Thanks Harald.
It's good to know that the forum categories work pretty well - I'm always tempted to have a re-arrange, but if the consensus is that they're appropriate, I'll leave as is.
From the admin point of view I sometimes wish I could move "project logs" that aren't from the project log section into a regular forum section.
I've added this now
. Check the
Item Tools menu, then click
Convert item to thread on a Project Log item. The resulting thread will need to be moved out of the discussion forum, but a move box should appear to prompt for this. I'll work on configuring something similar for the resources section.
Another idea that comes to mind is a limited lifetime for watching a thread. It is not uncommon that no reply is given to an answer, the op simply vanishes. These threads stay in the watchlist until I do some housekeeping and remove them after a while. I'd like to have kind of a watchdog feature: Watch a thread for say 4 weeks. If no reply is given within that period, un-watch the thread. If a reply is given, prolong the watch period for another 4 weeks. I have no idea whether the forum software is capable of such a feature.
That's an interesting idea - is it primarily to keep the watchlist "clean"? It's not possible out of the box, nor can I see any addons for this, but I may be able to code something for it if it's a popular request. At some point we'll be moving to XenForo 2.0, so I'm going to save up any of the larger, non-essential coding tasks for that upgrade.
Last not least I recently had to merge a few threads. This is not really easy as it takes some steps to locate and mark the threads to be merged. My observation is that it is mostly threads opened by the same member that need to be merged. Therefore it were a good support when marking a thread for merge to be offered a list of recent posts (e.g. within a 2-4 week span) by the same member to select from for merging.
I like the sound of this, as 90% of the time merging threads involves the same member. At the moment, I generally merge things by viewing the member profile, view the information tab then click "find all threads by x". In the top-right corner, there's a "moderator tools" menu which allows merging threads and shows recent threads by that member. It's a few clicks to do this, so I'll have a think on how best to speed this up for merging.
Ideally, a good implementation may be nice to have an a "merge with recent threads" option on the thread tools menu. This would then show the last 10 threads by that user, which could then be merged as required. This may actually be a quick thing to code, so I'll have a quick look at it in the next week - if it's a bigger job, I'll add this to the XF 2.0 task list.