[Darth-Apple]

Status Updates - Advanced Status Feed

Update May 2, 2020: I'm currently in finals week at university. Development will be resuming within about a week. Please check back soon!

We're working on a brand new plugin for MyBB to allow profile comments, status updates, and more. And firstly, it's actually mostly written! It's installed here in its full form. A little buggy, don't worry, we will be fixing that.

What makes this plugin very unique is that it is the ONLY MyBB status/profile comment plugin that supports replies. Yaldaram had one many years back. It is now gone, and no longer available or supported. 

We also have statuses show up on the postbit, and have a special "community wall" with all status updates. It's going to be a fully featured plugin by the time that we are finished developing it. 

What's already implemented:

•  
• Replies! In addition to writing statuses on your own profiles (or other user's profiles), you can reply to them. It's a unique feature to our plugin here. No other plugin (that I am aware of) supports this. 
  
• Built in alerts. (They are fully featured and actively being improved) 
  
• Support for user profiles, index page, portal page, and a standalone page. 
  
• Built in Jquery and ajax. (Will be expanded upon significantly.)
  
• Highly configurable. 17 settings already, even in the dev version. 
  
• Similar features to Profile Comments/MyProfile. Write a status on your own profile, or on another user's profile.
  

To be Completed:

• Add a like button. (Done) 
  
• Provide proper myalerts integration (and expand native alerts as well). 
  
• Moderator CP report functionality. 
  
• More ajax. Remove the redirect when you add or edit a new status. Make it appear instantly.  (Done)
  
• Style the postbit (under the avatar) statuses much better. (Done) 
  
• Make the "Community Wall" page much nicer. Add sorting by user, date, most liked, etc. into the mix. 
  
• Add a "buddy list only" sorting functionality so that you can either get notified when a buddy posts, or only see those posts on a special page. 
  
• Twitter-like hashtags?
  

The tentative release date for this new plugin is June of this year. BAM was ahead of its release schedule during development and ended up being released early. There is a possibility we will release the status feed early as well. We shall see, we will release it when it's ready.

What I need for contributions are: 

• Feedback and ideas. I can't know what features are needed (or how they are used) unless real forums share some insight on what they need! (Really can't stress this one enough. Trust me, it helps me as a developer quite a bit. )
  
• 3-4 people who will commit to helping test the beta version when it's released. (I currently have one comitted tester already. If you would like to join the testing team in the next few months, please reach out! )
  
• Some styling help. If you can come up with a few CSS or template edits on what we have here that will make them look awesome, please reach out! Design is not necessarily my strongest area, so I'm open to any contributions of any kind.  
  

Screenshots (so far):






Please stay tuned for more details. We are looking at around a 4 month development frame for this. And it will be an exciting release when it's time to push it forward! It might not be quite as polished as the profile comments plugin (or some other plugins that have been released that are similar), but I hope that we can still pull together and have a nice plugin to release soon.

[Darth-Apple]

Development is going very well!

Omar G. and Whiteneo from the MyBB community forums have expressed interest in contributing to this plugin, so it's definitely going to be a thing. We are very excited about developing this. I will probably work on getting the code in its current form on Github as quickly as possible in order to enable contributions from the community. The beta release will follow the initial github push by a couple weeks!

Please, by all means, tell us how you like the plugin here. It's being used on this forum as we develop it. There are many bugs I won't catch, so feature requests, bug reports, etc. are a very big help to us!

[nick]

Awesome. I really like that it's displayed in the postbit. I can't wait to see where this goes.

I see that you can like updates, I would really appreciate a setting to make it so that liking a status update adds to the users reputation. Would also love to see one for adding negative reputation, like IPS forums have.

Either way great job, this looks amazing

[Darth-Apple]

Awesome. I really like that it's displayed in the postbit. I can't wait to see where this goes.

I see that you can like updates, I would really appreciate a setting to make it so that liking a status update adds to the users reputation. Would also love to see one for adding negative reputation, like IPS forums have.

Either way great job, this looks amazing

Thank you, we really appreciate it! We're looking forward to releasing it. Can I ask where you found us by the way? 

