Original post message updated by user

[lyndseo]

Many times on my board, someone tells a story about something going on in there lives, and everyone waits for an update to the situation. Since

The original poster will edit the subject to say "update in new post" or "update on page #".  But it's a huge pain to go rooting through the thread, especially since they're usually bloated with comments and "any updates?" type replies. Also, if they only indicate the page number, it's useless for tapatalk.

What I'd like is to be able to flag or promote the actual post that contains the next chapter of the story. So features might go something like this.

Original user wants to provide an update to the original post. When using reply to start a new post within that thread, there's an option to say "official update" or something like that.

When that action is true, that particular post maybe would move directly under the original post, with a note that that it's an official update. Members could subscribe to either the whole topic or only official updates.

How hard would this be to do? I don't think my php or sql skills are up to the challenge. Well the sql part might be easy. Probably just need a true/false field for whether that option feature had been checked.

Or maybe this has been done, though I haven't seen anything in my searches.

Anyway it would be extremely useful for my board.

[dougiefresh]

Probably the easiest way to do this would be to add a new field to the messages table (for example: add a field called priority), then change the SQL query so that it first sorts by the new field (in this case, it would be priority), then however it sorts the messages....  Just throwing out an idea on how to do it....

UPDATE #1:
In Sources/Display.php, you would probably change this line of code:

Code (Find) Select Expand

ORDER BY id_msg ' . ($ascending ? '' : 'DESC') . ($context['messages_per_page'] == -1 ? '' : '
to this (depending on the name of the variable you created):

Code (Replace) Select Expand

ORDER BY priority, id_msg ' . ($ascending ? '' : 'DESC') . ($context['messages_per_page'] == -1 ? '' : '
(Note that I'm using the priority field that I brought up earlier!)

Then all you would have to do is add a setting to make it a priority message.....  You would also have to capture that new value/checkbox HTML variable and store it....  Probably want to limit the new option to the OP....