IT.COM

status-todo Suggestion: Bump Button

Spaceship Spaceship
Watch

Ategy

Arif M, NameCult.com TheDomainSocial.comTop Member
Impact
17,389
So while I really don't have experience with xF, or even back-end forum hacking in over a decade, I'm pretty sure the following is certainly doable.

A “Bump Button” hack .. just a button at the bottom of the thread in bumpable forums that:

1- Shows up only for the original poster after the forum's allowed “bump time”.

2- Pressing the button would automatically add a "Bump" to the thread.

3- At the same time simultaneously deleting any previous “Bump”.

3b- You could also make it so that ANY new post effectively deletes any previous "Bump".


I used to do little hacks like this on my old vB based forum all the time .. it’s been 15 years and you use xF .. so I doubt I could really help make it .. but xF is supposed to be infinitely easier to do this sort of thing .. and I doubt it would take more than few hours work for someone who knows their way around xF code/templates.


This would help:

1- Keep threads a lot cleaner and make real information easier to find.
2- Keep post counts more accurate because in all honesty "Bump" should not count towards a person's posting total as it really isn't content in any way.
 
7
•••
The views expressed on this page by users and staff are their own, not those of NamePros.
Hello Ategy.com,

That is an outstanding suggestion.
I'm sure Admin & Tech will A) See if it is doable, and B) Add it to the list if it is.

Thank you.

Peace,
Cyberian
 
1
•••
With the way the forum software works, the forums are sorted by most recent post, so there's no other way to bump a thread except to create a post in it.

Typing a single character and pressing "Post Reply" is fast and a single button to do it wouldn't save much time. However, having the ability to also delete previous bumps would be very useful and helpful.

Thanks for the suggestion,
 
3
•••
Hi again .. The suggestion of the button wasn't actually to save time posting .. it was to have the bump post standardised as exactly "Bump" AND deletion/cleanup in one shot.

More importantly ... Making the button automatically post "Bump" would also make the clean-up script simpler because it could just look for "Bump", instead of all the variations people write "Bump", "Bumpers", "Up", "...", "+", "Reminder", etc etc

Also .. I'm not sure if what you say is actually accurate on the data side. In theory it isn't the actual last post that counts, because sometimes the last post is ignored if the person posted less than 12 hours before.

So the real question that needs to be asked is if:

A) There is a hard "theoretical last allowed non-bump post" time_value in the thread's dataset in the xF database ..
or
B) If the sort rank calculation is done live on the fly processing and checking each thread one by one including an "ignore last post(s) if less than 12 hours before last eligible post time"

The exact specifics of a potential solution changes depending on the answer .. but I'm thinking either answer could have a potential solution.

I'm guessing it's A (but again .. don't know for sure with xF) .. because while it might seem less efficient to have an extra data field for "Last eligible post", there are a few forum features that likely rely on it being there.


hope what I wrote makes sense ... lol
 
Last edited:
2
•••
Hi again .. The suggestion of the button wasn't actually to save time posting .. it was to have the bump post standardised as exactly "Bump" AND deletion/cleanup in one shot.

More importantly ... Making the button automatically post "Bump" would also make the clean-up script simpler because it could just look for "Bump", instead of all the variations people write "Bump", "Bumpers", "Up", "...", "+", "Reminder", etc etc

If we just look for "Bump", people are going to post other stuff to evade the check. Yes, we could manually ban people who do that, but our moderators have bigger fish to fry; I'm not keen on giving them more work when it can easily be avoided. We'd also start to see people who'd post just enough content that it'd be impossible to objectively decide whether they're attempting to bump or post something half-useful.

So the real question that needs to be asked is if:

A) There is a hard "theoretical last allowed non-bump post" time_value in the thread's dataset in the xF database ..
or
B) If the sort rank calculation is done live on the fly processing and checking each thread one by one including an "ignore last post(s) if less than 12 hours before last eligible post time"

The bump logic for the marketplace is custom. Normally, XenForo updates a last_post_date field whenever someone posts. We skip that update if we determine a bump to be too soon. This avoids the potential fallout and incompatibilities with other parts of XenForo that would result from (A), and it's a lot more efficient than (B) because the check only needs to be performed when people post. Even then, we don't check each post one-by-one; we only check posts made since the current last_post_date + 12 hours. It's a little more complicated than that, and there are additional optimizations that often allow us to avoid the check in the first place, but that's the basic idea.