Regarding the dislike button, it's been requested before. We aren't going to be able to do it in the first version unfortunately, but it's planned for a future release. We're looking at a mid-May release at the moment. Beta testing will begin around the end of April. 

[nick]

Thank you, we really appreciate it! We're looking forward to releasing it. Can I ask where you found us by the way? 

Regarding the dislike button, it's been requested before. We aren't going to be able to do it in the first version unfortunately, but it's planned for a future release. We're looking at a mid-May release at the moment. Beta testing will begin around the end of April. 

I found the forum from your myBB profile, checked it out because I use your announcements plugin and the idea of status updates had me really intrigued 

Mid May is awesome, thank you for the hard work. I'm really excited for it.

[Plushy]

Uh waiting for new features is always like Christmas °-°
My only real suggestion is adding a proper editor to quick reply... it's really annoying to insert all bbcode manually or go to the new replay and then check other post in case of quoting... urgh...

And for the negative reputation... mmmm.... by experience with a xenforo one... the bad reputation always ends like a whinny tool for psedotrolls... that could be somehow funny in larger sites for shitposting n stuff but in small communities where most users are just good people is unnecessary and just bring troubles. If a jerk just come to bring trouble... ban and that's all.

[Darth-Apple]

I agree on the reputation point. My only concern with it is that it's generally fairly difficult to get rep on a forum. On a status update, it's just hitting the like button and you're done. People would end up getting 90% of their reputation from the status feed. That being said, a future version will probably have a setting to enable it at some point. We're taking suggestions pretty seriously and working on implementing everything that we can, but this one just won't fit in the first release unfortunately.

Regarding the bbcode editor, that's a very good point. I'll look into it and see what we can do. Going to put a target of the beta 2 release on this, so it won't be in the first beta, but we will have something to address this before the final release. Thank you.

[Lain]

Uh waiting for new features is always like Christmas °-°
My only real suggestion is adding a proper editor to quick reply... it's really annoying to insert all bbcode manually or go to the new replay and then check other post in case of quoting... urgh...

And for the negative reputation... mmmm.... by experience with a xenforo one... the bad reputation always ends like a whinny tool for psedotrolls... that could be somehow funny in larger sites for shitposting n stuff but in small communities where most users are just good people is unnecessary and just bring troubles. If a jerk just come to bring trouble... ban and that's all.

(Not the dev, but...)

I reckon a settings switch for dislikes wouldn't be difficult to implement.
I mean, its functionality is identical to Likes, so nothing more than a copy/paste job, and if the setting is disabled, just don't parse it when generating the page. Keeps both types of communities happy that way.

But I don't think a full SCEditor implementation is a good thing. It's already a bloated mess of hacky JS w/ dynamic styling, and functional issues like sometimes bolding doesn't work when you click bold (or rather doesn't turn off until you select the text you want to bold/unbold then click it again).
I wouldn't go that far to add the majority of the current (default) MyBB editor, but maybe a little dropdown menu that has five buttons (Bold, Underline, Italics, Link, Smilies [w/ submenu]) that just inserts the BBCode tags (i.e. source mode in the editor) at the location of the cursor. Most of the functionality can be taken from SCEditor, but in source mode as to not start weird issues.

Anything else would be bloat, probably. No need for images, videos, colors (because of a site's theme), or anything else, really.

[Darth-Apple]

What I'm planning at the moment is to have a link to a popup modal for "advanced editor". It will just be a small link that's out of the way below the text field, but a popup (similar to the alerts one we use here) will load with a simple (but complete enough) text editor for basic BBcodes. It would avoid bloat, but still have enough features to be worthwhile and be easy to access. Not sure yet, we may come up with something that works better. We will see.

MyProfile has the complete full blown editor inline. I never really liked that too much. I suppose it was just my preference, it's a popular plugin nonetheless, but it seems a bit much...

Thanks for the feedback and suggestions guys. It's very helpful to us as we develop it!

