The MGS Forum
The Forum => How the Forum works => Topic started by: MikeHardman on August 12, 2011, 05:38:27 PM
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One of the links I use most often in the MGS Forum is "Show unread posts since last visit."
But it would be soooooo useful if there was also a link "Show my posts".
Many times I want to check something I have posted or update it or make a follow-up posting, and the only way I see of finding it at the moment is to use the Search facility, specifying some pertinent keyword, then looking through the list of hits to find the intended posting. Not very efficient, to say the least. And as the forum grows, that will only get worse.
Also, although the Search facility lets you specify the poster (in the 'by user:' box), it won't let you search unless there is also something in the main text box ('Search for:'). So I can't search for all my posts efficiently that way.
(And just searching for my name as a piece of text returns no hits.)
Other forums have a "Show my posts" link, please can we have one here, too?
eg. http://www.cyprusliving.org/phpbb/nfphpbb/index.php ('View your posts', top-right of the main table).
Note that that forum also provides a 'View unanswered posts' link. That would also be very useful in the MGS forum.
If anybody else has a view on this, please speak up - otherwise Alisdair will think I am being picky again :)
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Mike, When we were planning the forum, we chose the simple machines forum package because it seemed to us to have a good many presentational advantages which we reckoned would make it suit typical users better than other packages (such as for example the phpBB bulletin-board-type system that that Cyprus forum uses).
You're right, it doesn't let you search for all your own postings, but we thought that would be very low on people's priorities, and reckoned that the usual thing would instead be simply to remember which of one's postings one did want to return to.
Of course, if there is a flood of requests for that facility, we'd do our best to oblige!
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Mike, During the night I had an idea which would make it much easier for you to retrieve your posts. Obviously there would be a whole lot that you'd never want to see again - where you were simply guessing at a plant, or seconding someone else's post. But the core that you might want to retrieve again: just add a little "trademark" at the end of the posting, that you would always use but that would be unique, then when you want to find posts with the trademark get on to the Home page (important first step in any global search) and search for that. I thought first of mh but that would throw up other posts (one so far in fact - David on carobs!), so you'd have to take something else like mhs or just qq.
Hope that helps!
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Alisdair,
Thanks for your thoughts, and their resultant idea. Gawd, I hope it wasn't actually keeping you awake at night!
However, I did a bit of digging on the Simple Machines Forum forum, and came across somebody else wanting the same feature (http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=347782.0 (http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=347782.0)). The SMF replied with a URL, which (modified for our forum) equates to http://www.mgsforum.org/smf/index.php?action=profile;area=showposts (http://www.mgsforum.org/smf/index.php?action=profile;area=showposts)
That can be saved as a bookmark, like any URL.
But also, it pointed me in the right direction to find a link that is already built into the forum, which I(/we) had simply overlooked!
Profile (tab) --> Show Posts (link on the left towards the top).
Minor point: there is a link at the end of the Profile page 'Show the last posts of this person.' That does exactly the same thing. That is, it shows all 58 of my posts, not just the 'last' ones. (Maybe once I have made 58,000 posts, it will show just the last ones.)
When pondering features for the MGS Forum, it is worth scouring the SMF forum. There are lots of enhancements in v.2 (we are on v.1.1.14 at the moment). So the feature may already be in the next release.
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Well, There you have it everyone, thanks to Mike's industrious digging!
Thanks for taking all that trouble to come up with a full answer to your own original question, Mike ;)