Wedge

*nods* Take the feature I'm working on: making the anti-spam questions support multiple languages and multiple answers per question instead of one language, one answer per question... so far I'm up to about 10 hours and counting for what is theoretically a tiny feature.

Oh, I know that feeling too, having actually written a novel in the past, heh. But yes, it's certainly true and you'd be surprised how many people don't actually realise that's the case.

That's also a massive task to actually perform in terms of art assets (having looked at it before), again it's plugin material, though I know exactly how I'd do it if I had the art assets handy.

Some interesting ideas, there, thanks for sharing!

Let me explain one thing up front about our plugin system. It is designed with two things in mind: 1) No file edits, at all, are possible with the plugin system. 2) It's designed less about specific versions and more about features, meaning that plugins should be able to work across versions by detecting what facilities are available. Certainly that's been true for the last 6 months since we implemented it.


1. I'm not sure thread prefixes are really necessary in the core, to be honest. While I've seen it as a core feature in XenForo, and I've even made use of it there, it isn't something I've seen on most forums. However, it would make a great plugin, and I've certainly thought about it for here in the past. What it might be worth doing is implementing it as a plugin and seeing how much use it gets there.

2. It might be used in every promotion forum, but I guarantee you that's a tiny fraction of the forums out there. Certainly a points plugin is on my to-do list because I'm just not convinced it needs to be there by default for every forum. Remember: it's not just promotion forums out there, there are many, many, many kinds of forum, and remember that everything that's in the core has to be maintained by us and it does mean it makes it slower for everyone that doesn't need it.[1]

3. I really can't see this being in the core. Knowing as I do how many people have trouble with these on shared hosting, I'd avoid it for the most part. There *is* a sort of chat facility of sorts with the 'Thoughts' system as evidenced here (this is not a plugin) but it's not auto-refreshing, which is where it clashes with shared hosting. Live chat is also very often good at *discouraging* posts.

4. What does 'look amazing' mean? That's the problem we have to deal with - I've never really seen a 'great' profile page, very often it's pretty bare and the people who do want it to be more 'pretty' are those who want to clutter it up with stuff. Generally I find that complex profile pages discourage people from actually posting if they're spending a lot of time in the profile area instead of posting... but it invariably ends up being a high-demand low-real-use thing.

5. As you say yourself it's a niche facility. But it's certainly one we can put as a plugin.

6. Yes, yes it is needed. How often do people leave themselves logged into the likes of Facebook? There are also performance aspects to it, too.

7. That's built in. It's just off by default because it's really annoying. I did look at rewriting it a while ago, just never finished it.

8. There's a good reason you've never seen it as a built in option. In fact, there's several reasons why you've never seen it built in, and to sum those up, we have performance, security and ease of use, which are all affected by having it a core feature. Great plugin material however.

9. Well, a member's list is built in, even if I once wanted to rip it out entirely. Making it look prettier to include avatars is no big deal, though.

10. That's built in. I just don't think it's the default. Try it from your PM area.

1.	This is the sort of thing we have to consider when we're doing things.

It was certainly the hardest part for me to make the mental leap from English to French when I studied it to cope with the fact that the majority of terms suddenly had gender to them; in English, the only items that have a gender are done so anthropomorphically - ships, for example where they are referred to as female, correlated to 'You treat her like a lady. And she'll always bring you home.'[1]

Then after a year of studying French, Spanish was also thrust upon me. Fortunately there's a lot of similarity in the languages - including the genders - so I didn't totally fail both, but I dropped Spanish as soon as I had the opportunity and concentrated on the you-will-study-one-foreign-language choice I was actually going to study. The sad part is that although I passed French GCSE in 2000, I haven't been back to France since then :/

1.	Now, anyone that can name where I got that quote without Google or IMDb wins a free internet.

Heh, yes, it should, but for the purpose for which I needed it, 'le' was fine :P When I commit this and you update, you can do it properly here ;)

I think that's the basis for it, however it's not two replies, it's one reply.