[nick]

Trolls will be trolls I suppose. Every now and then I have someone on my forum who abuses something, but it is what it is. On the other hand, I have made some modifications to the reputation system on my forum to give it an actual use instead of just another statistic. I use it as a way for my community to reward quality content and to punish poor content. People who have high reputation have access to greater privileges. I really like the idea Discourse has, where they have a trust system and at the final tier users are allowed basic moderation privileges. Using group promotions this is achievable in MyBB. So basically, strong participators in the community, backed by the community, will eventually be able to aid the community. But yeah, I hope you do implement the reputation addition, it would be very much used and appreciated.

TL;DR - it would be one step in the direction of modernizing MyBB

[Darth-Apple]

Thank you for the kind words. We're very excited about this.

It's largely on a short ~3 week hiatus while I wrap up this semester. I'm a senior at university full time, and have been working 40 hours a week while I still have a job. The coronavirus madness has had me a lot busier than expected.

A lot of more advanced features are being scheduled for the second release. The initial release is focused on stability (and on being in general ready for release). One advantage that we have on this one is that we are ONLY doing a status plugin. I believe strongly in doing one thing and doing it well. MyProfile had a large collection of plugins to maintain, which made adding features a little more difficult.

I am working hard to make sure that this one is stable and easier to maintain in coming years. I'd ideally like to do a separate plugin to reorganize the template on the profile to a more IPB-like look, but there has been some talk among other MyBB developers of someone else who may be doing this soon. If they want to take that on, I can focus on this, and we'll have a proper collection of profile plugins that are more modular and easier to maintain.

It's also nice that we are getting TONS of user feedback and testing in on a live install of this as we develop. It's been difficult to maintain up-to-date versions of it as I develop, but it's been worth it. We already have live forums that have agreed to install the final beta (when it comes out) on their communities ahead of the release. I'm honored that we're trusted well enough for members of the community to help us test.

That said, I'm very nervous about this one. I'm glad there are some people who have expressed some interest in contributing. It's a large plugin compared some of my past ones.

[Shimon]

Love it!! Can't wait to download!
When do you plan to relese it?

[Darth-Apple]

Thank you for the feedback! It’s on a short hiatus while I finish this semester at university. In a couple weeks, work will resume and a beta will be released shortly after that.

The release will be someone next month!

[Darth-Apple]

Update,

Many of you have been checking for updates on this plugin. It has been on a month-long hiatus due to an unusually busy university schedule. The good news is that I am finished with finals and my schedule has finally freed up, so development will be resuming!

I don't have a release date at this time, but I will be updating this thread periodically as development continues. Every few days, the development code will be pushed to the live site here, so you will be able to see changes as we move along.

Stay tuned, more updates coming!

[Darth-Apple]

Hello everyone,

I've made great progress this weekend. It's getting relatively closed to being beta-ready! None of the changes are on the live MS forum yet, but I'll be pushing them live sometime in the next week or so.

The next version will have some design tweaks/improvements, bug fixes, the ability to see who has liked a status (via an ajax tooltip that displays the list on hover), among other improvements. Additionally, editing and deleting statuses will be much simpler and have a dropdown menu rather than hiding the delete functionality within the edit button. Reporting statuses is now supported as well.

Most of the CSS and javascript is now within custom stylesheets/JS files, which will make it easier to modify in the future. Some code reorganization will still be needed before I'm ready to push the code here. Once that's completed, MyAlerts integration is the biggest addition that's left and it will be ready for the beta.

Stay tuned for more.

[tc4me]

oh yes, it has definitely turned out great again, I'm looking forward to it!

[Shimon]

There is any update? I'm looking forward to install it in my forum~

[Darth-Apple]

There is any update? I'm looking forward to install it in my forum~

Yes, progress is still going on. My apologies for the delays! I have been much busier than normal because of Covid and other related RL changes. 

I had some time this evening to iron out a few more issues and get some things working. I'm currently working off a dev site (so changes won't take place here until I push them later on), but I was able to get a few things implemented: 

   

Other changes include a new reporting system (needed for release), lots of little HTML/template details, and more operations were converted to Ajax. The only "big" thing left to do is MyAlerts integration, so progress is being made. We are getting much closer.