Forum wants and desires - Patience though ;-)

Member List view - Any chance you can add "Last Visited" column to this view?

For now, that one will have to be filed under "not enough ROI for the risk". I'd have to mess with the underlying code that generates that page and every time I do that I'm one step further away from easily upgrading to future versions of the phpBB software...so I want to limit that kind of modification as much as possible.

It would be useful when looking for a particular user to have an alpha sort within the lettered categories. The default sort of all members by join date is good though and I would not change that part.

It's not very evident, but if you click the column headers on that members page it will sort by that column.

This is a great improvement from the tax almanac. Chris, are you Chris from MusicV2?

Any word from Intuit on scraping off Tax Almanac posts/threads?

Not sure what musicV2 is so I'm probably not that 'chris'.

JR I did get a reply from Tim a day ago and it was basically "hang tight, we are still discussing". I took that as a good sign but wish someone would make a decision

As another suggestion, can we somehow stickie certain threads so they stay at the top? I'm thinking mostly about those great discussions we have about the topics that come up over and over and over and over (S Corp health insurance or home office or COD income) where we can just have a single thread easily accessible that people can refer back to and even continue to add on to with their "slightly different twist." No matter how many times you pound the "yellow box" drum, people inevitably will start a new topic on an old topic because they can't find anything relevant. Now maybe that was born of frustration with the TA search engine (it certainly frustrated me on occasion) and so perhaps it will be easier to search and find discussions here. I just thought for the really really big, common area issues that might be an option.

Stickies are a great idea but they have to be topics that everyone asks about, without fail. For example on the autobody website I run everyone asks about preparing metal for paint so we have a sticky about that.

Once I find out for sure what is going on with TA and the 6/1 date, I plan on turning my attention to the main page of this site. I can add links there to key/meaningful topics. So sort of a sticky but not loading up the forum page itself with them. There could then be a sticky in the forum page that says "recurring/important topics...go here" and link to that page off the main page of the site.

Chris, I curious if ANY progress has been made on being able to preserve or migrate the historical info from TA. If not, I may spend the next two days "printing" a bunch of threads for my own future reference. Again, thanks for your efforts here - they are greatly appreciated.

Belle - I have all the old content and can easily restore it here. Now whether or not Intuit will honor their own terms and conditions and allow me to rehost it here, is still yet to be seen. If you feel safer about copying/pasting or printing threads for your own use, then that's not a bad idea.

Chris,

Can you enable polls under the posting options?

One of the Yahoo! tax groups uses polls for various reasons, e.g. determining group demographics, resolving open questions, or just idle curiosity.

Sure thing...that was actually turned on already for all forums but this Q&A forum, so I went ahead and turned it on for this forum as well.

It only applies when starting a new topic (you can't start a poll inside a thread that already exists). In full editor, down near the options tab bottom left of the screen, look for the "poll creation" tab.

Tell me about these polls you speak of

I was going to post this elsewhere, but I feel it is probably most appropriate here.

We seem to be having certain discussions over and over...SEHI, as an example. On a recent question, I thought to do a very quick search on TPT and I got the full applicable answer on the third post down. A similar search on Google of the same search term got me two applicable links in the first four.

For this forum to be most valuable, people need to be asking for help and assistance. I think some people have the approach of posting their situation without the least modicum of solving the problem themselves. The board gets filled up with meaningless drivel in addition to making searches really awkward to get to the meaty discussions of that same issue.

My suggestion: Can we add a question to the New Topic screen..."Have you already researched this site for an answer to your question?"

It's a great point and that should be something I can implement. I realize there are a few good suggestions I need to work on; soon as I can free up some time to do so I will.

In reading my post again, it may have come off rather curt, which was not my intent.

Thanks for all you do in maintaining this forum, Chris. It's a great resource!

I think some people have the approach of posting their situation without the least modicum of solving the problem themselves.

I agree that it helps if some effort to answer the question is noted in the initial post, I think it makes others more likely to help. However some here actually enjoy looking things up and posting answers, even if just from a pub or form instruction. Some regular contributors even post the same questions repeatedly themselves, maybe just to keep the new material flowing especially during slow times of the year.

Possible addition?: Is there some way to code in additional profile fields? I spend a lot of time in BOD and it often would be helpful to see what tax software the forum member uses. Without any encouragement, nobody puts that in their profile.

(Or, even cooler would be if it showed up with each post near the "Location")

We could, but the only problem is that there is no way to demand it to be filled in by existing members. Some people will take the time to fill it in after the fact but probably not many.

One of the poor points of this software; if you don't really think through and set up the required profile fields ahead of time, to capture at initial registration - it's tough to get compliance with, later.