vBulletin 3.7.0 New Features

[Rhett]

vBulletin 3.7.0 contains a plethora of new features, many of which have been long requested by users and customers, while other new features will come as a surprise to everyone. 3.7.0 is slated to be the final major release of the vBulletin 3.x series before all forum development efforts are switched over to vBulletin 4.x, after which 3.x will receive only bug fix releases. In terms of timescales, the plan is to upgrade vBulletin.com to run on vBulletin 3.7.0 on Monday (November 26th) and to let it run for a few days in order to get some feedback and bug reports before releasing the first public beta. So, to the important bit: what's new in vBulletin 3.7? Answer: Lots. But here, in no particular order, are some highlights...

[Rhett]

Inline Spam Management and Prevention Tools Forum spam is an increasing problem for many boards. Unfortunately, due to the visible-source nature of vBulletin and most other forum systems, most preventative measures we might add to the system can simply be reverse-engineered and worked around by persistent spammers. Therefore, 3.7 contains a new set of tools to help clean up spam and deal with spammers. Threads and posts can be selected in the usual inline moderation fashion, and then the new 'Delete Threads/Posts as Spam' command can be selected, which will load the spam management interface, which contains options on a single page for removing the spam posts and threads, banning the spammers and finding other spam they may have posted.

Edited March 21, 2008 by Rhett

[Rhett]

Thread Tagging A new way to facilitate searching and grouping of threads, it is now possible for users to add tags to threads they post or read. Tags can be added when creating a new thread, or to an existing thread by any user (with appropriate permissions). Any users who then click on these tags will not only find all thread that have the same tag as the one clicked, but will also contribute to the building of a search tag cloud, which gives users a quick guide as to what has been searched for recently and most frequently.

Edited March 21, 2008 by Rhett

[Rhett]

Thread Prefixes Long requested by users, threads can now have administrator-defined prefixes to their titles. Thread prefixes are divided into groups by the administrator, allowing different prefixes to be available in different forums. UpdateHere is a new screengrab showing some of the thread prefix administration system, which should answer a lot of questions we have been receiving.

Edited March 21, 2008 by Rhett

[Rhett]

Reciprocal Friendships Between Users As part of our new social networking system, users can now request that people on their buddy list confirm their friendship, after which time a person's list of confirmed friends will be viewable to other users.

Edited March 21, 2008 by Rhett

[Rhett]

Public Messaging While private messages between users have been in vBulletin since version 2.0, vBulletin 3.7 introduces the public messaging system, allowing users to communicate publicly via their profile pages.

Edited March 21, 2008 by Rhett

[Rhett]

User Picture Galleries vBulletin users can now create albums and upload pictures to their account. The ability to view these albums and pictures can be limited by the user to just board staff and people on their buddy list if they want privacy.

Edited March 21, 2008 by Rhett

[Rhett]

User-Created Social Groups To further social cohesion between users and to encourage people to make friends, vBulletin now includes a facility to allow users to create their own social/interest groups. These groups are enhanced by having their own public messaging system, and the ability to add pictures to the group from user albums.

Edited March 21, 2008 by Rhett

[Rhett]

New Member Profile Page In order to accomodate all the new features in vBulletin 3.7, the member profile page has been completely redesigned from the ground up. The new page presents information in a far cleaner and more logical manner, while dividing up information into manageable chunks using a tabbed interface. Individual profile field categories can be displayed alone in blocks in the right column, in addition to appearing by default in the 'About Me' tab.

Edited March 21, 2008 by Rhett

[Rhett]

Member Customization of Profile Page The administrator may choose to allow his members to use the profile page customization tool, which allows users to alter fonts, colors, background and borders etc. of their profile page in order to create a more personalized look. The administrator can lock-down customization permissions, in order to prevent the personalized pages being made too offensively awful by aesthetically challenged members... nobody wants to see some of those really ugly MySpace pages on your vBulletin installation!

Edited March 21, 2008 by Rhett

[Rhett]

Inline Editing of Profile Field Values The 'About Me' tab of each member's profile page has edit controls, allowing them to quickly change values without leaving their profile page.

Edited March 21, 2008 by Rhett

[Rhett]

Attachment Viewing Lightbox Clicking on an attached image will now open a lightbox rather than open a new window, with the image scaled to fit the browser viewport. A click on the image in the lightbox will open it in a new window as before.

Edited March 21, 2008 by Rhett

[Rhett]

Post Edit History For boards where the history of posts is important, it is now possible to log all edits to posts and then review the changes at a later date.

Edited March 21, 2008 by Rhett

[Rhett]

Inline Moderation Enhanced Authentication When performing inline moderation actions, board staff will now be required to re-authenticate themselves if they have not done so in their browsing session. This prevents the possibility of unauthorized parties acting as a moderator on a public computer where a board staff member has accidentally ticked the 'remember me' box.

Edited March 21, 2008 by Rhett

[Rhett]

Navbar Notices Administrators can now set up custom notifications that will appear underneath the navbar when visiting users fulfil specified criteria. For example, one may want to set up a notice to display when a user is a member of a particular usergroup, or to show a congratulatory message when a user has posted their 1,000th post etc.

