How can I do this?
 

Tried a search but I am not sure what it is called.
click here for example
When you place your cursor over a specific thread, a little yellow posty will pop up with the text contained. You don't have to click into a thread if you don't want to.

That is a hack (I think it's called thread preview) at vbulletin.org

Unless there's some way to do it with templates only?

Thanks. I wish I could get through my firewall here at work to check it out though. Is that something difficult to do? I would imagine it would somewhat tax my bandwidth also correct?

That is kind of cool, I have never seen it used before..

This is the only one I have seen also. I like it too.

I'm not sure about bandwith. I had it installed on one of my boards a while ago but I took it off because it got annoying lol. I installed it when I was just starting out using hacks, so it couldn't have been too hard :D

It's DHTML by the looks of it. Check dynamicdrive.com, saw something similar to that

What are we looking at? When I went to the link, it looks like a regular forum. What specifically am I looking for?

click into one of the forums and then hover over a thread title. a posty should come up with the first few lines of the post there without actually having to open it up.

Try going to DynamicDrive.com as Shiva said finding the script/code for that then entering that in your "headinclude" template. Then in the text file if there is one, there should be a line that shows how to make that script work on a site, or in this case, a forum.

Enter that code that is says to get it to work into whatever template you want it to be in.

If that's not right, try heading over to vBulletin.org and typing in the search box "popup thread" and it will find things related to that if any.

Ahhh, I see it now. Thanks for clarification Richy T.

Even with the DHTML, this is still a hack because you're going to have to create a query for the first "foo" characters of the post. So, DHTML alone won't do the trick.

I found the hack at vBulletin.org that can do this. It's by nicksaunders and called Improved Thread Preview Hack [link].

Since this is a hack, we can't support you here at vBT, but the good people at vBulletin.org can fix you up. :)