Who's online improvements

[Pilot]

Make the "currently active users" text into a hyperlink which takes you to a list of these active users, and shows which forum they are currently in (unless in a private forum).

This would get nearer to the UBB hack "who's online" functionality which I used to have before converting to VB.

At present - although you see the users online, you have no idea what they are doing. Obviously the display should show more details if the viewer is a moderator/admin.

[Freddie Bingham]

Like if you go to my forum and click on Active Users?

[leadZERO]

Now that is a cool new feature, available as a hack or next release feature?

[Pilot]

That's the sort of thing. It could list the forum name as well as or instead of the thread name.

It's important that private (including hidden) forums are excluded as I don't want users to even know they exist unless they have access!

On the other hand saying "in a private forum" might be a giveaway as well - so it might be better just to list them as "main forum page".

Hope we see something like that in 2.0.2..!

[JamesUS]

It won't be in 2.0.2 but 2.1 is a possibility.

Isn't there already a hack for this somewhere?

[Pilot]

The hacks here need sorting out into a "database" where they are indexed under different categories.

eg

Stand-alone addon.
Modification to index.php
Administration utility.

etc etc

More like ubbdev.com

At the moment the hacks forum is confusing as to which hacks are the best, most recent and easiest to implement. And what versions of VB they work with. A lot of them don't say that they support 2.0.1 which is after all the current version.

Perhaps not surprisingly, since so many features are standard, I have not been that impressed by the quality of hacks available for VB in terms of how well they are documented, tested with Netscape and other finishing touches.

Good hacks should pick up their colour schemes automatically from the installed VB site and that sort of stuff as well. Also I notice many hacks require you to code your database name etc. Surely they should pick that up from config.php?

[RobAC]

Originally posted by Pilot
The hacks here need sorting out into a "database" where they are indexed under different categories.

eg

Stand-alone addon.
Modification to index.php
Administration utility.

etc etc

More like ubbdev.com

At the moment the hacks forum is confusing as to which hacks are the best, most recent and easiest to implement. And what versions of VB they work with. A lot of them don't say that they support 2.0.1 which is after all the current version.

Perhaps not surprisingly, since so many features are standard, I have not been that impressed by the quality of hacks available for VB in terms of how well they are documented, tested with Netscape and other finishing touches.

Good hacks should pick up their colour schemes automatically from the installed VB site and that sort of stuff as well. Also I notice many hacks require you to code your database name etc. Surely they should pick that up from config.php?

I do agree with this, but what I think is most important is that before a hack is released, it should be tested in both Internet Explorer and Netscat.

I'll be the first to admit my strong distaste for Netscat. IE has it's issues as well and I although I love IE, I don't like the idea that IE is so willing to overlook missing code and poor code quality.

Also, the majority of internet users use Internet Explorer, however, based upon my own site statistics, I think there is still a significant number of users out there that visit my site using Netscape. For this reason, 95% of the time I test all applications and site additions in IE 5.5, 6.0 and Netscat 4.7 - 6.0.

As a web developer, I think that if you're going to spend the time to put together a hack, you should try and test it out on every platform that you have at your disposal before release.