vBulletin 3.7 First Look!

[Kier]

vBulletin 3.7 - First Look

It's that time again! Today, the vBulletin development team is proud to unveil for the first time the forthcoming vBulletin version: 3.7.0.

vBulletin 3.7.0 contains a plethora of new features, many of which have been long requested by users and customers, while other new features will come as a surprise to everyone. 3.7.0 is slated to be the final major release of the vBulletin 3.x series before all forum development efforts are switched over to vBulletin 4.x, after which 3.x will receive only bug fix releases.

In terms of timescales, the plan is to upgrade vBulletin.com to run on vBulletin 3.7.0 on Monday (November 26th) and to let it run for a few days in order to get some feedback and bug reports before releasing the first public beta.

So, to the important bit: what's new in vBulletin 3.7?

Answer: Lots. But here, in no particular order, are some highlights...

[Kier]

Inline Spam Management and Prevention Tools

Forum spam is an increasing problem for many boards. Unfortunately, due to the visible-source nature of vBulletin and most other forum systems, most preventative measures we might add to the system can simply be reverse-engineered and worked around by persistent spammers.

Therefore, 3.7 contains a new set of tools to help clean up spam and deal with spammers.

Threads and posts can be selected in the usual inline moderation fashion, and then the new 'Delete Threads/Posts as Spam' command can be selected, which will load the spam management interface, which contains options on a single page for removing the spam posts and threads, banning the spammers and finding other spam they may have posted.

[Kier]

Thread Tagging

A new way to facilitate searching and grouping of threads, it is now possible for users to add tags to threads they post or read.



Tags can be added when creating a new thread, or to an existing thread by any user (with appropriate permissions).



Any users who then click on these tags will not only find all thread that have the same tag as the one clicked, but will also contribute to the building of a search tag cloud, which gives users a quick guide as to what has been searched for recently and most frequently.

[Kier]

Thread Prefixes

Long requested by users, threads can now have administrator-defined prefixes to their titles.



Thread prefixes are divided into groups by the administrator, allowing different prefixes to be available in different forums.



Update

Here is a new screengrab showing some of the thread prefix administration system, which should answer a lot of questions we have been receiving.

[Kier]

Reciprocal Friendships Between Users

As part of our new social networking system, users can now request that people on their buddy list confirm their friendship, after which time a person's list of confirmed friends will be viewable to other users.

[Kier]

Public Messaging

While private messages between users have been in vBulletin since version 2.0, vBulletin 3.7 introduces the public messaging system, allowing users to communicate publicly via their profile pages.