[DragonByte Tech]

Originally Posted by midnightpariah

Chat Field Orientation: The option to change where the input box is placed relative to the chat output. Right now, the input is in a rather unconventional left-side orientation, when almost every other chatroom and IM program places the input box below the chat output. Having an option for a Left, Bottom, Top, or Right input box would be spectacular!

This is a Pro-only option

Originally Posted by midnightpariah

Selective Archiving: I adore the “new thread/reply” notifications, but I hate how they end up cluttering your archive! The option to determine what is saved in the archive would be great. I for one would uncheck everything except the actual chat messages.

Selective History: When you first come to the forum, you can see ~20 past messages in the shoutbox, depending on the shoutbox’s settings. This includes shouts and notifications. If the shoutbox hasn’t been particularly active, this history may be nothing more than a list of new threads/replies and “User has reached X posts!” I only see notifications as useful to those who are currently using the shoutbox when the notification event happens, not for people who arrive a day or two later. That’s what “What’s New?” is for. This option would work in tandem with Selective Archiving, and might even be the same thing. Despite loving the notification feature, I had to completely turn it off because it was overwhelming the shoutbox, burying people’s shouts into obscurity and isolating possible conversations.

Interesting features, you should re-post them over at our forum (www.dragonbyte-tech.com) to ensure they are entered into our issue tracking forum and properly taken into consideration

Originally Posted by midnightpariah

Hook into any/all pages: I know I can manually edit the template pages that I’d like the shoutbox to appear on, but with every vB update comes a template thrashing, so I’d like to keep my template modifications to an absolute minimum. It’d be extremely helpful if vbShout came with a list of pages you could select for it to automatically appear on. Alternatively, a collapsible, hovering frame, as seen in the Ideal Chat mod and Facebook’s chat system, would be just as good, if not better in some cases. I think a chatbox is most effective when users have easy, immediate access to it. As it stands right now, users can either use the shoutbox and ignore the forum, or browse the forum and miss out on the shoutbox. You cannot effectively do both at the same time.

Adding 10 characters is hardly a huge modification

We used to allow people to determine what pages it should be automatically inserted on, as opposed to auto on index and everywhere else manual, but the volume of support request for detailed instructions as to how to achieve their perfect setup made it way too un-user friendly

Originally Posted by midnightpariah

Buttons above the input box: This is simply a matter of consistency with vBulletin itself. Having the buttons below the input box when everywhere else on the forum, from posting to sending PMs, BB code and other buttons are always above the text field, is confusing and uncomfortable. When I was first checking out vbShout’s screenshots, I thought the picture was cut off at the bottom, because I didn’t recognize the big empty square on the lefthand side to be the input field! In my own install of vbShout, I’ve actually completely disabled all the BB code buttons just because I hated how it looked.

I'm not entirely sure whether we can reliably make this optional as well, without making the actual display code too complex. We'll see

Originally Posted by midnightpariah

Oldest First in Archive: In the shoutbox, you have a sorting choice between Newest or Oldest First. The archive is always Newest First. It’d be nice to have the option, or at least for the archive to follow the same sorting preference as the shoutbox.

That would cause huge problems with pagination code, so unfortunately I don't think this will be added

Originally Posted by midnightpariah

Edit/Delete in Archive: As an admin, I can “Report Shout”? But not delete or otherwise edit like I can in the shoutbox itself?

This is a Pro-only feature