customize forumdisplay, linear message view

[evan2nave]

Hello,

Has anyone customized a display for a forum page (forumdisplay.php), in which you give a linear, non-threaded display of all messages chronologically within the forum. In this view, the latest reply to a post in any thread would appear at the top of the forum page. Posting a new thread or a reply to a post in an existing thread would appear the same to users in this view, although the system would still retain the thread hierarchy of responses, such that one could switch back to the standard thread display for a forum.

This functionality already exists in vBulletin out-of-the-box within a specific thread—it’s just the linear view for the thread. But the idea is to do the same thing for all of the posts within an entire forum, not just within a thread for the forum. This would actually not be a very obscure feature—several large forums provide this type of view. For example, it is the default at investorvillage.com. And Yahoo Message Boards provide it as an option as well. When you are viewing a specific forum, by default it will “List in Topics” but you can select to “List as Individual Messages” and it will provide this linear message view across all the threads of the forum.

E.g. Suppose you have the following threads:

Thread A: Posted 1:00pm
Response A1: Posted 1:30pm
Response A2: Posted 2:30pm

Thread B: Posted 2:00pm
Response B1: Posted 2:15pm
Response B2: Posted 2:45pm

In the standard forumdisplay, one would see:

Thread B Last Post 2:45 Replies 2
Thread A Last Post 2:30 Replies 2

In this new linear forumdisplay, the new thread posts, as well as the replies, would all be at the same level. One would see:

Response B2 Posted 2:45pm
Response A2 Posted 2:30pm
Response B1 Posted 2:15pm
Thread B Posted 2:00pm
Response A1 Posted 1:30pm
Thread A Posted 1:00pm

When any top level thread post OR a response post is selected, you’ll just go to the normal showthread.php view of the message, perhaps in the hybrid view.

Has anyone already implemented something like this that they would be willing to share, or does anyone have any suggestions or ideas about issues that might be involved in implementing this customization?

Thanks very much for any help,
-Evan

[Cyricx]

That could be HUGE if you had a few large sized threads with 20+ or so replies :(

[evan2nave]

Thank you for your response. A couple points:

1. That's true that it could be a lot of data, but theoretically that could be true within a single thread that has multiple posts each with many replies, and there's a linear message view for the threads.
2. There are major forums that do offer this feature, such as yahoo as an option, and the investorvillage example I pointed to.
a. The investor forums are a good example of content where this view makes sense, because within a forum (not a thread) for a particular company that people are talking about, people are generally just interested in the latest thing said about it, regardless of the thread. Of course, this is subjective, but there is a desire for it among certain communities.
3. It's not as if every single message would need to be shown at once on a page, since the page would only need to show some number of messages at once, with prev and next links to paginate.

In any case, there are certainly forums out there that provide this feature. Does anyone have any ideas about doing this in vbulletin, or better yet, has anyone done it?

Thanks,
-Evan

[Cyricx]

Can you link me to an example? :)

[evan2nave]

Sure, it's the default at investorvillage.com.
E.g. http://www.investorvillage.com/smbd.asp?pt=m&clear=0&v=1&mb=8&category=A

If you look at it now as of this writing, you'll see on top messages 144 and 145 which are responses to the new thread from message 133. If you click the button at the top of the messageboard tab that says "Show Topics Only", it'll only show the top level post for each thread, more like the default vbulletin forumdisplay.

Similarly, here's an example from yahoo boards:
http://messages.yahoo.com/Business_%26_Finance/Employment_and_Work/Finding_a_Job/forumview?bn=1600934134-dreamjobs

By default, yahoo only lists topics on the forum display page, but at the top, you can click to go to the option that says "List as Individual Messages" and then it'll behave like I described.

Thanks,
-Evan