Some suggestions for iSTORYA

[YJOB]

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Greetings!

I have some suggestions for little improvements of this interesting iSTORYA forum.
I'm having a hard time describing these modifications so i just decided to create a test site so that the admins can have an actual view of the enhancements.

The test site is located here: http://www.istorya-testsite.yjobz.com

Registration is disabled since it is only a test site, however, if the admins want to explore deeper into the site they may request to be registered and assigned an administrator rank.

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Below are some rough explainations of the enhancements.

The installed SMF packages:

TinyPortal - adds portal blocks on the page (center, front, left and right) which can contain many different features.

RTM Board - all reports generated by the "Report to moderator" function will be automatically posted in this board (this is of course visible to the admins and mods only since it contains the name of the member who reported the violation). Admins and Mods will have the option to solve/unsolve the said report. In this way, reports are attended to in a quicker way, they won't have to check their email periodically for violation reports.

View-only Boards - set on a per membergroup basis, only selected members can view the contents of these boards. Other members know it exists but they cannot view the posts inside.

Arcade - 116 games installed here. With options to hold tournaments and save scores.

Message Preview - hoverng the mouse cursor over the topic title shows a preview of the context.

Invite - Members can send automated invitation emails to their friends to register to the forum.

Spoiler tag - hovering the cursor over the spoiler tag reveals the hidden message.

Reason for editing - moderators will see a text box when modifying a post. the contents of that box will be added at the bottom of the modified message as the reason for editing.

Enhanced Quick Reply - the quick reply box now contains the smileys and the bbcodes just like the standard reply.

Guestbook - guests can leave their messages here.



The other enhancements:

Announcement block - option to display an important/urgent forum announcement.

PM Alert - the logged in user will see an animated alert icon whenever he receives a new PM. On the test site, there is a PM Alert on the upper left portal block in order to show the actual icon, but in reality, that will only be visible to logged in users with unread PMs. This feature can be very useful since most members have no idea that they have received a new message. Pop up blockers may also block the standard message alert pop up window.

Menu with icons - aside from the standar menu, a left block contains another menu with additional links.

Scrolling shoutbox - enhanced shoutbox. the scrooling pauses when you hover the cursor over the messages.

Gallery Preview - images in the coppermine photo gallery are randomly displayed in this block along with some stats.

Calendar - also displays the upcoming events and holidays. The upcoming birthdays were not included since the iSTORYA forum contains so many members and displaying the upcoming birthdays in that block will consume a lot of space.

Web Search - this is a Google adsense block that can help the administration raise funds.

Links & News - shortcuts to some common links.

Imageshack tool - a handy image upload tool for members.

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The front block currently displays the news update and some rss feeds, however, the admins may decide to replace them with featured articles just like the articles displayed on the main page of iSTORYA.

[pnoize]

yjob: thank you for your suggestions. some of your suggested implementations have already been around for quite sometime now, though the execution is a bit different from what you have in mind. these are:

a. RTM - there is an already existing RTM board which is visible only to the mods and admins.

b. View-Only Board - There are actually 2 boards which are not visible to general members.

c. PM alert - we have a pop-up alert that tells the members if they have a new message.


as for the others, some of them may not be ideal with the amount of bandwidth we have and the sheer number of members but we will try to look into them

[YJOB]

thanks bro.

by the way, the pop up alert is not advisable to all, since some browsers have pop up blockers.

[ic3s]

Im not sure if there's already a section where we could review the sent messages. It happened to me once, that I received a reply (without a quote) but I had a hard time recalling which message I sent to that person.

[xyberblue]

OK raman sa akoa...mo pop-up man siya bisag gi enable nako ang pop-up blocker.

[xyberblue]

Im not sure if there's already a section where we could review the sent messages. It happened to me once, that I received a reply (without a quote) but I had a hard time recalling which message I sent to that person.

There's an outbox bro where imo matan aw unsa to imo gipang send.

[ic3s]

akong gi try pero wla lagi sulod akong outbox..

[YJOB]

ic3s, you must make sure that you save a copy of your message to your outbox before you send it.

there's a checkbox there to save a copy in your outbox.

[ic3s]

I already found out the option under Profile, ill give it a try. thanks!

[vern]

A lot of these mods really are just gimmicky addons that don't add to the core of istorya. I hate the idea of tinyportal and blocks. It's screen real estate that doesn't need to be wasted by such. Anything that would require extra queries to the database is unneeded in my opinion.