Miscellaneous Hacks - Featured Threads

Overview

This product is designed to allow for the creation, display and management of a list of threads that you wish to feature on your site. It gives you a convenient means of showcasing especially good thread content on your forum and give it the increased visibility to registered users and visitors alike that you likely already feel it so richly deserves. You will find that when the featured threads list is displayed on its static page, then the block element is not collapsible since it does not share space with any other content, otherwise it is collapsible so that users will not have to scroll past this list to get to other parts of the page it they wish not to. This is consistent with the behavior of other vBulletin elements.

You may choose to manage this list yourself, or allow others on your staff to share in or even take over the management duties. Some or all of your members may even be allowed and encouraged to be a part of the process by their nominations of threads for the list. You can choose to allow nominations via this product, or use vBulletin's intrinsic thread rating system, or use a combination of both systems. You may also choose to display the most replied threads as well. In this way you could elect to implement a threads of the week or month etc. by popular vote. This product makes all of this possible and easy to accomplish.

You will find that you have a great deal of flexibility in where and how the list is displayed. Those you designate as managers of the list can add, remove, and set the display order of the threads in the list. Also, you may choose to allow your managers to auto-create voting polls to narrow down the selection of nominated threads to be added as featured threads, which is posted to a forum of your choosing. This forum may be private so that only staff is involved in the final voting, or a public forum may be selected so that everyone may vote. All actions performed by users and managers are confirmed with a standard vBulletin redirect message.

Upon installation, two tables are added to your database, one to store the list of featured threads, and one to store the nominations data. Queries are joined so that the latest data for all threads is displayed in the lists and to minimize the redundancy of stored data. If the product is uninstalled, then naturally the two added tables are removed.

The product settings are conveniently sub-divided into the following six categories:

Location Of "Featured Threads" List

You may choose to have the featured threads list displayed on every page, either below the navbar or above the footer. You are given the option to exclude any scripts that you choose. For example you may not want the featured threads list to display on pages whose associated script names are inlinemod, member or online.

In addition to displaying the list on all pages, you may choose one or more of the following options:

• Display the list on your forum home page, either above or below the forums.
• Display the list on your forum display pages, either above or below the threads.
• Display the list on your show thread pages, either above or below the posts.

Note, the above 3 options will be effectively disabled if you have chosen to display on all pages to prevent duplication of content, unless you have set them as excluded scripts for displaying on all pages. This gives you increased control over these 3 pages. For example, you may wish for the featured threads list to display at the top of the page everywhere except on your home page, and so you could have it displayed below the forums there instead.

In addition to, or instead of these options, you may choose to display the list on its own static page. If you have chosen to display on all pages, that will naturally be disabled on the static page to prevent duplication of content. You then have the option to either create your own link to the page using the "Navigation Manager" or you may opt to have a link to the page auto-added as either a navtab:



A navlink on the navbar:



Or as a link in either the "Community" or "Quick Links" drop-down menus on the navbar:

Appearance Of "Featured Threads" List

You may choose to give the "Featured Threads" list element a custom title. This title will be used in the header of the list element, as the link text to the static page on the nav bar, and as the page title for the static page.

You may set a maximum height for the list that applies when it shares space with other content, that is, when it is not on the static page. A vertical scroll-bar is introduced when the list is taller than the maximum height you set. This height does not inlude the header element, just the table of data.

You may set the left/right margins of the list element as a percentage of the parent element. For example, if you wish for the list element to be 75% as wide as the parent element, and centered, then you would enter 12.5 for both the left and right margins. If you want the element to still be 75% as wide as the parent, but all the way on the right, then you would enter 25 for the left margin and 0 for the right margin.

You may set the background color for the "Featured Threads" element, using an HTML color picker.

You may define the CSS for the borders of the list element. This includes both the outer border and the inner borders of the table containing the data. The table cells are only given borders on the right.

You are given an HTML color picker for the color of the Forum/Thread links in the list, as well as the option to give any additional CSS for these links. You may also set the alignment for the thread links (left/center/right).

You may choose how the featured threads are sorted (by Thread Id/Thread Title/Date/Time Added To List/Thread Author User Id) and whether to sort in ascending or descending order. Note that when one of your managers imposes an order for the threads, then that ordering will take precedence.

