I've been trying to wait on this request for Version 8 to come out, to see if it would handle it, but I think I really need to find SOME way to get this working on 7. It is really killing our traffic.

We used to have the sidebar of our BellaOnline.com forum show all recent posts. It really made for lively conversations and back-and-forth. However, we have a few 'games' that run in the forums and they would often end up being the ones that featured, which then interrupted the actual discussion forums. After a number of discussions in here about ways we could handle this, we finally went to a layout where we showed recent brand new topics, not just posts. That way the games, which were begun years ago, wouldn't show up.

However, it now means you have no quick way of seeing when a discussions is going on. You have to go digging them out of the actual forums (we have 400 forum areas). So the forum traffic has really dropped as a result. Which is not good.

I need *some* way of having that sidebar show all the recent posts - but exclude the specific threads that have the games in them. There must be some way to edit the code so it doesn't update that list if a thread matches a certain set of IDs.

Any thoughts?

Bella I am not sure if this can be done (as many things that you do on your site I don't have on mine) however, could you set permissions up for those game forums where they are not in the recent posts box? I seem to remember that there is a way to make a forum not be reported as a featured forum... I will look and see if I can find the button in the control panel..but seems to me that with all the permissions we can edit there, that there is something there either in forum permissions or in site permissions that does this. (though I could be wrong, as I have never actually had to do any of that).

Dunny

It's possible. If you're just using the standard post islands, then what you'll need to do is get the list of TOPIC IDs that you want to exclude. You then need to edit the cache_builders/post_island.php file. Look for a query around line 70 or so. You'll see a portion that has the following code:



Right after that, add the following. A comma delimited list of your TOPIC IDs that you want to exclude. I'm using 2,4,6,8 as an example.

Awesome!! Thank you so much, this will make a huge difference in our forum traffic!

Dunny -

I've done a lot of customization on my forums over the years - most of the code should be here in the forums. If you have a question about something feel free to ask!

Thanks Bella!

OK I think it's not quite working correctly? My code reads:

and t1.TOPIC_ID NOT IN (440794,613732,613731,613729,464338,528073,440794,396215,379866,613475)

I put that in yesterday. However when I look at the forum today, one of the featured threads is this one -

http://forums.bellaonline.com/ubbthreads.php/topics/528073/Town_ABC_Game#Post528073

That shouldn't be showing up in the list, right?

Another featured post is this one -

http://forums.bellaonline.com/ubbthreads.php/topics/379866/Word_Association_Game#Post379866

which is also in the ID list.

OK just to cause a bit more trouble, that query there we're playing with is bringing back and entire MONTH of data, which is HUGE. So every time the database is creating that query it's working with gobs of data, while all it wants is the last 10 entries, which happened within the last hour.

Can I at least change this so it only works with the last day? Surely that would speed up the query vastly, and not unnecessarily bring in the other 29 solid days worth of data in the results set.

Is this query used for anything else besides that "recent posts" island?

I assume you are referring to the "Brand New Posts" island on your site.
It seems okay now possibly the cache was in play at the time.

There is a topic called food game but it is not on your list.

On the one month value.
All it does is exclude anything older than a month.
Even if you allowed 2000 posts in the island the default would only go back 30 days to display.
In your case you limit it to ten posts.
And you have quite a bit of traffic.
If you want to change it search for.

Around line 70 on the same file.
The 86400 is the number of seconds per day.
the value of 30 makes it days.
So if you want say 14days change the 30 to 14.

If you start seeing less that ten posts in the island then it is because there are less than ten in 14 days.