This describes freeware that I
wrote which allows any virtual board manager (or WebBoard
administrator) to order the display of threads within a
conference.
This is particularly useful for boards in which
administrative annoucements are posted, or situations in
which WebBoard users have to make "reports" that must
be sequenced in a certain order (such as, by date).
The basic idea is the same as WebBoard's built-in
"conference order" page, except that it's applied
to discussion threads within conferences.
Each thread may have a weight from 0 to 999,999. Only
staff users may assign weights to threads. "Staff" for
this purpose refers to WebBoard
administrators, virtual board managers, and conference moderators.
Thread weights can be entered on the posting page by staff
members. The weights are actually carried in the post
subject, and are essentially invisible to non-staff
members. For staff members, a link follows the display
on the topics page: this link allows staff members to either
"show" or "hide" the display of weights in post subjects.
Once a weight is assigned to a post, it will be "inherited" by
all the replies to the post. Preferably, staff members
will assign the weight to a thread when the thread is relatively
new (i.e. there's only one or perhaps just a few posts in the
thread). After that, the replies to those posts will
continue to carry the weight (unless a staff member alters it).
The system will consider all the posts in a thread to have the
weight associated with the first displayed post in a
thread. So even if the user decides to display "new"
or "attention" messages, the thread should show up in the same
sequence, relative to other threads.
If a thread hasn't been explicitly weighted by a staff member,
it will be assigned a weight of 100,000 plus the sequence in which
WebBoard displays it. So posts that
haven't been explicitly weighted will normally appear last, in
the sequence that WebBoard assigns.
However staff members may also assign posts a weight that
exceeds 200,000. These posts will always appear at the
end.
This system isn't currently supported for WebBoard 5, or for the
"modern" layout of WebBoard 6. If you need such an animal,
please
contact me.
I also don't recommend using this system on boards that have
conferences with associated news groups or e-mail lists,
although nothing terrible will occur if you do. It's just
that replies done via e-mail or a news group won't
"inherit" the thread weight: so a staff member will have to edit the
post in order to maintain consistency.
This code is freeware. You
use it at your own risk. No warrany of fitness for use
or any other form of guarantee inheres.
You may use it
and/or the source code in whole or in part for any otherwise
legal purpose that you deem fit; however you may not claim legal
ownership of same for legal purposes against anyone who's obtained
it from an "independent source" (such as this web page).
