Those who have been using the "New Post" features in the navigation bar have probably noticed the unreliability of it in the way that once you viewed it, if you visit the site later, it's over, all these posts are gone from the list, not even waiting until you actually read them. This renders the feature pretty much useless for people who don't frequent the board at least once a day and it was alerady useless for those who did, considering they get notified of all new replies on the front page list anyway. So we may have found a solution to this problem: using a mod allowing us to create custom pages, we could create an empty page then assign the page name (index.php?action=activity) to EZBlocks that shows only on that page. So what we did is have a copy of the recent topics block show up there, but have set the amount of topics to show up to 250. In addition to this, we also added another block that lists latest activity by individual posts, so it is easier to see if someone replied to a topic (and if a spambot goes loose).
On the old forums, we had a feature called Today's Active Topics. This did something similar, except it only showed topics with activity in the last 24 hours. The front page list could show up to 250 topics if we wanted, but the front page is all we could use it on and it was not a good place to have a list that large.
Now why the feature is on trial? Well, because we are not even sure these EZBlocks supports such high values. If we set such block to like 900, it will only show topics from a certain point, as if there was a cap. However, if people keep creating new topics or replying to ones that aren't currently in the list, they will appear in it and the oldest ones showing up will remain, hopefully, until we hit 250. Basically, we'll see how high the count can go, then cap the settings at this number, or hopefully 250. The same will be done with the individidual replies list.
So now, if you click the "New Posts" options in the navbar, it will take you to the new activity page instead of the unreliable thing we had, and this time, it will also be avaliable to guests:
http://www.omnimaga.org/index.php?action=activityThis should be handy too on these very high moments of activity, where unread topics gets bumped out of the front page list and you miss them completly. I seen some times where there were 25 topics with new posts in 8 hours and we can sometimes have about 30-35 topics with activity in the last 24 hours, if not more. On the old board, we've hit 55, once.
I hope you like and that it works as we want!
