I apologize if the particular things I discuss here with regard to the Recent Topics module has discussed elsewhere in the forums here. I've searched around and found quite a number of threads on the module, but none I found brought up the matters I wish to discuss in this thread. I also hope that you folks will consider this post as useful feedback if nothing else. That is the spirit with which is intended.
I run a website called
CelticsBlog with currently a little over 3,400 members that is very active. During slow activity periods we may have around 150 to 200 people on the site. During busy periods we may have 2,500 there. I migrated our old site to Joomla and SMF at the beginning of the year. The JSMF bridge, modules and plugins have served us very well there. Our members enjoy the nice integration of the site with the forums and most of the JSMF functionality with one exception. Practically person on the site, both members and visitors dislike the Recent Topics module. There are two main complaints.
Complaint #1:I hear this from practically everyone -- The only time a topic gets listed in the module is when it is first created. After that it just gets pushed down and off of the list, quickly and completely, never to return. This irritates people to no end for two reasons: 1) They miss a lot of new topics that are created and, 2) to the last person, they are way more interested in the topics that have recently been posted in (whether new or old) than they are in just topics that have recently been created.
What they want to see is that a topic gets re-listed at the top of the topic list every time a new post is made to it. If the module did that, then it would produce a list of most recent topics that have been posted in and that would naturally include new topics as well as active, newly posted ones.
Complaint #2:Again, I hear this from practically everyone -- The only time a "New" icon shows up on a topic listed is when it is first created and is as of yet unvisited. After a topic has been visited, it never again shows a New icon no matter how many posts are being made in it. As far as most people seem to be concerned, that makes diminishes the function of the New icon almost to be useless.
Here's what they tell me they want from the module:They want a Recent Topics module that will list the most recently posted in topics in order from the latest to the least whether the topics are new or old and they want the module to indicate with the New icon which topics in that list contain posts they've not yet read.
Summary:It seems to me that they want is more like what the what the SMF SSI Recent Topics Function: (<?php ssi_recentTopics(); ?>) provides, but with a display better suited for use in a module and of course, more backend control over the parameters. I must say, I agree with them that this would probably be a much better module. As I mentioned earlier, I'm just providing you with some feedback.
Aside from what I've mentioned above, the only other thing that has ever been asked of me is for backend control over which categories/boards are displayed. That of course has been discussed elsewhere in these forums and I'm not so worried about that issue anyway. It would be nice to have, but I can pretty easily hack the module to control which boards show there.
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