'Recent threads' list on AG homepage

[saucyminx]

Ok, this is actually a technical question regarding the forum. I was just wondering how to make the recent forum thread appear on the main page. You know, the table on the main page that displays which current thread is going on in the forum? (I really hope I'm explaining this well). Does it come along with the VB board or did the webmaster figured it all out by himself? Explain??? :confused:

[Intrepid Homoludens]

On the upper right corner of every page are five little arrow tabs. The second one from the left = 'View New Posts'. This is a temporary setup and will be changed soon.

[Kode]

Ok, this is actually a technical question regarding the forum. I was just wondering how to make the recent forum thread appear on the main page. You know, the table on the main page that displays which current thread is going on in the forum? (I really hope I'm explaining this well). Does it come along with the VB board or did the webmaster figured it all out by himself? Explain??? :confused:

If you are talking about the portion on the main page of Adventure Gamers.com; the part that has this picture near it:
http://www.adventuregamers.com/images/smt_joinforums.gif

then I think that was coded from scratch by the coders of the site. It's usually something that allows the code to access the forum database and find out what the latest posts were and displays them there. If not that, it's likely to be a hack (addon) for VBulletin.

[remixor]

Has anybody else noticed that that section is frequently out of sync with the forums themselves?

[tabacco]

It can't be out of sync. Every page load it does a query to get the 15 newest. It does ignore chit-chat, but that's intentional.

As for how we did it, vb3 comes with a file that can build a javascript array of recent posts, or an xml document or an rss feed. None of those worked well enough for us, though, so we made our own. It's really not that hard to do if you know how to use MySQL.

[remixor]

Ah, ok. Most likely I was just interpreting the Chit Chat filter as the list being out of sync.

[DomStLeger]

There is something wrong with it; the dates seems to be wrong. For example, the BS3 Goodies thread, the last post was today by Theneb but the list syas the last post was 09-26-2003 06:25 PM. Other posts are the same, so only the top four on the list are actually using todays date. This makes the forum look much less active than it really is.

(Edit: it's pretty bad looking at it; for example the Shadow of Destiny thread was posted in today and it's not even on the list)

[tabacco]

Okay, I rewrote the code from scratch to use our own database class instead of vbulletin's. I also limited the length of topic titles so they wouldn't force word wrapping (hopefully) in the table. See how it works for you now.

[remixor]

Ha! I knew something was up!

[DomStLeger]

hehe Perfectemon Tabacco, well done! :)

[tabacco]

Cool. Before we were using vb3's query adapted to our own system of outputting the data. Now it's all ours :D