Unread Message Display, Custom Extensions, Pre-existing Members

Hello,

Looks like some very good software here- I'm very excited about the feature depth.

A few pre-sales questions:

1. Is the display of unread message status session-independent?
2. Is it possible to create new custom extensions for the board as "add-ons"?
3. Is it possible to create custom displays of forum info other than the built-in board display?
4. I have members on an existing system.
         Can I pipe in custom info from the existing system to display with their avatars next to posts?
         Can I pipe out information from the board to display on their existing-system member pages?

Thanks for the help,

Jumpstart

Hi Jumpstart,

Thanks for your questions first. Let me answer them one by one:

1. no, it is session dependent. Once the session ends, the next time a person logs in he will see every message posted before the previous session's last activity date time as read.
2. Yes, you can do so with User Controls which you can incorporate into the software easily.
3. Yes, we use User Control based template for forum display so you can definitely customize the template or create different templates that suit your need.
4. If you need to display avatar, you can do so by issuing SQL statements to insert the avatar location to our database for your users;
5. For showing our software's data outside of the software, you can use the our membership provider, but if you need to show some info not provided by the standard ASP.NET membership provider, you can do so too with simple SQL statements.

Thanks for the answers, that's very helpful.

I have used forums where only the threads that you have actually opened get marked as read, so if you come back the next time the un-viewed ones will still show as unread. This is quite useful.
From what you're saying it sounds like in this software all threads are treated as "read" after you visit, whether they have been opened or not. This is okay, just confirming.

Thanks again!

You are right about the description of the read/unread feature.

You can also reset you last visit time yourself if you wish with the software (on the default page, there is a link named Reset Last Visit Time) to see posts marked as unread later than a certain time.

Thank you very much too!

Thanks for the info. I'll keep reviewing!