MyBB Community Forums

I know, everyone is firing at me for mentioning that one forum software which is one I hate.

Currently, to "bump" a thread in MyBB, you make a one-word post.

In phpBB (*dodges gunshots*) you can bump a thread without making a pointless post. I propose having a similar system in MyBB. It is annoying to see a thread back at the top, but with just a pointless "Bump" message at the bottom.

I think this feature is pretty lightweight and should just require one query (update last post). In fact, it may even be better than posting. Getting rid of all those posts would save DB space. And if I understand correctly, multiple queries are used to make a post (update user postcount, new post, raise thread to top, etc), so this may even help performance and lower MySQL stress...

I apologize if I am wrong about the query counts, but I am just guessing.

Constructive feedback/discussion?

I honestly have to say I don't get why systems have such a feature in the first place. If you want to bump a thread, add something worthy to the discussion. Otherwise people would be constantly bumping their threads to the top. The only difference is you don't know why they've bumped their thread because all they've done is clicked a button.

I think it was a mistake for other forum systems to add it in the first place.

Of course you can argue that people won't follow that logic and just make spammy posts such as "bumppp", but that's something the administration team should disallow and enforce a rule to not make low quality posts.

I see where you're coming from. Make no mistake of that.
Maybe I will just write this as a plugin for 2.0.

vBulletin have a plugin for this also, a forum that i'm active on use it on the market to bump the post. You can only bump the post after 3 days for free or have options to pay to keep your post to the top all the time.
I think will be a nice feature as a plugin.

Well, I'll have to look at developing this for 2.0.

This is a great idea, but it should be switched off by default - and the administrator can choose on what forums they want to use the function in.

For example when you create a topic with a question and you don't get an answer you must somehow 'bump' the thread, but posting nonsense is of course against the rules, so I would do that:
BUMPing brings up the topic to the top (in categories list), but if someone has already seen it (opened the topic before), it isn't marked as if there are new posts in this topic.

I think a bump plugin exists already. It's around here somewhere.

I figured there had to be, but I haven't seen it (or remembered it).

It might be labeled something about "last post" because ultimately a bump will only alter the last post date.

This is very old but with some adjustments might work fine.
http://www.mybbcentral.com/thread-1292.html

For MyBB 1.4 but should work fine with 1.6: http://mybbhacks.zingaburga.com/showthread.php?tid=386