Some features that we would love to have on the forums:

Thread tags
The ability to apply tags or categories to topics similar to the way categories work for blog posts.

Thread ratings
User ratings on threads.  A simple 1-5 scale would be great for sorting the good stuff from the boring stuff.

Last Read feature
A last read link would take you directly to the latest reply that you have not read.  This is useful when you come to a multi-page topic and you aren’t sure where you left off.

Here’s a pic that shows this implemented on a different forum system for referrence:

Bump for this

A link to the last item in the thread is something that’s definitely needed!

I would also very strongly like to see the same thing available on the recent threads/postings list, per this thread: http://expressionengine.com/forums/viewthread/61956/

I’m still surprised that this last feature isn’t there already. If you are wanting to integrate a forum into the main site, you want a list of forum threads with links to the latest responses. Without it, you click on a ten page thread and you’re dumped at the top which isn’t terribly useful. Please please please look at adding this.

I gather there’s similar functionality when you reply to a thread in that you don’t see your reply, you instead see the start of the thread. Little usability things like this are what make all the difference. (Can’t say I’ve tried this last point as I’ve not yet used the forum module in anger enough to have threads long enough for this to become an issue).

David, both features you are asking for already exist.  Jim is suggesting not the showing of the last / latest reply, but the last one that you read.  Currently the ExpressionEngine forums do not track your activity at a reply level.

Ok well I’ve obviously got crossed wires there in interpreting what was written above. My apologies for that.

Ultimately the thing I’m looking for is the ability to embed the latest forum links on the front page of my site (which I’ve done with the exp:forum:topic_titles tag) and have the ability to embed links for each pointing to the _last_ post (read newest) in each thread listed. I’ve got the list of latest thread replies but the links themselves go to the start of the thread and not the end of the thread right? There are lots of “last” variables like last_rely_date, last_author, last_post (the content) but the one I cannot see is something like last_post_url i.e. a link. I’ve dug around in the various forums and when this has come up elsewhere people have been referred to the query module for custom “hacks”.

I was also going to talk about linking the “discuss” links on my articles to the tail end of the forum threads - but thinking about it some more I actually think linking to the start of the threads makes more sense here.

As far as I know the topic_titles_tag doesn’t allow you to link to the tail of each thread? But your remarks above seem to indicate maybe this is available and I’m intrigued.

Happy to be shown the error of my ways of course. Apologies if this ends up looking like something that should be in the tech support forum.

From the Topic Titles tag, no, not presently; from the forum templates, such as the forum and thread listings, yes.

I see there have been a few additions to the Topic Titles tag in the latest release (e.g. views). Great to see this tag getting some love and attention.

Is there any chance that we can get a {last_post_id} added so that we can construct links to the last post in the thread? Jumping to the first post on a multi-page discussion as we have now isn’t all that useful I’m afraid.

We already have a variety of ‘last_post’ entries including last_author_profile_path, last_post_date_format, last_post_relative_date, last_reply (the content of the post) so it would seem the code has access to information about this posting in the underlying query. Not having the id is a curious omission.

It’s a feature that would make a huge improvement in the usefulness of this tag.

I believe {last_post_id} is already available, and was made available at the same time as the reply info.  Is that not the case?

Derek Jones - 21 July 2008 05:45 PM

I believe {last_post_id} is already available, and was made available at the same time as the reply info.  Is that not the case?

Umm, it’s not in the documentation:
http://expressionengine.com/docs/modules/forum/recent_forum_topics.html

Ah so it’s not.  Well, it is available, I’ll make sure the docs get updated to reflect that.

Awesome! Thanks Derek.