Thread

I’ve been digging around in the discussion forum area of our site (front and back) looking for the right tools to be able to change the statuses of different message threads to announcements and sticky threads and have not been able to do it.

Can you guide me?

Also, including this information in the help section would be helpful.

Thanks,

Hi AJ,

Sure thing!

What you want to do is select the topic that you want to make the change for. Once have that open, via the Forum front-end not the Control Panel, click “Edit” of the first post. In the Edit screen you will see Options, with a link for “More options”. Once there, you will be able to change the announcement and sticky status for the thread.

Hope this helps!

Cheers!

Hey Dan - just found this while searching for my related question ...

Once I have set an Announcement to “closed” (via Forum front-end/Edit etc) ... how do I find it again if I want to re-open it?

Is there a place in the UI somewhere to see all closed announcements (or even threads)?

Thanks!

Robert

Hi Robert,

There’s currently not a way to search for closed threads using the fact that they’re closed as a data point. When you’re looking at the closed thread, however, you can re-activate it by clicking the “Activate Thread” link to the upper right corner of the first post in the thread. You must be logged in as a forum administrator, of course.

Does that help?

Thanks Kevin - so to clarify then, when you say “When you’re looking at the closed thread” - how do I look at it once it’s closed?

Sounds like I just need to keep the urls of closed threads somewhere handy?

I ask because we have announcements that we regularly open/close (with edits) and once I close one, it disappears from the announcement list.

Thanks!

Robert

Right, the threads still show up in the forum if it’s a regular post (not an announcement, as you’ve noted), but there’s not one central place to find all closed threads. For announcements, you might just need to keep a list of those handy.

Thanks Kevin for clarifying - by the way, I can’t find any User Guide for the forum other than the webmaster “install, maintain etc” at http://ellislab.com/expressionengine/user-guide/modules/forum/index.html, where the feature descriptions are more about the backend UI, not the actual “front-end” - do you know if this exists anywhere, or is it expected to be intuitive?

Sounds like I might need to use direct access to the sql db to search for the closed threads (that are Announcements) - I would have thought that Super Admins should be able to see Announcements even if they are closed (somewhere) but that sounds like ti is a limitation and needs to be suggested as a feature.

Thanks for the help in any case 😉

There isn’t any more comprehensive documentation on the front-end of the forums, though that’s something we’d like to do.

Sounds like this might be a good opportunity to develop a simple plugin to output the information you want to a page that only logged-in Admins can see!

Hmm, a plugin is a good idea - we’ve recently been doing some work on a plugin to run ads inside the forum (it’s finished and up and running on our own forum, with thread-specific and ‘global’ ads with control over repetition and suppression of global if a “thread-specific” exists) so this should be a breeze!

Hi Robert.S,

Congrats on your ad plugin! And good luck on the administrative plugin.

Is there anything else I can assist you with?

Cheers,