New Features on the PriusChat Forums

The software update I performed earlier this week has enabled many new features on the PriusChat forums. Below I'll run through some of the new features.

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.



Thread Prefixes

Threads can now have administrator-defined prefixes to their titles. I have already implemented this in the Private Sales forum added "For Sale" "For Trade" and "WTB" as a selection of prefixes. This will be a great feature to integrate into other parts of the site in the future, as well.



Social Networking

This seems to be all the rage lately, and now we can use social networking features to expand on the community aspect of PriusChat.

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.



Public Messaging

You've always been able to send Private Messages on PriusChat. Well, now you can publicly message another user by posting a message on their profile page. Think of it like writing on someone's Wall in Facebook :frusty:



New Member Profile Page

In order to accommodate all the new features in vBulletin 3.7, the member profile page has been completely redesigned from the ground up.

The new page presents information in a far cleaner and more logical manner, while dividing up information into manageable chunks using a tabbed interface.



Inline Editing of Profile Field Values

The 'About Me' tab of each member's profile page has edit controls, allowing them to quickly change values without leaving their profile page.



Attachment Viewing Lightbox

Clicking on an attached image will now open a lightbox rather than open a new window, with the image scaled to fit the browser viewport. A click on the image in the lightbox will open it in a new window as before.



Social Bookmarking of Threads

I can now define a list of your favorite social bookmarking sites and have them available for use on the showthread page for bookmarking threads. If you have any sites that you would like for me to add, please let me know!



Also, all AJAX features use the Yahoo User Interface Library and are hosted by Yahoo in an effort to speed up PriusChat.

More feature announcements coming!

 

Private Message Quick Reply

I know how much I personally love the Quick Reply in the forums, so I went ahead and added the feature to the Private Messaging system as well.

Private Message Preview

You'll now notice that you will see a small portion of the Private Message you have received before you ever even click on it. This will help you stay sane if you get a lot of PMs like me by identifying messages without having to click through 5 of them to find the right one.

 

I can't find a way to disable it on a member level, Force. Sorry.

Bill, I'm taking a look into that...

 

You can subscribe to threads without having to receive email notifications. When you go to "Subscribe to thread" be sure to select the drop down on the following page under "Notification Type".

Then you can quickly check the threads that you have subscribed to on this page:

http://priuschat.com/forums/subscription.php?do=viewsubscription

The ones with this image have new posts in them since you last posted.