It's not just my threads, but other peoples threads too, in hidden forums. Normal folks are probably tired of seeing this and it probably makes them feel bad too knowing there is discussions they cannot participate in.

We need to REMOVE private thread rows from the new posts page for user ranks who are not able to access such threads. It needs to be cleaned up.

Image upload: 725x557 totaling 209 KB's.

I don't mind about this, everyone should know there are forums they cannot access for one reason or another, but it's true the New Posts page would look cleaner if it only had the forums each user/rank has access to.

The problem would be the few private rented forums still out there. They're available for a select few people, and manually coding who has access to them can mean trouble. I wouldn't mind leaving those be, since even with high activity not many of their threads appear in the New Posts page, and focus on the rank-restricted forums which are the real issue.

And since we're at it, it would be even better if threads created in hidden forums didn't display on the Latest widget, because everyone knows what the thread is about unlike the whole privacy we see in the image you posted. If said threads can also appear in the Trending widget, we should solve that one as well.

I think every widget and page should not show the mod forums that a user can't access.

The number of rented forums that are restrictive are pretty low so it wouldn't be much of a problem.

I definitely think it should be a toggle-able option, because despite there being only a few forums that are private, I mean, have you seen how much space they take up on the list? I get it, you guys are up to important mod business, now I'd like to discuss my air ventilation system in painstaking detail.

I don't really mind of seeing "private forum" in the "New Post" page, and the "user's posts" page. But kinda agreeing with Geeo, I understand the staff forums, but some of the rented forums,, they can be a little annoying here and there, but not too much though.


Like I said, in the user's page, some of them were former staffs, so, when they get demoted, it would be alright to say "Restricted Thread", so that way, you don't seem to have missing posts and wonder "what happened to that post".

I don't think it's been that big of a deal, only when those threads are really active, it just messes up the look of the page. But most of the time those threads aren't active enough to really make a difference.

I do think we could benefit from having private forums not listed, just because I'm a little OCD about the spacing being messed up a little by them. Either way it would at least make the website a little less confusing for newbies since they might not understand why they're private

(I'm assuming the bumping rule is long gone now. Anyway....)

I certainly hope this becomes a much higher priority to take care of because this makes the site look much more confusing, restrictive, uninviting, and unorganized to newbies. (at least when the restricted forums become more active which is gonna happen fairly often, so it's pretty bad)

It looked much better on my end once I got promoted to site staff, but it still annoyed me when I was an Elite. Considering Elite is the highest non-staff rank yet it still annoyed me at the time... That's very bad. (it'd be so much worse for newbies)

I logged out of my account and tried to view the new posts as a guest out of curiosity and this is what it looks like:



To me, I wouldn't mind as I understand what's going on. But a new user would feel uninvited, confused, and the extra spacing is ugly. I might sound like I'm exaggerating, but this is waaay worse for a newbie. Any page that looks ugly/uninviting to a new guest/user... They'll click away to another website and never come back. Newbie retention is extremely important to keep vizzed alive. (heh, no white banner winner last time) That's why I'm emphasizing this issue. 

I also don't understand what people pointed out about private rented forums. To your perspective, a staff forum doesn't annoy you because perhaps you can see it (while maybe a private rented forum doesn't show so it annoys you), but to a newbie, both the private rented forum and the staff forums are equally annoying. And the staff forums have many more private threads than the very few private rented forums anyway.

I don't imagine the coding being very hard since it's just that if it's "private forum", just completely hide the row instead of displaying useless space. But I could be completely wrong of course, I'm no PHP expert. (I only know Java/Python very well)

My apologies if I sound rude, but I just feel like this is somehow a bigger issue than it looks because of newbie retention. 

Mohammedroxx3 : David already figured out who should be viewing what thread so all the coding on it is already done. As someone who knows PHP and has made features that do this exact same thing, I can tell you this should be a very easy fix and like you mentioned all he needs to do is simply stop it from printing the entire row altogether if it is a hidden thread. It literally would take no longer then 1 minute to fix. Here is the thing though. I made this thread almost 2 months ago. So how fast it is to fix depends entirely on David.... we are waiting.

Let's take this into consideration for a second..From a new user point of view having restricted forums that you can't access, but can see clearly that people post in, does make you feel a little excluded, now I could see if instead of it saying "private forum" it said "staff forum" or "Moderators forum" but it doesn't it says private forum and that will make new users feel a certain type of way(excluded)...given jigsaw is trying to fix the new user experience on vizzed(i.e the long registration process, newbie quiz etc.) I'd say hear him out on this issue, the reason it doesn't bother some of you or rather us is because we've all been on the site for years and its become common place to us or rather we overlook it because were used to it, but honestly it serves no purpose to allow users under the allowed rank to see threads and forums being posted in that they cannot access, it's sort of there at this point just to say hey we have places to post that you can't (which is what believe it or not some people view it as)

I'm not sure I've ever seen private threads outside of the trash bin, and if this is about the trash bin... Then it's probably not a big deal. Otherwise, where are these threads?

Edit: Nevermind, I found it shortly after typing this. Considering I didn't know it existed, I'm sure it's not a huge problem for the average user.

I've fixed the issue with threads in restricted forums showing up on the New Posts page. This issue is also fixed on all other pages that display a list of threads. Instead of those threads showing up as being in restricted forums, they just don't show up at all. If you're an admin of a private forum, then the threads will show up. I agree that this was an eye sore and was a constant reminder of how much the users are missing out on, which is very unappealing. It was a somewhat time consuming fix since it required me to have to rewrite some database queries and scripts but well worth doing.

The original reason for it listing threads as being part of a restricted forum instead of not showing up at all is kinda confusing but I'll try to explain. The database query that I wrote returned threads whether they were part of a forum you had access to or not. It was very challenging to make it not return threads from forums you don't have access without it being a query that places a lot of strain on the database so I just had it return the threads regardless of whether you had access to the thread's forum or not. Then from the PHP side I made it check to see if a user has access to the forum for each individual thread and if the user doesn't have access, it would show that restricted thread message.

Now why didn't I just have PHP not display the row? When the db query returns the list of threads, it's a specific number, usually 50. So if PHP didn't display anything regarding those threads, there would have been less than 50 rows and that may have caused user confusion and also potential script related issues. Imagine going from page to page where 1 page is showing 30 results and then the next page is showing 50 results. That would make the page seem broken or cause the user to be confused about how the page works.

My explanation doesn't really matter now that I invested time into finding a proper solution and fixing the issue but I just figured I'd let everyone know the reason behind it rather than assume I was just being stupid lol.

Davideo7 : Good work! There is a similar bug that needs fixing. Hidden threads show in the latest and trending tabs on board index. It won't say hidden thread but it will display full title of hidden threads for users who should not be seeing it.