Ever wish you could make a Forum disappear ?

[chrisolson]

There have been some recent concerns expressed about the RSS news Feeds and their associated posts from some of our Members.

 

A slight diversion:

•     For those not tech inclined, RSS can be thought of as simply a stream of articles from digital magazines that, in our case, feature motorcycle themes.  We tap into the various streams and display the articles as posts.  These articles appear under the heading of Worldwide Motorcycle News and its 4 individual sub forums representing 4 different content sources.
•     MotoNews is simply a name, not a real person, that is shown as the author of the articles. All posts on the site can only be made by a BMWNST Member and of course since the real authors are not Members, we had to create a fictional Member (MotoNews) to be the virtual author of all the articles from each source.

 

One of the concerns with the articles was "spoilers" which we tried to fix by eliminating some feeds.  However that was an incomplete solution.  Another more recent problem was an error in the feed itself from the source which caused one single article to appear more than it should.

 

BMWST Management still believes there is value in retaining the article feeds. So, we have found what we hope is the best solution that should work for all Members.

 

We have purchased a new third party add-on ... "IGNORE FORUMS"  ...that has been created by one of the top app coders for our software platform.  

 

This plugin will allow Members to ignore specific forums. Unlike the system ignore Member feature, Ignored Forums virtually disappear from your view of the site and won't have their topic content or headlines appearing in Activity Streams or Search Results.  

Ignored forums are unique and "sticky" to the individual Member so everyone can make their own choice which stays until you change it.

 

And although this solution has been offered in regards to the RSS feeds, you can use the functionality to ignore any forum ... WITH ONE EXCEPTION :  The Discussion Board Support Forum can not be ignored as from time to time there can be valuable and important information posted there.

 

The feature is very simple to use:

You will now see a new button on the home page of discussion forums where new topics can be created.

 

If you click on Ignore, you will get a confirmation screen.  Click OK and you're done ... simple, that forum is now being ignored !

 

You can check and manage what forums you are ignoring by accessing your profile page which has a new option.

 

Clicking on the new option gives you ...

You can start ignoring and if you later change your mind, you can stop ignoring it and it will reappear as normal