ChemGal
One with keen eye
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Her
The following is information about changes the users will see when the forum is updated to a more recent version, planned for May 21. Much of this is copied and pasted from xenForo's forum, along with a bit of paraphrasing.
The items in red are controlled by admin, but will affect what users see or experience. The admins can do a fair bit of customization, for example they can disable the multi-quote option, so just because it is listed here doesn't mean it will necessarily be included on the new site.
Feel free to ask questions!
Improvements to Replying/Quoting
This is probably the biggest change for users. The Reply button will work as before.
Partial Quotes
If a section from a previous post is selected/highlighted, a Quote Text button appears. This allows one to quote just a portion of a previous post easily, rather than having the entire post appear in the quote as it does with hitting the reply button. This one works for one post at a time, so for example, someone cannot highlight the bottom of post #4 and the top of post #5 and have this appear as one quote.
Multi-Quote
-In addition to the reply button, a quote button will appear with every post. This will allow a user to go through and click quote (as well as to deselect it) on multiple posts. After doing so, an Insert Quote button will appear at the bottom of the comment box, near the 'post reply' button. Clicking it will cause a popup box to appear which gives the option to put all those quotes in the comment box, remove some before posting or to cancel all of them.
Partial and Multi-Quotes
The option to select a part of a post and a multiquote also works together. To do this, select a portion of a post as before, then click Add to Multi-Quote. This can be done for separate posts, as well as multiple selections within one post - for example, the first and third sentences from an individual post. Deselecting the quote button will remove all selections from that particular post included in a multiquote. A combination of entire posts and partial quotes can be made utilizing the Quote button and the Add to Multi-Quote button.
The Insert Quote button works across the forum. This allows users to take quotes from different threads and place them, along with typical link back to the original source in a new thread.
A video explains all of this quite well:
Profile Post Features
Compared to profile posts themselves, profile post comments have been missing tools for user interaction and moderator management. XenForo 1.5 sorts this by adding an array of new, but familiar, functionality to profile post comments.
Ability to like profile post comments
Of course if someone likes your comment, you get an alert just as you would expect
And we have also added support for comments appearing in the News Feed / Recent Activity, allows to view new profile posts
Ability to search profile post comments
Profile post comments are now indexed and are searchable from the global "Everything" search or from the Search Profile Posts tab on the search page
Comments can now be reported and warnings can be issued directly from comments
User Status and Activity
Online status indicator on messages
Another very common suggestion was to indicate if a user is online right now when you view a message. This can now be seen in the upper right corner of the user's avatar:
When the user is not online (or invisible), no indicator is shown.
More detailed user activity display option
The user visibility option has now been split into two parts:
In versions before 1.4, if you had the online status option enabled, it was equivalent to enabling both options. Now, you can set it such that users can see if you're online (such as via the active user lists or the online status indicator) but prevent users from seeing the specific page you are viewing at any given time.
Polls
There are a number of new options and controls when you create a new poll:
Editing a Poll
These new options spill over into the existing system for editing a poll, but there are some important changes.First, a poll can be added directly to an existing thread. This can be done by the thread creator or a moderator. The thread creator can also edit an existing poll with some limits. If there are no votes in the poll, they have full access to edit everything about it or to simply remove it. However, if there are votes on the poll, some options remain editable and new responses can be added; the question and existing responses cannot be changed.
Thread Tagging
Tags are a common method of adding keywords to content to aid searching and discovery.
Read tags apply to the thread itself (rather than individual posts), so they are displayed at the top of the thread view, independent of any post.
Clicking any tag will take you to a page displaying all content that has that tag attached to it.
These results pages will be accessible to search engines (and of course end users) to help them relate the tagged content to each other.
To edit the tags in an existing thread, clicking the "edit" link shown in the first screenshot will bring up an overlay with a tag editor.
When typing a tag in, auto-complete options will be displayed.Note that tags will have some normalization applied (lower casing, white space adjustments, etc)
Tag Searches
Tag searching is exposed via a new tab on the search pages:
When a post is made, links can automatically be converted to show the title of the page they link to. If enabled, a "simple" link like this:
XenForo Community
Would be automatically converted to:
XenForo Community
Notices
Floating notices
In XenForo 1.5 there are now two types of notices. Block notices behave in the familiar way as pictured above. Floating notices are a completely new way to display your notices. Floating notices will appear in the bottom right corner of the screen. You can also control how long the floating notice will display for, and fade the notice in after a period of time.
Guest dismissal
We now give guests the opportunity to dismiss notices. For guests, the mechanism for dismissing a notice is to set a cookie in their browser.
The cookie that we set is valid for the current browsing session. To restore dismissed notices a guest can clear their cookies, move to another device or restart their browser.
Bulk watch thread management (end user and admin)
End users can now quickly disable all email notifications or stop watching all threads from the watched threads list.
Similarly, admins can now disable watched thread email notifications or remove all thread watch records for a user via the control panel.
User title ladder flexibility
While trophy points is still the default, "messages" allows you to use a simple message count-based ladder. Similarly, "likes" is based on the number of likes a user has received.
Help
The help pages can be customized, so if we wish we can include our own content there.
The items in red are controlled by admin, but will affect what users see or experience. The admins can do a fair bit of customization, for example they can disable the multi-quote option, so just because it is listed here doesn't mean it will necessarily be included on the new site.
Feel free to ask questions!
