Fold up or minimize forum sections on the front page?

Discussion in 'Forum Related Discussions' started by Snoop3, May 23, 2015.

  1. Snoop3

    Snoop3 Registered Member

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    Hi,
    would be useful if we could fold up or minimize forum sections on the front page. For example Paragon has 6 sub-forums, Colasoft 3, Brightfort 4, Returnil 3, etc - no offense to these companies but i have no interest and they take up a lot of space on the front page. Maybe other folks have no interest in the Privacy section or Software Hardware General Services etc and they might like to minimize those?

    Would be nice if there was like one of those triangle pointers like in the linux file managers and you could expand or contract the subforums below by clicking on it.

    any thoughts?
     
  2. LowWaterMark

    LowWaterMark Administrator

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    Unfortunately, XenForo doesn't have that feature native to the forum software. I looked at an Add-On for it, but, didn't like the look of it.

    I am experimenting with a new idea... the use of custom forum views through widget pages.

    I've created two of them to see what people think.

    widget-page-views.png

    The first tab is a combined view of the security products forum sections (firewalls, anti-virus, anti-malware). For those people who wondered what the activity in those sections would look like if they were combined into one forum, that page will show you that.

    The Privacy tab is just the three main Privacy sections (I didn't include the technical help section, encryption problems, since that is really for a different purpose).

    The sidebars in both sections are like the main index page. The sidebar's "Other Active Threads" are recently replied to threads in sections not included in the main list. So, in Privacy view, the privacy threads are the big list on the left, while the sidebar has active threads from non-privacy forums... and never include vendor forums, just general forum sections.

    These pages may show the real meat of the forums activity, depending upon the view you prefer, without the excess of things like: vendor forums, updates, broken truecrypt container topics, and such.
     
  3. Minimalist

    Minimalist Registered Member

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    Combined view would be good way to check only security sections that you want to monitor. I found two problems:
    1. in combined view a lot of threads is marked as having new messages, but those threads are marked as read in "normal" view.
    2. you can't use marke as read the whole combined view.

    OP, you can also watch forums you are interested in and then use Watched forums to filter unwanted ones.
     
  4. LowWaterMark

    LowWaterMark Administrator

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    Are you sure about that? I'm not seeing any threads that are marked incorrectly for my account. If they show the unread dot in the widget page, they are unread in the forum itself, and the reverse is true.

    Well, since they aren't real forums, you can't mark them read in a combined way I'm afraid.
     
  5. Minimalist

    Minimalist Registered Member

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    Yes I re-checked and I still have this problem. I currently have no unread posts, but when I click on Security products combined I get this:

    upload_2015-5-24_22-52-39.png

    When I click on any of those "unread" threads there are no posts marked as new.
     
  6. LowWaterMark

    LowWaterMark Administrator

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    If you have no unread posts anyway, can you try clicking the Mark Forums Read and clear them using "Mark all forums read" just to see what that does? Because, I'm not seeing the issue myself.
     
  7. Minimalist

    Minimalist Registered Member

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    Yes, I use that option all the time. I marked them read again but when opening Security Products I still get the same results as shown before.
     
  8. LowWaterMark

    LowWaterMark Administrator

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    Well, that's got me stumped. Without being able to see it myself, and therefore recreating it and whatever conditions effect it, I can't really figure out where to fix it.
     
  9. Minimalist

    Minimalist Registered Member

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    OK, it might be problem on my side. It would be great if somebody else would try it and confirm that they don't have this problem.
     
  10. LowWaterMark

    LowWaterMark Administrator

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    No, it's not on your end. I have confirmed this is a bug in the Widget Framework Add-On. Mentioned on page 224 of its support thread.

    I don't know if they've figured it out, but, it's specifically the handling of the Mark Forum Read function that is causing it.

    It goes like this... Threads you have actually read to the end of, get marked specifically as read to a certain point in time for you - flagged by the individual thread_id. But, the Mark Forums Read function is stored as a single timestamp for a forum section, and that function does not update the individual thread markers I just mentioned.

    So basically, the threads that are showing correctly without the unread marker, are those you actually read thru to the end. Those that still have the unread marker, but which shouldn't, are because you did a Mark Forums Read operation, and did not actually read them. The Add-On is only checking the individual thread markers, not the global Mark Forums Read value.

    The code is fairly complex at that point, so, I can understand why the add-on developer is struggling to fix the bug.
     
  11. MrBrian

    MrBrian Registered Member

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    This has worked fine for me. You can also use https://www.wilderssecurity.com/watched/forums as your Wilders bookmark.
     
  12. Joxx

    Joxx Registered Member

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    Would it be possible to customise the New Posts button?
    For example: not showing update alerts, or not showing some forums.
     
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