I just happened to be looking at the little icon legend at the bottom of the thread list:
Yellow Open Envelope for new posts.
Grey Sealed Envelope for no new posts.
However there’s also:
Red Open Envelope for new posts (More than 15 replies or 150 views).
Grey Sealed Envelope with rays for no new posts (More than 15 replies or 150 views).
Any reason why we don’t see the second two even on threads that meet the criterion? Just another board feature that went unimplimented to save hampster power?
As I recall, that feature was turned on for a while after we switched from ubb to vB. It seemed that it wasn’t a particularly useful feature as so many of our threads exceed those criteria.
On a message board with less traffic, highlighting the threads that generate the most interest might be worthwhile, but here, where a majority of threads in some forums would be highlighted, it doesn’t really add anything.
I suppose then, my next question would be how hard would it be to hack vB to remove those icons, or for that matter the Edit button that appears under each post? They serve no purpose, it just chews up bandwidth.
Billdo’s right: we chose to deactivate those options. We could hack them out, I’m sure, but our tech staff is usually really hesitant to alter the vB-software in any way. Since these changes would be mere convenience and would add no functionality, I’d say the chances of the superfluous envelope icons being hacked out are slim.
Also, the edit icons ARE needed - for the moderators.