We get more than 100 backend requests per second even at off times, so we have to keep our queries extremely efficient. We've rewritten sizable chunks of XenForo.
 
3
•••
If we just look for "Bump", people are going to post other stuff to evade the check. Yes, we could manually ban people who do that, but our moderators have bigger fish to fry; I'm not keen on giving them more work when it can easily be avoided. We'd also start to see people who'd post just enough content that it'd be impossible to objectively decide whether they're attempting to bump or post something half-useful.

True .. but my recommendation wasn't meant to be instead of the current system you guys set up .. it's meant to be in addition to it. What you have is good in preventing the flood of bumps that would otherwise happen. My recommendation is more for helping to clean things up. Having the 2 together is what I had in mind .. never to replace what was already there.



The bump logic for the marketplace is custom. Normally, XenForo updates a last_post_date field whenever someone posts. We skip that update if we determine a bump to be too soon. This avoids the potential fallout and incompatibilities with other parts of XenForo that would result from (A), and it's a lot more efficient than (B) because the check only needs to be performed when people post. Even then, we don't check each post one-by-one; we only check posts made since the current last_post_date + 12 hours. It's a little more complicated than that, and there are additional optimizations that often allow us to avoid the check in the first place, but that's the basic idea.

Yeah .. that's what I assumed but wasn't 100% on. I guess decisions like this are always more a question between usability and efficiency. In theory you'd only need to look for the original poster's previous post to see if it was a "bump" .. not too complicated .. then deleting it is a bit of work, but more than worth it in the long term in keeping the database smaller (because even if it's just "bump", there's all the other data that goes in for each post). I personally think it's still a good thing to do .. but only you guys know how it will effect serverload etc. Just to sway you a bit more .. just think of all the future useless posts you'll be cleaning out of the database! ;)

Here's an interesting question .. how many bumps are there per day on average?
 
1
•••
The difference in resources would be negligible; usability is more relevant here, as is the time it takes to develop any customizations.
 
1
•••
A bump button would be nice as it looks like the poster is desperate when you see the word bump 15 times, and could cause the person to not get bids because the thread is basically spammed by the thread owner who has had to post that. It's time for a bump but to keep the threads cleaner!
 
1
•••
I believe we figured out a clever way to do this without requiring a post in the thread.

A bump button (Or similar) is on the horizon. ;)
 
0
•••
Long time in waiting. Will a bump button (or similar) be created before the end of this year -2018-?
@Eric Lyon
 
0
•••
"Bump" ... lol

Just curious as to what's happening with this as the bumping problem was brought up in another thread.

In the end all that needs to be done is have the bump button:

1- Check when the last time the thread starter posted
2- If more than 12 hours, then update last_post_date to current time
(else show amount of time before next bump is allowed)

In fact .. it might be even better to have the loading page check the time of "last post by thread starter" and/or "bump", and only have the forum show the bump button if it's more than 12 hours.

Better yet .. you could allow different bump intervals based on user level and/or transaction satisfaction rating. New member could have a 24 hour restriction .. paid members could go as high as 8 hours.


I'm using 8, 12 and 24 .. but it could be anything. Also note that for these sorts of things I really think 7h50m, 11h50m and 23h50m is better so it's easier for people to always come back at same time instead of having the time slowly drift away.
 
1
•••
Unfortunately, we had to put this on hold for now while we focus on higher priorities.

We will return to it eventually and implement a button that does not populate threads with unnecessary text.

Coming (eventually) soon.
 
0
•••
Ummm .. "BUMP" .. lmao

(Just bringing this back up since I mentioned it in a different thread .. oh yeah .. that .. and the fact it's been 2.5 years since I suggested it ... AND the fact it's a great idea .. lol) ;)
 
0
•••
Back