Release 1.2.8

This release brings several quality-of-life improvements and new features aimed at boosting engagement and ease of use.

Most notably, we've introduced email notifications for watched topics and a new weekly digest to help bring users back into the conversation. You’ll also find multiquote support, making it much easier to reply to multiple posts at once.

The default theme has also gone through a small round of polishing to start to mature the design.

See the full changelog below:

Features

• Filter users by username in admin API
• Add <!-- BOARDSTATS --> theme token with board stats panel
• Show admin welcome on first login
• Multiquoting and insertion into replies
• Polish default theme
• Add extra html to forum row stats for better theming
• Add email notifications for watched topics
• Add weekly digest email to re-engage users
• Add class to body to better identify pages for theming

Bug Fixes

• Parse bot names from user agent in active user list
• Emoticon and reactions optmisations

This will be documented in the ForumSpark docs eventually but just a note on how the notifications work:

Weekly Digest will email users active in the last 30 but not in the last 7 days. The purpose of the email is to re-engage with users who are just dropping off into inactivity. The thinking behind this is to prevent spam and sending unwanted (weekly) emails to users who arent interested.

Reply notifications (emails) will be sent once per 30 minutes per user/topic combination. Email notifications are delayed for 10 minutes and only sent if the "watcher" has not visited the topic in the preceding 10 minutes. In-app notifications are immediate, so if you are actively browsing the forum you effectively cancel redundant emails.

I have tried to be responsible in the policies implemented for email notifications, so we will see how these work out.

More notification types will follow, such as mentions and direct message notifications. This just provides the basis to start.

Great work!