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[Zanzetkuken The Great]

I've recently been on the Spacebattles forums a few times, and noted one really neat feature over there that I honestly kinda miss on this forum.  Specifically, their 'threadmarking' system, where various posts in a thread can be marked and allows for easy browsing between those posts.  I can admit it would probably see the most use on the various Forum Games and Roleplaying boards, allowing for the Game Master to easily mark off turn posts so people could directly browse between each turn post without having to scour the entirety of the thread, and the DF Community Games and Stories, where the turn posts of succession games or installments of the stories could be marked so after reading through one you could instantly go to the next important one if you wished, but there are likely benefits for other locations as well (Toady using the system to mark each time he replies in the Future of the Fortress thread so people can look between them easily, for example).  While some people do provide lists to turn posts in the thread OP, or in a secondary post, it does take a bit of time to keep updating that, so there are many that don't do that, and going between individual threadmarks is both quicker and easier to both browse between the important posts and to set up the marking of the important posts.

After a bit of musing on this topic, something came to mind.  I'm honestly not on too many forums, so there are probably ones others have seen that I haven't.  So I ask, what features on other forums have you seen that you think could improve this forum's software?  I don't expect Toady to actually change over the forum software due to the hassle it likely would be to do so, but I figure it could be an interesting bit of conversation to see what features people like to see on forums.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Can SMF be customized? I know we're essentially using base, but Toady has added at least one thing to it with the Darkling theme.

I too would commit blood sacrifice to bring threadmarks to Bay 12. If someone here knows how to customize SMF, maybe Toady would accept their work?

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

Can SMF be customized? I know we're essentially using base, but Toady has added at least one thing to it with the Darkling theme.

I too would commit blood sacrifice to bring threadmarks to Bay 12. If someone here knows how to customize SMF, maybe Toady would accept their work?

Well, section of the simple machines site exists and it has a fair number modifications section for the simple machines forums.  Plus, the community section of the simple machines site has several boards dedicated to modifying the forum software.  Granted, I don't know if a threadmark system is in there, though, but it does seem the software can be customized.

[Frumple]

Significantly more than threadmarks (they're pretty great, mind you, but there's a lot of B12's discussions that it isn't as useful for as somewhere like SB or SV, imo), a decent alert system would probably be all kinds of sexy. There has to have been something approaching a good hundred or more times over the years I've been here someone's asked how to unsubscribe from a thread, or fiddle with new/unread topics, or so on. I wouldn't be entirely unwilling to bet stuff surrounding that sort of feature is straight up the single most asked about thing regarding the forum software.

... after that would be an easier method of resizing images, and/or auto-resize, methinks. Then let me put spoilers inside spoilers and I might go find a small child to sacrifice to you. I mean, it would probably be a tadpole or something instead of human, but we could work something out. I've never cooked veal but I'm willing to learn.

[Greiger]

When the forum switched over to SMF Toady had help from at least one forumite to get things working if I recall correctly.   Sadly I don't remember who that was, and if they are even still around.  As far as I understand Toady and TT haven't done much more with the SMF itself than some moderate troubleshooting.

(That said I'm sure theres at least half a dozen QOL improvements that could be made.)

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

Decided to do a bit of looking around since I couldn't locate a mention of threadmarks on the Simple Machines forum or the customization list.  Bad news is that the only example I can find seems to only be a part of the XenForo software, a forum software you need to pay for to use.  Good news is, threadmarking is something made by the community rather than something innately part of the XenForo software, and it also seems to utilize an .xml file to some extent, which the Simple Machines forum stuff seems to use as well.  Bad news is, in order to download the threadmarks program, you need to be a registered customer of theirs, which costs $140.  Yet, there is good news, as the author has a github page here that includes to .xml file containing the code to get it working.

Granted, there's probably a bit of reverse engineering and Jerry-rigging to get it to be integrated, but at least there's an open source base to work off of that is very permissive of its use and modification thanks to using the MIT license.

Significantly more than threadmarks (they're pretty great, mind you, but there's a lot of B12's discussions that it isn't as useful for as somewhere like SB or SV, imo), a decent alert system would probably be all kinds of sexy. There has to have been something approaching a good hundred or more times over the years I've been here someone's asked how to unsubscribe from a thread, or fiddle with new/unread topics, or so on. I wouldn't be entirely unwilling to bet stuff surrounding that sort of feature is straight up the single most asked about thing regarding the forum software.

... after that would be an easier method of resizing images, and/or auto-resize, methinks. Then let me put spoilers inside spoilers and I might go find a small child to sacrifice to you. I mean, it would probably be a tadpole or something instead of human, but we could work something out. I've never cooked veal but I'm willing to learn.

There might be something on the customization section of the simple machines website I linked in the post above yours.  Never know.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

Decided to see if Toady would be interested in implementing the threadmark system if we were able to get it working under the Simple Machines software.  If he proves interested, we can at least try to see if we can modify the code so that it works.  Maybe once that is done, we could try out doing some of the stuff Frumple said might be good if Toady proves favorable to adding other quality of life features.