New Feature: New Topics

[Webmonkey]

Up at the tippy top of the message boards you may notice the following icon:

It probably means what you think it means.

That is to say, it will create an 'on the fly' board of only the most recently posted topics on all the message boards in the EC family.

Enjoy!

- Chrismonkey

[Amber]

That could be a totally useful feature if I was able to filter out the boards that I don't read. It would be more useful to me than it is now if even listed the name of the board the thread lives in.

My two cents on the subject.

[Abby/Blood Offerings]

In total agreement with Amber, but also in total understanding if this is a feature that can not be messed with by the wondrous WebMonkey.

[Webmonkey]

'Messed with' is less a problem than 'accessed' actually in this case. But I will tell you that the trend by Proboards seems to be toward broad compatibility with other media standards. You'll likely see facebook and other social media connectivity come to Proboards, more robust media posting functions and a bunch of other 'common' features that you've seen on other sites. By that I mean, it is not unlikely that each board will be selectable as a 'feed' at some point, and that feed aggregators (like RSS readers for example, or perhaps some Proboards specific solutions) may soon be able to customize the content you see based on the 'name' of the board(s) you want to see through a tool or widget or button.

In fact, this may even be something that the boards can do now, I just lack the syntax to act on it, and then teach you how to act on it - yet.

I expect that this is not an uncommon request though, and the very large and savvy community of admins that run proboards pages are often very good at creating work-arounds and fixes even before the creators of the base code do, heh, so, point is, consider this a 'beta' of the feature in that respect. I will do a little research to see if anyone has started working on this type of thing yet.

Also, on a seperate note, I think it is a mistake to view the community as only the people you play with, and from time to time interesting titles and topics and discussions do happen across spheres, so there is a part of me that doesn't like the idea of cherry picking only the boards you care about, but people do it anyway all the time manually, so that is just my fluff opinion. Won't stop me from investigating the feature request by any means.

Thanks for the feedback, and I'll let you know what I find out!

- Chrismonkey

[Amber]

Aug 15, 2010 11:27:00 GMT -8 Webmonkey said:

Also, on a seperate note, I think it is a mistake to view the community as only the people you play with, and from time to time interesting titles and topics and discussions do happen across spheres, so there is a part of me that doesn't like the idea of cherry picking only the boards you care about, but people do it anyway all the time manually, so that is just my fluff opinion. Won't stop me from investigating the feature request by any means.

Sadly, this outlook is based out of two issues for me. The first is that I'm a horribly slow reader. This, in and of itself, isn't necessarily a bad thing. The second is that I do not have a lot of spare time. Let me be honest here, I have three books that I'm in the middle of and want to finish reading, but they're priotized for me based on current activities (burlesque), who the author is (friends win out in the priority war), and the type of book (steampunk fiction).

While I agree with you that there is value in reading the other sphere's boards, the reality of it is that it's simply not practical for me.

However, thank you for looking into it.

[Webmonkey]

Aug 16, 2010 8:24:40 GMT -8 Amber said:

Aug 15, 2010 11:27:00 GMT -8 Webmonkey said:

Also, on a seperate note, I think it is a mistake to view the community as only the people you play with, and from time to time interesting titles and topics and discussions do happen across spheres, so there is a part of me that doesn't like the idea of cherry picking only the boards you care about, but people do it anyway all the time manually, so that is just my fluff opinion. Won't stop me from investigating the feature request by any means.

Sadly, this outlook is based out of two issues for me. The first is that I'm a horribly slow reader. This, in and of itself, isn't necessarily a bad thing. The second is that I do not have a lot of spare time. Let me be honest here, I have three books that I'm in the middle of and want to finish reading, but they're priotized for me based on current activities (burlesque), who the author is (friends win out in the priority war), and the type of book (steampunk fiction).

While I agree with you that there is value in reading the other sphere's boards, the reality of it is that it's simply not practical for me.

However, thank you for looking into it.

No worries. Not everyone is a board troll like ur friendly neighborhood Webmonkey here.