The top 10 hacks to add to any board
 

list your top ten board hacks that would suite any type of board

For the posters:
1. Quick reply by Firefly (encourages people to post faster)
2. Statistics by Bane (a fun thing to keep track of who is active)
3. Journal by Ryangel (adds some depth to the forums and lets people open up and feel more at home)
4. PhotoPost Gallery (okay, this is not a hack but some sort of image system where people can upload pictures--this builds a sense of community and keeps things fun)

For the moderators:
5. Reason for closing a thread by Sinecure (this saves so much drama and minimizes hatred of moderators)
6. Thread preview by Nick (this indirectly minimizes problems because people can see what a thread is about before opening it and prevents flaming when people get mad about stupid threads)
7. Warning system by G-force (this standardizes the moderating which prevents drama and saves the moderators from dealing with extra hassles)
8. Forum boot by Overgrow (if you give this to the moderators, they can make their own decisions about the forum they lead which empowers them but it also saves administrators from so many details)

For the administrators:
9. Moderator tracking by Overgrow (this lets you keep an eye on the moderators; if they are good staff members then you stay out of their way but if they make bad calls you can step in)
10. Some sort of search engine listing (several to choose from, need to pick the one that applies to your situation)

WOW THANX ill check those out

anybody else have any suggestions?

uppin for more replies

wheres your top 10 u started list off so is only fair

cant ask someone for somethign you aint prepared to do yourself!

Maybe he's looking for ideas.:rolleyes:

yeah im just lookin for ideas

uppin

IMHO, only add hacks that are benificial to the forum leaders/staff

you could forgo alot of hacking if you went with vb3, then the hacks youd want would just be a matter of wating for vb3 to go rc :)

well until that time what hacks would u suggest

Sorry, I misunderstood the original question.

If I was starting a brand new message board right now, I would just go with vb3 Beta 6 and not worry about hacks until I had a core userbase of about 1000 people. For instance, a journal feature is worthless to a new board....people only want to keep a journal somewhere when they feel connected to the community.

In general, people are attracted to new boards that are friendly and address a good topic. Don't worry about technicalities and just get some good people posting first. We only started worrying about hacks when we had specific needs to handle all of our traffic. It is a good idea to only add hacks that serve a specific purpose.

Good luck, man! :)

^^^ thanx

anybody else....

1. Quick reply by Firefly
2. PM Quick reply by Erwin
3. Store hack by Lesane
4.Arcade by by futureal
5. Who Was online today by genial

These are my personal favotite and normally what people ask for first.

1) yup
2) yup
3) very insecure code, I wouldn't recommend it
4) very insecure code, I wouldn't recommend it
5) yup



That's bull :) A good Journal System can be very useful for a starting-off board because it will CREATE reason for people to form a community there. It will be a good additional reason for them to keep coming back. Not everyone in the entire world has a journal already, and if you're starting off, you're likely to have visitors who don't yet have one, but who might well be interested in having one, and if they can get one at your new forums, that'll be good reason for them to return often. :)

Kura, out of curiosity, what is insecure about the arcade hack?

I have never received any feedback from anybody saying anything like that. In fact, define insecure for me...

I agree, insecure is the wrong word to be using. The word means not secure, as in susceptible to hackers.

At a glance I don't see anything open to hackers, which is of serious potential danger (such as retrieving important data from the server) in his code.

Yea. my thoughts exactly.

I will be the first to agree, though, that the current version of the arcade out there has some poorly coded sections (query loop). That has been fixed.

hmkay, arcade hack was not so much insecure as it was susceptible to cheating, which is a form of hacking, but it doesn't pose dangers to the integrity of the vB database itself.. true :)

For your users posts
Glowing BBCODE by SmEdD :)

Kura: You're right, but sadly, there is not much you can do to protect something where the code is communicating back and forth from user to server. The only secure way I know of doing this is via XML Sockets, which would require a lot more server set up than I am prepared to support in a hack.

I am always looking for new ideas on security, though. :)