You may chose to include optional thread information to be displayed, including Replies, Views, Last Poster, Forum, and Prefixes. Thread authors and titles are always displayed. The thread author has a tooltip showing when they created the thread. The replies has a tooltip giving a breakdown of everyone who posted in the thread, sorted in descending order by the number of posts, and then by user id in the case of ties in the number of posts. The last poster has a tooltip that shows when they posted that last post. All usernames in both lists (featured threads and nominated threads) are shown using their current HTML markup. And finally the thread has a tooltip showing a preview of the content of the first post. The number of characters is that which you have set in the AdminCP's general settings.

You can set the maximum number of characters of each thread's forum name to be displayed since these can be long and take up a lot of space. To display the complete forum names, set this maximum to zero. All forum titles that are truncated will have a tooltip that shows the complete forum name on mouse hover.

You are given the option to have an alternating row background color be given to the rows (in all thread tables) to make reading each row easier. You may choose either not to have the alternating backgrounds at all, to have them only for your managers who will benefit more from them because of thread selections while managing the list, and for everyone to see them. An HTML color piker allows you to choose this alternate background color.

"Featured Threads" Icon

You may choose to display an image icon for the featured threads in several places. You are given a choice of 5 included icons, or you may upload your own and give its filename in the settings. You must upload your custom icon to the "markfl_featuredthreads/icons" folder. The icons are appropriately sized depending on the location they are displayed.

If you choose to use an icon, then they are displayed in the thread listing when viewing forums, to the immediate right of the thread titles for those threads in the featured threads list.



Support for this product can be found here:

• MHB - Featured Threads
• TAZ - Featured Threads

(continued in post #2)

[MarkFL]

Originally Posted by Snowhog

Have you gotten around to this yet? I don't see a post from you saying you have.

As far as I know, this was done.

[Morrus]

Quick question re the functionality of this. I think I know the answer, but wanted to check first --

Can I use this mod to set up a separate page which lists all the most replied to threads which were started in the last week?

Thanks!

[MarkFL]

Originally Posted by Morrus

Quick question re the functionality of this. I think I know the answer, but wanted to check first --

Can I use this mod to set up a separate page which lists all the most replied to threads which were started in the last week?

Thanks!

You can see a list of the most replied to threads, from which you can add to the featured list, but it won't auto-add only from the last week.

[Morrus]

Originally Posted by MarkFL

You can see a list of the most replied to threads, from which you can add to the featured list, but it won't auto-add only from the last week.

Darnit. Thanks for the reply!

[chloe101]

Originally Posted by MarkFL

Okay, try replacing the file "featuredthread.php" (in your forum's root folder) with the attached file...let me know if that works.

Hi Mark, I am having a similar, though not the exact same, problem and wonder if I should replace this file too? Or if you have another suggestion.

This happens when I try to reorder the threads. Here is my error message:

PHP Warning: mysqli_query(): (42S02/1051): Unknown table 'thread' in ..../includes/class_core.php on line 1394

Database error in vBulletin 4.2.4:

Invalid SQL:

				SELECT thread.*, featuredthreads.id
				FROM (redacted)thread
				INNER JOIN (redacted)featuredthreads
				ON thread.threadid = featuredthreads.threadid
					ORDER BY featuredthreads.thread_order ASC, featuredthreads.id ASC;

MySQL Error   : Unknown table 'thread'
Error Number  : 1051

Thanks again for this awesome mod!

[MarkFL]

Originally Posted by chloe101

Hi Mark, I am having a similar, though not the exact same, problem and wonder if I should replace this file too? Or if you have another suggestion.

This happens when I try to reorder the threads. Here is my error message:

PHP Warning: mysqli_query(): (42S02/1051): Unknown table 'thread' in ..../includes/class_core.php on line 1394

Database error in vBulletin 4.2.4:

Invalid SQL:

				SELECT thread.*, featuredthreads.id
				FROM (redacted)thread
				INNER JOIN (redacted)featuredthreads
				ON thread.threadid = featuredthreads.threadid
					ORDER BY featuredthreads.thread_order ASC, featuredthreads.id ASC;

MySQL Error   : Unknown table 'thread'
Error Number  : 1051

Thanks again for this awesome mod!

