I was posting a new thread tonite, and decided I wanted it in another forum than the one I opened the new thread box in. So I looked over the page ID to figure out how to manipulate it to post in the right place, without having to move around the board.
I noticed that the ID for a new post ends in 'forumid=#. MPSIMS is apparently 4. I take it they were assigned based on when they were created.
The forum IDs are such:
CoCC forumid=1 Makes sense, wasn’t that the first forum?
ATMB forumid=2 Also logical
GQ forumid=3 Again with the logic
MPSIMS forumid=4
Pit forumid=5
CoMA forumid=6
GD forumid=7
And the baby, IMHO. Logically, IMHO would be forumid=8, right? Wrong. Check it out. It’s forumid=12. [Hank Hill voice]Whut th’ Hell?[/Hank Hill voice]
TubaDiva, you have some 'splainin to do! ::taps foot::
I figure you guys had some trouble when creating a new forum, and ended up deleting it right away and making a new one. But why the HELL would it take 5 instances to get it right? And why couldn’t you just edit the forum you had created? And don’t say “room for growth.” Feh!
I will confine myself to the observation that things that sometimes seem terribly important at 4:00 in the morning, later on, in the light of day, seem not so important.
Tim, sweetie, I really do worry that you’re not getting enough sleep.
The hidden fora are all identical. They are called Archives–The Reference Section. Each of them is empty except for Ed Zotti’s announcement about the new e-zine. Hey, Tuba, where do I apply to become moderator of forum number 9? Now there’s a job I might be able to handle. http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/forumdisplay.php?forumid=8
Back in the vB days, we had separate archive versions of each forum. A particularly good thread, that the mods wanted to preserve in perpetuity, would be moved to one of those archives, where it would always stay near the top of the list, and where nobody could post, so as to keep out irrelevant comments. vBulletin doesn’t seem to have an “archive” feature, so those threads are now normal threads again, but I believe that they’re still all locked. They might actually still be living in the secret fora, but they’re all old, so you’d have to set it to view all threads, not just ones from 2 or 10 or whatever days ago.
It looks like you DO have the archive feature.
You just need to put a button to one of those forums on the main menu, and default it to “show all threads”.
It would be especially good for the “special coding” tricks, where people always get directed to the incomplete vB page before someone points out that thread with all the extra features**Don’t forget the link. Here’s how to post one, Part Next**
A third is a list of “unwritten rules” that trip new people up, like “search first”, “put in a link”, “don’t double post”, “post in the right forum”, “email a mod when you have a major error (e.g, libel) to be edited out”, “use moderate signature blocks”
We set those forums up thinking we’d just transfer them over like we did the current forums, but . . . something happened.
Not sure what. Jerry the Tech God said he worked with 'em a bunch and couldn’t get them to convert properly.
So we just set those aside and kept on moving forward.
I don’t know if we’ll ever have separate archives. It was a big deal with UBB (our former message board software), they encouraged you to archive/delete all posts over a month old, the system couldn’t take a lot of posts and archiving moved them into another area. vB handles things differently and it doesn’t matter, you can move them if you like but they all get treated the same and apparently a load of old posts ain’t no big deal.
The archive forums are closed to new posts anyway, so they’re just empty. Move along, nothing to see here . . .
Sounds like Chronos/barflyer have a way to make them work again. If not that way, maybe by the method of putting them into the “announcement threads” that stay near the top of the list. Or maybe at least in FAQ.
Seeing those vast, empty fora is like walking into a room in your house you never noticed before… Or finding an old house in the middle of the woods. Kinda strange, while being very imposing, and slightly creepy (some would say very vaguely ) all at the same time.
) all at the same time.