3 months and no eve updates… what’s going on?

The short answer is a whole bunch of things.

The long answer is a complete reworking of the Eve’s forum module (ubb.x). The overall goal of 1.2 is to change the notion of community to be less forum and topic centric and more content centric. This doesn’t mean we have changed the way forums and topics work, it means from a base level we are changing our software to be more analogous to real communities.

Currently most community software is designed around the notion of categories, forums, topics, replies, and sometimes threaded replies. The top down approach can work well for a standard message board. Unfortunately it leads to very strict categorization and pigeon holing of ideas, and sometimes even members.

Our approach is to be completely content driven. The content (which can be a photo album, a poll, a message, or potentially something else) defines itself and the actions around it. For instance wouldn’t it be nice to have notifications for any message that contains a word or phrase you are interested in? Our how about having a RSS feed of just the content you are watching? Or what about having chat room live in a category next to a photo album? Searching across all and any content in they system? Categorizing Photo albums and polls that live outside of a forum software completely? These are just ideas currently, but the new release is designed to answer what is at the crux of all these questions: The essence of community is the membership and how those members contribute to the system.

In terms of noticeable feature changes in 1.2, here is a short list, although all features are subject to change:

• Private topic indicator in the community
• Faster/more reliable “New Since your Last Visit” and “Today’s Active Topics”
• Topic list sorted alphabetically
• Ability to keep stats historical vs. live (post & reply counts)
• Online now at the forum level
• Feature topics across all forums
• Faster/Simpler interface for Content Islands
• RSS feeds of some Content Islands
• Replace copy topics with linking topics
• Search engine friendly URLS

-Barry

What is a "private topic indicator"?

And what is meant by "replace copy topics with linking topics"?

Sounds like some exciting stuff and I can't wait to see it implemented.... Okay, I'll bite and be the first to ask the inevitable follow-up question... Any teasers on when 1.2 may roll into beta or go live? (subject to change, of course)

Hi Aaron-

A private topic indicator is an icon/symbol on your community pages that tells you whether you have a new private topic waiting for you.

Visualtea- 1.2 is going to alpha this week. When it goes to beta will depend on the overall quality (how many bugs we find in that initial testing). It is safe to say that 1.2 will not be released to all sites until AFTER the new year... hopefully not too far after, however. We'll keep you posted on the progress.

quote:

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Originally posted by Barry Kaplan:

(List edited by McQ)
• Private topic indicator in the community
• Online now at the forum level
• Feature topics across all forums
• Faster/Simpler interface for Content Islands
• Search engine friendly URLS

-Barry

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Thank GOD (and Infopop)!

My members were at the near-mutiny point over the private topic notifications.

I look forward to the upgrade.

Replace copy topics with linking topics means that instead of copying an entire topic from one forum to another. You will instead create a link in the second forum that will bring you to the topic in the first forum.

So if you have topic A in forum 1 and create a link to it in forum 2 the forum 2's topic list will show topic A the exact same way it appears in forum 2. If a user enters the topic its styles and rules will be that of forum 1.

Make sense?

Perfect sense. Will you still be able to copy a topic like before or are they all done via linking now?

And of course, I assume you can still move topics.

Exciting list of changes. Great work all!

You will not be able to copy a topic or a message in 1.2. We thought about the use cases around copying topics and messages and could not think of any case in which it would be helpful.

Question on the private topic indicator... will it be associated with a permission? I would love for sites to be able to offer it only to certain groups.

I may not be understanding this correctly, but with linking topics replacing copied topics, how are we supposed to "split" a thread? Infopop has always made that hard - cutting a thread into two since it has gone off-topic so much. I've usually copied it to another forum, delete the other posts, renamed it, and moved it back. Now with linking topics that won't be possible.

How do other people here split topics? Am I missing something?

Hello visualtea

Private Messaging already is a permission that you can grant to certain groups. But I expect anyone that has the permission will also have the new PM indicator.

does this linking topics replace moving topics too?

I would love to see a backwards copy of this for moving topics.
Move to correct forum, link in old.

Oh, and how do permissions work with it Are they applied from both forums, the original and the one linked to or is it just a link that requires the user to have the rights of the forum the post is in?

This is why I can see a true copy as being useful if the permissions are single-forum only.

What do you mean by "topic list sorted alphabetically"???

moving topics will stay the same, and we are thinking of adding the ability to move and leave a link behind. The permissions for the linked topic are whatever the permissions for the original forum are, this applies to styles and preferences of the topic as well.

Topic list sorted alphabetically is the ability for a forum admin to make a forum have topics in alphabetical order instead of date order.

As part of the updates list, is there a possiblity of the Karma Titles in the Members Directory getting fixed?

Yes, that is fixed in 1.2.

for the "Feature topics across all forums" feature, will we able to set the announcement start date and end date...so that the announcement will remove automatically after a certain date?

Hi 037,

The ability to set start and end dates for featured topics across all forums will not be available as part of this release.

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I would love to see a backwards copy of this for moving topics.
Move to correct forum, link in old.

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Can I ask why Infopop find the copy link thing more functional and needed than the above?

Seems like you guys are once again adding things that are not really needed while ignoring the basic feature requests. Mb i'm wrong and lots of people have asked for the copy link.

What about a simble link to another post in another forum? My members always want to cross reference posts

The intitial relase of the Topic Shortcuts, will be the ability for an admin to create a shortcut in another forum from an existing topic. We do plan on adding a move topic and leave shortcut behind feature, but we need to prove the technology first and make sure that there won't be any degraded performance.

-Barry