Here are some ideas for new SMF features that might greatly improve the product. Feel free to either mod them into the mainstream product, or use them in your own fork. Some of these might be better addressed as theme features, but would be useful to have widely available.
- ability to repeat first post of a thread on each page ("what is is about" reminder) regardless of time ordering. May be pinned to each page
- for multiple items (topics, posts) displayed on one page, have an easy choice of preferred sort order. Order may vary by section (category), e.g., sort forum topics by creation date or subject line rather than last post timestamp
- pinned posts (in a thread) or pinned threads (in a board) on first or all pages of thread/board
- pinned items sortable in a different order than rest of page, including manual ordering override
- ability to vote posts or topics to the top of the list
- "hot topic" by number of posts and/or number of views
- related to admin blacklists and warnings, every member can blacklist/block selected other members if they're annoyed enough with them...
- block their posts from showing (have view button)
- put up warning (to yourself) YOU HAVE BLACKLISTED THIS MEMBER so that you don't respond to their nonsense
- a reply to a topic started by, or directly to a post by, a blacklisted member gets a reminder warning
- possibly block them from PMing you
- ability to stop following a thread/topic -- topics go off in other directions, or have so much noise that you no longer want to follow them (SMF: ignore the fact that you've posted in this topic, when showing recent updates)
- ability to archive deleted or edited posts, for review/evidence
- ability to mark given boards/topics noindex/nofollow
- for members who can't be bothered to search first, "move" function that just points to an existing post/thread/FAQ; either replacing current thread or is new last post (with lock)
- moved posts or topics are marked "started by" the original starter, with the mod who moved it listed in the move post
- hooks to create boards/posts from external feeds or files or email (need to sign on as admin or member with privileges)
- export semi-formatted text to HTML static archives. PDF files, etc. Remove from active forum
- reasonable way to re-add a user and associate their old posts with them, or add with a specific ID
- categories, boards, etc. which are links to another site (or at least, outside the forum, such as a Wiki page on your site)
- be able to pull out selected (e.g., "popular") post as a banner ad-like feature, with "teaser" excerpt
- a way to ignore new posts (at the top of page 1) when going to 'next page'. That is, when getting the next batch of records from the database, would need to add however many items have been added since you were on page 1 (started), so you don't get overlap with stuff you've already seen. This is a big problem with topics with heavy posting traffic -- by the time you've read a given page, enough new posts have been added so that "next page" start may even be on the previous page now!
- automatically lock a topic when marked 'solved'
- defense in depth against spammers. Spammers have gotten wise to all the tricks used to keep out spambots, and are often using people to get around these blocks. Need to...
- impose hurdles (CAPTCHA, question, etc.) on "new" users, including length of time since signup and number of posts so far
- scan posts for potential spam terms, after replacing punctuation with letters and merging non-words (e.g., v1@gra --> viagra)
- count all-cap words (SHOUTING)
- look for a disproportionate number of links within a post
- randomly vary the challenge presented (type of challenge, number of questions, etc.) to keep robots off balance
- see my sig > Projects > "Checking and validating user input" for more in-depth discussion, including the generation of a "spam score" to determine whether a post is let through, held for admin review, outright banned, CAPTCHA challenged, or some other fate.
- better BBCode:
- ordered lists with choice of styles: 1., 1), 1 --, etc., B, b, II, ii, β, etc.
- include arbitrary HTML entities such as —, α, etc. (and numeric &# ). Maybe just [&name;] -- & would signal an entity. I can't think of any HTML entities that would be harmful and need to be excluded.
- supply "system" things, such as the URL, domain, URI of this forum. This would stop hardcoding of many URLs in a forum, always a pain if something is changed.
- control over alphabet allowed for member names
- amount of editing (or deletion) allowed is a function of time passed and member privilege level -- e.g., anyone can delete or edit their post for 5 minutes, then for 30 minutes they can edit with no "edited by" mark, then for 6 hours they can edit with "edited by", and finally after that they can only append to an existing post (with "edited by"). A mod or admin can always make changes.
- clear "inclusion" and "exclusion" member groups, with arbitrary functions (or external utilities) to maintain/update groups, and groups that members can apply to join (automatic or admin-approved)
- easy export of membership list to other programs, such as a bulk mailer for newsletters
- easy import of membership lists, "starter sets" of topics and posts, etc.
- threaded view in a topic -- this is something requested from time to time, but before implementing it, we need to step back and look at overall navigation and the flatness of the category-to-post tree. If you have a sufficiently flat structure, with members encouraged to start new topics for different subjects, and the ability to split off posts into a new topic; is a truly threaded view necessary?
- when N or more members have reported a post, automatically suppress it (content and title not shown) until a moderator can get around to inspecting it. Note that this is not an automatic deletion. If deemed OK, set a flag that it cannot be suppressed again (unless modified). Track members who report posts, and against whom and what the final disposition was -- if they appear to have a grudge, warn them and possibly revoke their post reporting privileges.
- copy important navigation tabs (home and logout, if not all of them) at the bottom of the page, so you don't have to scroll up to the top to log out. Disable logout tab if you're not logged in -- it's annoying to not be sure whether you're actually logged in, and get that silly error message if you were already logged out.
That ought to do it for now. Sorry about the haphazard order. I'll add more later if I think of them.
That's a huge list! :P
Quote from: MrPhil on September 05, 2011, 12:15:03 PM
ability to repeat first post of a thread on each page ("what is is about" reminder) regardless of time ordering. May be pinned to each page
A bit of spam (http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=3110). :P
Quote from: MrPhil on September 05, 2011, 12:15:03 PM
- for multiple items (topics, posts) displayed on one page, have an easy choice of preferred sort order. Order may vary by section (category), e.g., sort forum topics by creation date or subject line rather than last post timestamp
- ability to vote posts or topics to the top of the list
Interesting.
Quote from: MrPhil on September 05, 2011, 12:15:03 PM
reasonable way to re-add a user and associate their old posts with them, or add with a specific ID
Reattribute user posts (http://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/Forum_Maintenance#Members)?
Quote from: MrPhil on September 05, 2011, 12:15:03 PM
ordered lists with choice of styles: 1., 1), 1 --, etc., B, b, II, ii, β, etc.
There is already (http://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/List) a quite good list of possibilities! :)
Would you propose others?
Quote from: emanuele on September 05, 2011, 12:35:44 PM
That's a huge list! :P
Shor 'nuf is... I hope it will give some ideas for new themes, new mods, improvements to base SMF, and even new forks. If someone is looking for something to do, but can't come up with a useful new feature, this list might help give them an idea or two.
Hmm. It's kinda died stuck out here in a sub-subboard :( . Anyway, I'll poke it with a stick: "What kind of things do you wish SMF had done differently? If you were in charge of SMF 3.0, what would you put in it even if it meant breaking compatibility?" Even, "If you were designing a forum from scratch today, especially given the state of social media (blogs, Twitter, FB), what would you put in it?" How about some unlimited blue-sky thinking!
I would infest the core with hooks, redo the theme so it uses more modern technologies, combine many templates into a unified form class, do away with mods or hacks and introduce plugins or add-ons that use purely hooks (file edits reserved only for updates), objectify a few things (central stuff), require 21st century software.
Quote from: MrPhil on September 05, 2011, 12:15:03 PMHere are some ideas for new SMF features that might greatly improve the product. Feel free to either mod them into the mainstream product, or use them in your own fork. Some of these might be better addressed as theme features, but would be useful to have widely available.
- ....
- export semi-formatted text to HTML static archives. PDF files, etc. Remove from active forum
- ....
Sorry for digging out this old topic, but did the above feature request ever get any attention? It's a feature I would need, too.
Wow. This is some serious topic necromancy.
The short answer to your question is yes.
1. You can export a copy of all your posts and/or personal messages using SMF 2.1's profile export functionality.
2. If you want a PDF archive of a topic, you can use the Print button to generate a view of the topic suitable for saving as a PDF (or for actually printing).
Quote from: Sesquipedalian on November 15, 2022, 12:02:09 PMWow. This is some serious topic necromancy.
Yeah, but it was the most fitting topic, so... O:)
Quote from: Sesquipedalian on November 15, 2022, 12:02:09 PMThe short answer to your question is yes.
1. You can export a copy of all your posts and/or personal messages using SMF 2.1's profile export functionality.
2. If you want a PDF archive of a topic, you can use the Print button to generate a view of the topic suitable for saving as a PDF (or for actually printing).
Hmmm, that was not what I was looking for... more like me as an admin saying "this forum here is no longer used, let's archive it to static HTML pages"?
I found some howtos on the net, where they were tampering with the Theme files and then got it all with wget, but that's ... well.... I don't know, I'd rather have a nice original script that knows what strings to pull inside SMF and then spits out a page per topic or per 50 posts or something like that...
That could be a huge task, and would basically be redundant. Take this forum for example, 3,894,731 Posts in 462,495 Topics. We could just turn this all read only, and achieve an archive through settings instead of creating a duplicate.
Yeah, an often stated remark. It has flaws, though.
1) It doesn't answer my question
2) It assumes that redundancy would be important for me
3) It doesn't get to the "why" I would like to have static HTML pages instead of the original forum site.
Quote from: RicochetPeter on November 16, 2022, 05:23:19 AMYeah, an often stated remark. It has flaws, though.
1) It doesn't answer my question
2) It assumes that redundancy would be important for me
3) It doesn't get to the "why" I would like to have static HTML pages instead of the original forum site.
It does answer your question.
1- we don't do it. There are no plans to ever do that. It would be overly complicated, almost never used, and basically pointless.
2- ???
3- Well, if you don't tell us the WHY, how the heck are we supposed to understand? We're not mind-readers.
in short... converting a forum to fixed HTML is not simple and not going to be done as a feature of the software, especially since the same result can already be accomplished by removing all permissions except "read contents" from all groups.
Sorry, the reason in my case is to remove the dependency to PHP and MySQL, both components which on one hand need constant patching, and on the other hand probably will have backwards compatibility issues at some point in the future. Not so with plain HTML files. And yes, I know that the web server also needs patching ;)
Could you explain why it's "overly complicated"?
And I dare to object: it's not the same thing.
For one, you can't simply export permissions. SMF doesn't show everything to everyone, plain HTML would be bound to do so or lose contents. Also, a script to crawl through millions of posts to recreate the topics in another format is simply something that doesn't see much demand, but would take some serious work to figure out how to make it all "portable". SMF is not designed for this. What you need is something like Scrapy (https://scrapy.org/) and that is well beyond the scope of our team.
thx for the clarification ;)
Quote from: RicochetPeter on November 16, 2022, 11:09:36 AMAnd I dare to object: it's not the same thing.
note: I didn't say it was "the same thing" -- I said that the "same result can be accomplished"
(and, if you're not updating your server software, then you have a bucket load of other issues, even aside from php, which are not solved by using plain html either. :P )
Well, we're maintaining several converters from (and maybe to; I don't know that but I guess not) other forum software. So why not build a static site exporter? It could offer the option to export as a specific group or user and then export everything that group/user is allowed to see. (But then again, using existing generic tools might be the smarter option; I think we even have at least one user-contributed guide on how to use scrapy, let me search.)
Found it! It was HTTrack, not scrapy, and apparently it's very easy. But, it was posted in the German board. Google-translated link: https://www-simplemachines-org.translate.goog/community/index.php?topic=567900.0&_x_tr_sl=tr&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp
thx, guys! 8)