Improvements to Replying/Quoting
This is probably the biggest change for users. The Reply button will work as before.
Partial Quotes
If a section from a previous post is selected/highlighted, a Quote Text button appears. This allows one to quote just a portion of a previous post easily, rather than having the entire post appear in the quote as it does with hitting the reply button. This one works for one post at a time, so for example, someone cannot highlight the bottom of post #4 and the top of post #5 and have this appear as one quote.
Multi-Quote
-In addition to the reply button, a quote button will appear with every post. This will allow a user to go through and click quote (as well as to deselect it) on multiple posts. After doing so, an Insert Quote button will appear at the bottom of the comment box, near the 'post reply' button. Clicking it will cause a popup box to appear which gives the option to put all those quotes in the comment box, remove some before posting or to cancel all of them.
Partial and Multi-Quotes
The option to select a part of a post and a multiquote also works together. To do this, select a portion of a post as before, then click Add to Multi-Quote. This can be done for separate posts, as well as multiple selections within one post - for example, the first and third sentences from an individual post. Deselecting the quote button will remove all selections from that particular post included in a multiquote. A combination of entire posts and partial quotes can be made utilizing the Quote button and the Add to Multi-Quote button.
The Insert Quote button works across the forum. This allows users to take quotes from different threads and place them, along with typical link back to the original source in a new thread.
A video explains all of this quite well:
Profile Post Features
Compared to profile posts themselves, profile post comments have been missing tools for user interaction and moderator management. XenForo 1.5 sorts this by adding an array of new, but familiar, functionality to profile post comments.
Ability to like profile post comments
Of course if someone likes your comment, you get an alert just as you would expect
And we have also added support for comments appearing in the News Feed / Recent Activity, allows to view new profile posts
Ability to search profile post comments
Profile post comments are now indexed and are searchable from the global "Everything" search or from the Search Profile Posts tab on the search page
Comments can now be reported and warnings can be issued directly from comments
User Status and Activity
Online status indicator on messages
Another very common suggestion was to indicate if a user is online right now when you view a message. This can now be seen in the upper right corner of the user's avatar:
When the user is not online (or invisible), no indicator is shown.
More detailed user activity display option
The user visibility option has now been split into two parts:
In versions before 1.4, if you had the online status option enabled, it was equivalent to enabling both options. Now, you can set it such that users can see if you're online (such as via the active user lists or the online status indicator) but prevent users from seeing the specific page you are viewing at any given time.
Polls
There are a number of new options and controls when you create a new poll:
- Polls are no longer limited to one or multiple choices. The creator can now control exactly how many responses a user can select. If they select the maximum amount, the other options will automatically disable to indicate this.
- Voters can now change their votes, if the option is selected. This is useful to handle cases where people make mistakes, a response is missing, or if people just change their mind.
- Poll results can be limited to only be viewed by people that have voted. This can help to limit gaming of polls or "groupthink".
Editing a Poll
These new options spill over into the existing system for editing a poll, but there are some important changes.First, a poll can be added directly to an existing thread. This can be done by the thread creator or a moderator. The thread creator can also edit an existing poll with some limits. If there are no votes in the poll, they have full access to edit everything about it or to simply remove it. However, if there are votes on the poll, some options remain editable and new responses can be added; the question and existing responses cannot be changed.
Thread Tagging
Tags are a common method of adding keywords to content to aid searching and discovery.
Read tags apply to the thread itself (rather than individual posts), so they are displayed at the top of the thread view, independent of any post.
Clicking any tag will take you to a page displaying all content that has that tag attached to it.
These results pages will be accessible to search engines (and of course end users) to help them relate the tagged content to each other.
To edit the tags in an existing thread, clicking the "edit" link shown in the first screenshot will bring up an overlay with a tag editor.
When typing a tag in, auto-complete options will be displayed.Note that tags will have some normalization applied (lower casing, white space adjustments, etc)
Tag Searches
Tag searching is exposed via a new tab on the search pages:
- Threads with the latest posts in the sidebar
In XenForo 1.4 we introduced the "New Profile Posts" sidebar block, this time around we're introducing something very similar in the form of a "New Posts" block. - Setting it to 5 would display the 5 threads which have most recently been posted in ordered by last post date. Of course, should you not want to display this block, you can set this value to 0
When a post is made, links can automatically be converted to show the title of the page they link to. If enabled, a "simple" link like this:
XenForo Community
Would be automatically converted to:
XenForo Community
Notices
Floating notices
In XenForo 1.5 there are now two types of notices. Block notices behave in the familiar way as pictured above. Floating notices are a completely new way to display your notices. Floating notices will appear in the bottom right corner of the screen. You can also control how long the floating notice will display for, and fade the notice in after a period of time.
Guest dismissal
We now give guests the opportunity to dismiss notices. For guests, the mechanism for dismissing a notice is to set a cookie in their browser.
The cookie that we set is valid for the current browsing session. To restore dismissed notices a guest can clear their cookies, move to another device or restart their browser.
Bulk watch thread management (end user and admin)
End users can now quickly disable all email notifications or stop watching all threads from the watched threads list.
Similarly, admins can now disable watched thread email notifications or remove all thread watch records for a user via the control panel.
User title ladder flexibility
While trophy points is still the default, "messages" allows you to use a simple message count-based ladder. Similarly, "likes" is based on the number of likes a user has received.
Help
The help pages can be customized, so if we wish we can include our own content there.
Last edited: