New XF Features and You

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While very similar to vBulletin on the surface, XenForo contains quite a few very welcome new features.

The first thing you'll likely notice about XenForo is the Alerts system (top right). It works in the same way as in vBulletin, only it notifies you of many more things, making it much more useful.

You can also "tag users", that is draw the attention of a certain user to any post by prefacing their username with "@" inside a post. Here I'm abusing @Blackthorne TA 's attention to demonstrate.

You'll be familiar with the post liking system already, since it's all but replaced Reputation over the last few years on our old forums, but now Reputation is gone completely, so so much about that. If you like someone's post, hit the "Like" link next to the Reply.

You can also "Follow" users and in turn, other users can Follow you. The posts from users you Follow show up in a separate new posts feed (Your News Feed) accessible from your pop-down shortcuts panel that opens when you hover over your username to the left of the Inbox link in the top right area of every forum page. Speaking of which, hovering your mouse over each of the top-right links will provide you with certain useful information.

I'll add additional info on various new features as they come up or upon request, so if anything new's got you stumped, simply ask what it's all about in here.

 

Cool. I like that tagging/alert system.

 

It's one of the best XF features, I think.

Another very useful "trick" is to tick "Automatically watch threads that you create or when you reply" in your preferences. That way you will be notified via an alert on the boards every time someone replies to your thread or post, which is very handy since it eliminates the need for any kind of manual checking. You can achieve the same for every other thread by clicking on the "Watch Thread" link on top of every thread.

 

No, but check this thread for the post-import FAQ.

 

Another potentially life-saving feature is the "Drafts" feature of the message editor. It essentially means no more lost posts, ever. Everything that you type into the text field is being periodically saved even before you submit a post, so if for whatever reason your post doesn't go through, you accidentally close the window or press the Back button, most if not all of your post should still show as a draft when you return to the text editor box. You can manage the present draft by clicking on the "Floppy Disk" icon in the message editor.

 

Is there a way to mark a particular forum read without going into it or marking everything read? Used to be that you could double click on the indicator that said that the forum had unread posts, but that didn't work when I tried it just now.

(Looking better and better, by the way. )

 

Oh well, sort of defeats my purpose, but it is what it is.

 

Hmm, there is no option to hide it for those who don't want to see it like there was with the old media showcase. I'll see if we can do something about that.

 

Maybe just move it to the bottom of the page.

 

I tried but it's too out of sight there. We've got a lot of good stuff in the gallery and I'd like for people to use it more, so I'm intentionally giving it a more prominent place.

 

Baby pictures are really in the minority in there.

Setting it to "Owner Only" effectively makes them private, but I'm guessing that people didn't upload them just so that only they could look at them...

There are varying levels of exposure you can give your albums now, however. From purely "owner only" to "everyone" and in between to "members only" or "people you follow" only. In addition to that, you can also limit exposure only to certain specified users. So the flexibility is definitely there now.

The Random Media block is just that, however -- it's grabbing random non-private media and showing it. If we wanted to show, say, only screenshots, this would require either very stringent adherence of all the users to only making gaming screenshots public (=impossible) or modding the random media showcase to only show hand-picked albums, which would again require a lot of work as it would constantly have to be manually updated. So neither option is very realistic. Personally I don't mind seeing non-game images though, but YMMV.

 

Sure, we could filter by tags, but someone would still need to properly tag everything existing and future, which would be quite a bit of work. There is a way to hide that element on a user level, but I'll need to custom-build it so it won't happen immediately as there are more pressing issues to handle beforehand. I've made a suggestion to the gallery author to add the option, though.