Edited March 21, 2008 by Rhett

[Rhett]

New Human Verification Systems In addition to the image verification system available in previous versions of vBulletin, 3.7 introduces the means for the administrator to choose the verification system employed on their board. They may choose to use the popular RECAPTCHA™ system, or to define a set of questions and answers for their visitors to deal with.

Edited March 21, 2008 by Rhett

[Rhett]

User Change History In order to track changes made to users' profiles by administrators, a change log is now kept for various user profile fields including username, usergroup etc.

Edited March 21, 2008 by Rhett

[Rhett]

Social Bookmarking of Threads Administrators can now define a list of their favorite social bookmarking sites and have them available for use on the showthread page for bookmarking threads.

Edited March 21, 2008 by Rhett

[Rhett]

And More... There are plenty more new features in vBulletin 3.7.Here is a brief list of some of the ones we haven't yet touched on:

• Visitor tracking on profile pages
• Automatic resizing of attached images to match filesize or pixel dimensions
• Enhancements to custom bbcode system
• Custom icons per forum
• Advertisement locations defined in templates
• Add multiple moderators in one go through ACP
• ATOM support for RSS Poster Robot
• Hooks to allow attachments to be passed through a virus scanner
• Posts by users in 'Tachy Goes to Coventry' will no longer count towards the total number of posts in a thread or forum. They are now truly hidden!
• All AJAX systems now employ the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI) for a more consistent and predictable system
• YUI files can now be switched from locally hosted to remotely hosted by Yahoo! with a single option change, saving you bandwidth

We hope you will be pleased by the work we have put into vBulletin 3.7. We are all proud of the end result and look forward to letting you all use it for yourselves on Monday. Until then...

[Rhett]

Answers and Clarifications for a Few Issues Raised in the Discussion ThreadYUII've seen several people post who seem to be under the impression that we are now using YUI (Yahoo! User Interface Library) instead of vBulletin code for several of our Javascript components.This is not the case. What we are doing is using YUI for some of its abstract methods, such as DOM manipulation, event handling and AJAX connection management. We are not using any YUI widgets such as pop-up calendars, rich text editors etc. All of these functions remain and will always be vBulletin proprietary code.Javascript MinimizationThere has been a lot of talk in this thread about minimizing our javascript so that it can be compressed more. Well that's very lucky, because one of the changes we have made for 3.7 is to alter our javascript files so that they can be run through the YUI minimizer. Since the start of development of 3.7 we have intended to supply vBulletin with minimized javascript files (though of course there will be an option to download the commented, nicely-spaced versions too).Social Group Public MessagingJust to clarify, vBulletin social groups do have their own messaging system, which acts in the same way as public messaging for individual users. Each group has the facility to leave messages so you could consider each group to have its own single thread (although internally it does not actually use the vBulletin thread system)Profile RatingvBulletin 3.7 does not have a profile rating system. As I stated in the dicussion thread, I believe that the existing reputation system offers a far superior way to rate users rather than an arbitrary 1-5 or 1-10 rating applied to their profile.Images in Title Bars for Right-Column BlocksThe different images visible in the title bars of blocks in the right column are collapse gadgets. A new image was created in order to work with any background color, as the existing collapse images are matted to specific colors and would not work correctly.

[Rhett]

Picture CommentsNew to this version are picture comments - a system enabling visitors to leave comments on pictures in member albums. This final touch adds the key social networking functionality to the system.New Member Album TypesIn previous versions of 3.7, members' albums of pictures could be specified as private or public only, and any pictures that were intended to be used for backgrounds of customized profile pages had to be located in public albums. This has now been changed, and a new special type has been introduced - profile albums. These albums are not directly browsable, unlike public albums, but their contents are available for use in profile page customization.It's also now possible to pick background images from a profile-type album without having to memorize picture IDs etc.Social Groups AdministrationIt is now possible to do extended searches on user-created social groups from the Admin Control Panel, and mass-delete groups should one wish to do so.Significance of a Beta ReleaseThis is beta software. If you are not fully at home with backing-up and restoring your forum, dealing with bugs and regular upgrades, do not install this beta version.Customers should bear in mind that this is a public beta, not a certified 'stable' release so the following caveats apply:

• Beta software is unsupported and you install beta versions at your own risk.
• Some minor bugs remain unresolved at this time, so beta software should not be on production sites.
• You should always back up your database fully before attempting to install beta software.
• If you choose to install this version, you should be aware that we plan to release new beta versions in rapid succession as bugs are fixed and holes are plugged. Do not install this beta version if you are not willing or able to keep up-to-date with new releases.
• The ImpEx import system does not support the 3.7 code yet, and will not support it until the release of 3.7.0 (stable).

[KWComp]

Wow!!!!!!!!!!! This is an impressive update! Cant wait to see them implemented R1Lover!! Great Work on the putting this together.

[Biga]

That got a lot of new features.

[Grandevil]

Holy crap! That's awesome! I mean it can be a bit excessive, or as Lover put is "gay" lol but it should work out great as a website grows larger and larger.

[Rhett]

Ya for sure, I will turn most of the gay items off, but there is a bunch more too that I didn't post yet..