Administrating New Posts

While not a tool that all forum administrators will choose to make use of for those that do the Admin Bar has undergone quite a transformation in Version 4. If you need to read every new post (as we do on our support forum) or use moderation, the Admin Bar is the most useful tool. If you are not familiar with it’s use a brief explanation is in order. All new posts are stored in what we call the Admin ‘Queue’. This is an option that can be turned on or off. As new posts arrive the post count in the admin bar (again optionally displayed) increase – red for new, ordinary posts and blue for those requiring approval. In Simple:Press Forum version 3 we introduced the retrieval of the post content by clicking on the ‘New Posts’ button. This opened up a drop down section from where you could then click on through to the topic. In version 4 we have extended this. You can now display each new post and simple mark them read/approved; opt to load the topic itself; delete the post or reply to it there and then with our new ‘Quick Reply’ feature. And because all of this is handled with AJAX there are no extra page loads and the forum administrators can quickly see, read and deal with all the new posts waiting in the queue. One word of warning. If you, as the forum administrator, do not wish to use the Admins Queue then make sure to turn the option off (in Manage Admins) otherwise the queue will continue to grow which can have performance repercussions. On the other hand if you choose to make use of this feature – ensure you check out all of the options available to set it all up as you want to use it.