Special post counter system

Version: 0.3
Title: Special post counter system
Requested: [Here]
Explanation: You can maintain a special post counter for certain forums, like your offtopic forum.

Features:

• Special counter in postbit template
• Add special counter to your profile overview
• Special counter can be controled from admin panel

Screenshots

• Special post counter in postbit template
• Admin settings
• Special posts counter in users profile

Version 0.3 should be working fine.
i'm not able to test it very well. but it worked for me one 1 board.
my conenction make it almost impossible to upload a file to my server :/

but it should work, and there is no restrinction of the amount of forums..

by the way, i put all this in a nice install file
upload that file to your admin dir and run it..

[gopherhockey]

Yea, setting not to count posts in that forum toward users post counts doesn't seem to have any affect on how they are reported to the users - they are still seeing tons of new posts each day... I'd love whatever you could do to help me out - thanks a ton!!

[Dpcows]

could you explain your problem a bit more specific,
i think i've misunderstood your problem in your first post.

[gopherhockey]

Sure thing - I'll try to explain this again. I confuse myself sometimes, so hopefully I can get this straight.

The way vb works, as we all know, is that posts in a forum will trigger various affects. A few of which are:

1. Users post count increases (there is a way around this in the admin cp)

2. Total posts on the entire board go up (as displayed on the top of most unedited vb systems as:

Members: XX, Threads: YY, Posts: ZZ

3. There are various scripts & hacks that will show this data on other pages as well, such as vbhome lite which shows it as:

X new articles released
Y new forum threads started
Z new forum posts

4. When looking at the list of all forums, you can see the total number of posts and threads for each forum just before the "Last Post" column.

5. When a user arrives and sees that there are new posts or threads, often times they click on "view new posts" to see a list of what has been posted lately.

All of those are just fine under most circumstances.

I have a specific reason to have a forum never increment those totals. (actually all but #4, but even if it affects #4 above thats ok too).

In my example, the forum is an NNTP gateway (newsgroup). The forum itself can get anywhere from 10-200+ posts/threads in a day. Users coming to my system do not wish to see these show up as new posts, new threads etc. I want to treat it as a resource (special) forum - but not let it act like the others by increasing post totals etc.

I have worked around *most* of this by editing search.php and putting in a statement such as:

wheresql.=" AND thread.open<>10 AND thread.forumid!=50";

(example excluding forum #50 from daily new threads stats)

What I can't fix is the new posts part. You can't just add the AND thread.forumid!=50 to the posts section (you get a SQL error).

What happens now is that people come to my system and in a low traffic day (but high for the newsgroup) they might see:

0 new articles released
0 new forum threads started
201 new forum posts

They click on "view new posts" and get a message that there are no posts since they last visited.

The reason is because that forum is still able to increase the forum post count and total vb system post count.

I have posted this elsewhere on this system (and have had others request the same) - have had many think they knew how to do this, but nobody has been able to do it.

When I ran accross your hack, I thought maybe it found a way to categorize posts in a certain forum differently. However, I think there is still some counter that is affected - some global total post count that many functions hit. I thought maybe if I installed this and set the forum, that the system would stop displaying the post count since last visit for this forum. I think the concept is close, or closer than anything I have seen... but there still must be something missing.

I'm not enough of a programmer to be able to figure out out. Conceptually I would guess if one could edit all places where the post total is increased and exclude a forum it would work. Thats why this hack seemed sooo very close.

I know there are others looking for this kind of functionality. I apologize if this is rather off-topic specifically for what this hack does. Perhaps I should re-post this in the hack requests area. I just feel with this hack, there is probably one simple line of code somewhere that I'm missing to pull this off.

Thanks for your time...

[Dpcows]

I'm afraid i don't have time to look into this, or even add more features.

gopherhockey: i don't see a fast solution for you problem with this hack. sorry..

[gopherhockey]

Thats ok, I found an alternate way of doing this that I'll post elsewhere. Thanks for your time though!

[Dan]

Hmm.... is there a way to update this post count in anyway?

And is there a way to make this work with post count off in a forum it suppose to count in?

Thanks in Advance

/me clicks install

[Koopa]

Good idea, could be useful....

[Dpcows]

03-12-03 at 04:21 AM Oricon said this in Post #56
Hmm.... is there a way to update this post count in anyway?

And is there a way to make this work with post count off in a forum it suppose to count in?


Thanks in Advance

* Oricon clicks install

Not sure, didn't test that.
if you did, i'd like to know if it works

[tinbin]

Interesting hack m8!
Would it be hard to code it so that it counts the # of replies people made in the offtopic forum, but DOESN'T count if the users started the thread itself.

So it should count all offtopic replies, not all offtopic posts..

Dpcows or anyone else:
Would that be just a bit of extra code or hard to do ?

[Dpcows]

Would be pretty easy.
Just don't edit the newthread.php file i guess.

No garantee all still works..