PH Wishlist Item - Subscribe to OP within Threads

[Kozy]

Good idea!

[Goodsteed]

Brilliant Idea. Got my support.

[n3il123]

Sounds like a good idea to me, as people have said some threads you can't see what is happening with all of the "noise".

[Poison Tom 96]

Agreed!

[K50 DEL]

Agreed, often thought it would be nice to just read the posts by the OP of a thread.

[The Jolly Todger]

Is there an official way to put this suggestion to the PH tech team for comment?

I had assumed (wrongly it seems) that posting in this forum was the best way to go about this.

[Switch]

The Jolly Todger said:

Is there an official way to put this suggestion to the PH tech team for comment?

I had assumed (wrongly it seems) that posting in this forum was the best way to go about this.

Hi there. You did not assume incorrectly. We're just very busy and sometimes miss things.

In short, no, there's no easy way to do this. largely because of the size of the database, it would broadly speaking require a search of all posts within a topic, rather than the current system which only looks at a topic last reply field.

Given the sorts of topics you're talking about (Nazi bunker for instance) the added load on the db (searching 100's of post rather than a single row(per watched topic in my stuff)) would be prohibitive I'm sorry to say.

[The Jolly Todger]

Switch said:

Hi there. You did not assume incorrectly. We're just very busy and sometimes miss things.

In short, no, there's no easy way to do this. largely because of the size of the database, it would broadly speaking require a search of all posts within a topic, rather than the current system which only looks at a topic last reply field.

Given the sorts of topics you're talking about (Nazi bunker for instance) the added load on the db (searching 100's of post rather than a single row(per watched topic in my stuff)) would be prohibitive I'm sorry to say.

Thanks for the reply.

It seems it would require an additional field on the 'topic table' to record the 'OP Last Reply' (this assumes we are only dealing with subscribing to the OP's posts). A change to the posting logic would also be needed to check whether the poster is the OP or not and, if so, to update the new field accordingly.

I can see that it would be a reasonably involved change and given your apparent workload, perhaps one for the back-burner.

[Fastdruid]

That's a fair response, although there are other ways you could do it.

How about my option?

Fastdruid said:

I'd like it but I'd settle for a filter by user option to only display posts by a specific user.

[Switch]

Fastdruid said:

That's a fair response, although there are other ways you could do it.

How about my option?

Fastdruid said:

I'd like it but I'd settle for a filter by user option to only display posts by a specific user.

Oddly enough that might be easier.
My post in the ignoring thread about a plugin to hide posts by a person would work the other way round....

However.... hmmmmmmmm. I might have an idea... There might be a sensible way to have a... let's say... collapsed view of a topic. HMMMM

ETA: I'll go find my tools...

Edited by Switch on Wednesday 15th January 12:37

[TonyRPH]

Maybe I'm oversimplifying this but...

1) You already have logic to alert users to new posts by any member
2) You also know who the OP is, as defined by the "Original Poster" sub heading.

So..

If a user is subscribed to a thread, and wants to only know about posts by the OP, wouldn't it be relatively trivial to determine this using the above logic?

Only place an alert in "My Stuff" if a post is by the OP? Sounds simple to me...

I realise this doesn't account for the other part of the feature request - being able to follow an OP throughout the site - but the above is a start surely?

[Switch]

TonyRPH said:

Maybe I'm oversimplifying this but...

1) You already have logic to alert users to new posts by any member
2) You also know who the OP is, as defined by the "Original Poster" sub heading.

So..

If a user is subscribed to a thread, and wants to only know about posts by the OP, wouldn't it be relatively trivial to determine this using the above logic?

Only place an alert in "My Stuff" if a post is by the OP? Sounds simple to me...

I realise this doesn't account for the other part of the feature request - being able to follow an OP throughout the site - but the above is a start surely?

The logic for the "Op" is built into the topic display logic rather than the topic as a single entity.
Ie there's and

IF Reply.Poster.MemberId = Topic.OriginalPoster.MemberId write "Original Poster"

Where as a topic has Topic.LastPostMemberId as a property. which doesn't help because unless you happen to look at the same time the op posts again you won't see it.

To "Hide all non OP posts" in a topic while viewing however, might just be manageable without farking about with the stuff lower down.

I hope this answers your question....



ETA: The logic for the My Stuff alerts is based around a join between a subscribed table, the topics table and some cookies, however without the page searching the replies for each topic the required information isn't surfaced.

Edited by Switch on Wednesday 15th January 13:36

[OddJoe]

Dunno what happened to this but was reading an old thread and I thoroughly approve of this! Get it done hamsters....

[RacingPete]

OddJoe said:

Dunno what happened to this but was reading an old thread and I thoroughly approve of this! Get it done hamsters....

As part of the changes to the forum search which we are starting this month it will mean features like this will be far easier to implement - not promising we can do this now, but a step in that direction.