Yes, try doing the replacement, and let me know if that works or not. If not, we can go from there.

[chloe101]

Thank you! That seems to have worked beautifully. I can now reorder the threads without the SQL error.

Additional question if you don't mind... Is it possible to see how many nominations each thread received? It's entirely possible I'm missing something obvious.

Also, I am not sure what the "Rating Threshold" in the Nominations setting means and how it correlates to the "Votes Threshold".

I have the settings on Auto-Add Featured threads but that's adding an awful lot of threads at the top of my forum. Is it possible to limit the number of threads to 5 or 6 if I use Auto-Add?

[MarkFL]

Originally Posted by chloe101

Thank you! That seems to have worked beautifully. I can now reorder the threads without the SQL error.

Great...glad to hear it.

Originally Posted by chloe101

Additional question if you don't mind... Is it possible to see how many nominations each thread received? It's entirely possible I'm missing something obvious.

You should see how many nomination each thread has received when you open up the list of nominated threads. Only those who have been designated as managers can do this...but since you are reordering threads, you are a manager already.

Also, if you hover your mouse over the number of nominations, a tooltip will show you a list of users who have nominated the threads.

Originally Posted by chloe101

Also, I am not sure what the "Rating Threshold" in the Nominations setting means and how it correlates to the "Votes Threshold".

The "Rating Threshold" is the minimum rating average a thread must have before being including in the "User-Rated Threads" list. The "Votes Threshold" is the minimum number of votes a threads must have before being included.

For example, you might wish to only have 5 star threads in the list, but you want a thread to have at least 5 votes as well, this way you don't see those that have only gotten a small number of votes.

Originally Posted by chloe101

I have the settings on Auto-Add Featured threads but that's adding an awful lot of threads at the top of my forum. Is it possible to limit the number of threads to 5 or 6 if I use Auto-Add?

The only way to limit the number is to use the option "Yes, And Penultimate Thread Is Removed"...this way when the newest thread is added, the previous auto-added thread is removed.

I don't have a way to limit this by number.

I use this feature at MHB for our "Problem Of The Week" forums...when a new problem is posted in one of our problem categories (High School/University/Post-Grad), last week's problem is auto-removed, and the new problem is auto-added.

[chloe101]

Originally Posted by MarkFL

You should see how many nomination each thread has received when you open up the list of nominated threads.

Also, if you hover your mouse over the number of nominations, a tooltip will show you a list of users who have nominated the threads.

The User Nominated & Featured tables are different on my forum. I am trying to find a way to sort the threads by number of nominated votes (or at least know how many votes they got) so that when I manually add new ones, I have a little more visibility into which ones to eliminate.

First I couldn't get people to use it on our new forum and suddenly they're using it everywhere so your add-on is a major success!

The "Rating Threshold" is the minimum rating average a thread must have before being including in the "User-Rated Threads" list. The "Votes Threshold" is the minimum number of votes a threads must have before being included.

For example, you might wish to only have 5 star threads in the list, but you want a thread to have at least 5 votes as well, this way you don't see those that have only gotten a small number of votes.

Thank you.

The only way to limit the number is to use the option "Yes, And Penultimate Thread Is Removed"...this way when the newest thread is added, the previous auto-added thread is removed.

I don't have a way to limit this by number.

This will make things difficult when our forum gets busy. Would you be available to tailor this for our needs when donations start rolling in? We'd compensate you of course. One feature I'd love is the ability to put these in a couple of widgets on the CMS. I hope I didn't break any VB rules by asking that!

(on edit, I found the admin setting for "Yes, And Penultimate Thread Is Removed" but I'd still like it tailored )

[MarkFL]

Originally Posted by chloe101

The User Nominated & Featured tables are different on my forum. I am trying to find a way to sort the threads by number of nominated votes (or at least know how many votes they got) so that when I manually add new ones, I have a little more visibility into which ones to eliminate.

First I couldn't get people to use it on our new forum and suddenly they're using it everywhere so your add-on is a major success!

You should see the number of nominations in the leftmost column in that table when you click the button to view it. There is no option to turn that column off.

The threads in that table are automatically sorted in descending order by the number of nominations they receive, and in the event of a tie, the threads are sorted within the members of the tie by threadid, so that the older threads are displayed first.