I have toyed with the notion of allowing for a popup on last post links and on inbox. I think doing that on hover would drive some people nuts (incusing me!) but populatng a popup via an ajax call would work.

It’s something that has become standard on almost every other forum out there. While it sounds annoying on paper, it’s veryuseful for the users. It should only be a preview with about 100 characters.

It’s great for misleading titles or posts that don’t have much info in the title, then you can get an idea of the post contents without actually clicking through.

really? never seen it before on the forums I frequent… but, can still consider it for a future version… would most definitely be a user option…

Mr Papa said:

really? never seen it before on the forums I frequent… but, can still consider it for a future version… would most definitely be a user option…

Go to almost any vBulletin or phpbb forum and you will see this feature. One example: http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=13

hmmm…  interesting – but never saw that on my phpbb installs!  lol, before spf of course…  just a preview though not the whole post as I initially understood you…

there is a ticket open for future version – wont make 4.2 however this late in the game…

I’m waiting to see 4.0, but as an avid forum user (most of my time online is spent in forums) i can tell from my perspective, annoying little popups in forums are awful, and common or not, only some users like them.. just because you see it on some popular or trendy site doesn’t mean it’s the right decision, it’s just the one they choose to make. Laziness is popular, users will say things like that, if it can save them a few milliseconds, which is essentially all it does (oh and looks nice to).

10+ years of using forums and the internet, and i can’t say i use a single forum, or ever have that uses performance hungry features like silly preview boxes.

If it’s optional, and it’s ajax i’d consider it an acceptable feature, anything more, and you’ll drive away just as many users as you’ll attract, in my personal opinion, one of them being me.

Great work on SPF by the way guys.

Regards,

A random developer looking in on the SPF project.

personally I tend to agree with you.
But, virtually everything we do along these lines is optional which brings that decision to the forum owner and they are the one who should be evaluating their users needs.

Wow 10+ years and you don’t use Phpbb or VBulletin, two of the most used forum softwares available? Both have the “annoying” pop-up feature. which by the way, is delayed so it’s not like things are popping up all over the place when you move the mouse around the screen.

Why would you call something “lazy” just becuase it increases productivity? So 90% of the stuff you do on your computer was redesigned and tweaked for the benefit of “laziness”. Why should members have to click all the way through to the forum thread just because the post author wrote a lousy title that doesn’t indicate the content? Isn’t it better to be able to get a quick sneak peak to know if it’s worth it to click?

I obviously think SPF is superior and I like the guys who wrote the software, but let’s not be scared to check out what the competition is doing and let’s not be scared to think they’re doing it because it’s a good idea. Ego is never a good thing when it comes to developing.

I have used internet and phpbb for years and years (could date myself and say well over 20 years, but why ) and its not the default behaviour I have seen on any of my forums or those visited… might be in 3.x now, as I did find some doing it today when researching this…  but thats relatively new…  and must admit never seen it before in my forum visits…

but as andy says, we are all about choice, so when implemented, will be a choice left up to the admins and maybe even to each user…

Mr. Papa I swear your post count just hit 10,000 last week now you’re nearly at 10,450! Did you go intot he database to adjust your count? =P

I humbly stand corrected. I just realized that all of the forums I see that on are VBulletin and not PHPBB. There are more pressing issues than this and it was only a suggestion because it is really convenient on heavily populated forums. I wish I could edit my post!

you cant? oh you mean the older one… yeah, only last post until someone else posts…

no worries – discussion is healthy! and we aim to please as many as we can… open ticket and will give it options for everyone! 😉

enroute to 20,000!!!

I see that this forum has the preview feature in place. How do I get this to work on my forum install?

Thanks in advance.

This functionality has been added to our 4.3 version, currently available in beta form, but it does require WP 3.0, also in beta…

Wow. That was quick. 🙂 Thanks. I look forward to this feature on the next stable release.