing the list of posts for each category, have a link to each page in the thread. (I.e., it would say "OMG the olsen twins are on 7th heaven righ... [1, 2, 3]" with each number being a link)

Also, basic forum signatures with either images or colored text, just so following who's saying what will be easier without the effort. (I don't like thinking when I'm on the internet.)

I think signatures blow. I don't want to read your quote from Garden State.

"It's more like an ellipsis..."

I don't think that the actual quotes matter, but it's just easier to remember people when they have a signature.

And I liked Garden State. Natalie Portman =

Wtf? It took out "< 3". (Without the space.)

yeah, php's strip html function is pretty picky. It's okay, carrot three hearts are dumb and people judge you when you use them...you're better off anyway =P

well put, cor-cor.

I don't care if people judge, I love Natalie.



(just kidding, btw)

no signatures please! they're obnoxious!

agreed.

I like a lot of things the way they are on here.

I'm just going to go ahead and say it: no sigs.