I was a bit disappointed that after upgrading to 2.1 from 2.0 that the red pm window had been done away with and the "My assistant" window popped up. The old red window was much more elegant and nicer to work with.

Can we have the option of having it back in 2.2 please? The new method seems a backwards step to me.

Thank heavens that a mod has been wriiten that gives us this functionality back here.

Thank you.

3DKiwi

I'd love to place it back to the old way

oh I never expierenced that way, but awesome idea, I like a lot!

+1 - My Assistant doesn't load properly for some people.

me too, I prefer the red box as well, so much better. I know we can mod our board to put it back in, but I don't want to do any changes to the sources so I can just do a blind upgrade...

You could make it an option in the admin cp, so that it's a matter of setting a simple switch to use either the red box or the my assistant....

Yes, this seems to work on some forums and not on others. For some reason, it never works where I acctually want to read the PMs.

Either My Assistant should be made a little more reliable, and perhaps draw more attention to itself, or should be optionally replaceable by the old 'red box' method. Perhaps this could be done with a skin edit? I've not looked through the templates in this area really.

Dean made a mod for me to give users the option of my assistant or the red block area. I still just use my assistant though. I like my assistant in theory, although it coulod be greatly improved.

The mod was really easy to do and you could easily restore things back to the defaults by deleting the code in the couple of php files or replacing the 2 php files with the backed up ones. There were a couple of simple CSS code additions.

Good idea


I will prefer an option in the UCP.

Couldn't agree more!

It was one thing I really loved about the forum, it was impossible to miss new PMs because it appeared in a red box at the top of the board. The popup doesn't work for me half the time and I imagine it doesn't work for a lot of the forum visitors too. I couldn't never understand why they changed it when it was possibly the best PM design I've ever seen on a forum. Popups are always unreliable.

Please can we go retro again?

if that works that would be even better, but I'd imagine there'll be changes in the templates as well, so that's why I proposed an acp setting. Not that it really matters as ips probably won't find this worthy enough to add this back in.

I think My Assistant must be one of the worst additions to the ipb board though: it just doesn't work.

I'm not too fond of My Assistant, I think it's an example of AJAX gone wrong.

Me too. The only good thing of My Assistant is Search. But people at IPS can make My Assistant a pretty usefull tool.

For example:

When someone clicks on My Assistant, he/she definitely doesn't want to view "The Moderating Team" or "Today's top 10 posters"!

The default "Information" page of My Assistant sucks. The first page one sees when clicking on My Assistant should contain a search, last 3-5 PMs and/or 3-5 latest threads/topics.

Another thing about My Assistant is that it loads sooooo slow. When one clicks on My Assistant, he is waiting for the first page to load via Ajax.. Ajax should be used to load content which changes, what kind of change could the "The Moderating Team" contain? At least the first tab should be pre-loaded, if not all. Even "New Posts". If there are New posts from the time the user opened My Assistant the user could press an update button for them to update. (If not update them automatically every 10-15 minutes)

Some criticism about New Posts tab. It's okay, but what if you added the option of viewing new posts IN My Assistant, and having the option to reply through it? That could be kinda bit of extreme but would be usefull I think.

Although Search is pretty usefull as it is now, why not include some more searching options? You could add a simple search box in the first tab as I suggest above, and give the tab dedicated to search more options - like specify the place where to search in and/or display mode of results. (Posts/Topics)

Why have to load another page when clicking a PM in Recent PMs? Once clicking a PM, a box could expand (in the way search results expand when clicking something in isohunt) to show your PM, as well as an option to reply to it.

A good idea might be to add another tab to edit your profile on the fly, and not have to traverse through a bloated, hard to navigate User Control Panel (Which I might criticize another time.. lol). It would be usefull to edit your signature or add a new ignored user, or change your post editor to RTE/classic.

It would also be usefull to add a section to view/change your UCP Personal Notepad, it would make it much more easily accessible.

Also, an admin has no control over my assistant at all. (except of editing template files..) It could be usefull to let the admin decide which features to turn on/off in My Assistant.

Voltermot, I'm with you on the UCP notepad and removal of the top 10 posters info. The rest of your suggestions would just make MyAssistiant too bulky. My assistiant it supposed to make your board browsing experience easy, not be a replacement for My Controls.

I agree with some of Voltemort's suggestions about the My Assistant and I agree with Antony in the fact that it should be optional to allow to switch back to the Red PM box, which IMO definitely receives more attention from the eye than the My Assistant box, not to mention it doens't work for everyone. A big +1 for these options.

My Assistant sux! When a new PM is received, the damn thing always pops up right beneath the board header, which is not necessarily on the user's screen. Thus, new messages are easily overlooked.

Well I agree it would be alot more effective if it was in a possition on your screen for definate. Other wise, it kind of defeats the object. I didn't think it was just absoloutely beneath the header.

I wonder if there are actually people who like my assistant, I hear nothing but complaints about it...

I like it personally.

The problem I have is that if I miss it for whatever reason, it wont pop up again! So I wont realize I have PMs waiting that I haven't read for awhile oops.

My Assistant should be expanded and made more helpful though, because other than a quick read of new PMs, I never use it.

How often do you go to a restaurant, eat your meal, then demand to see the manager and say "HEY, THIS FOOD WAS COOKED TO PERFECTION, I DEMAND I GIVE YOU A TIP!" ?

I've been using Invision for a year now and I'm yet to use My Assistant, I looked once and it was fairly useless. I'd like the ability to turn it off.

I like My Assistant. Although it could be better.

It probably could be improved but I think it needs to be more reliable and sturdy. I just don't like the way it pops up at the minute.

What I like about it is I use ntd's modification to display the entire PM message in it, so you can read the entire PM in it rather than going to a new screen. Plus he put delete buttons in it to delete the latest PM's. Although a problem is you then have to click into the control panel to get that new PM's number to disappear.

either the ability to turn my assistant off or the bring back the red pm box would please me...

New improve suggestion to My Assistant. I posted it as new topic so everyone can comment on the new thread:

http://forums.invisionpower.com/index.php?showtopic=227357

Basically, I think the idea of My Assistant is a good idea: smaller inteface and simpler graphic will make it load faster. The problem is that it confuse between the idea of NEW PMs and UNREAD PMs.

Just to let you guys know the old PM notification method still does exist. All you have to do is open up the global_board_header template and set the javascript variable "use_enhanced_js" to 0. The alert isnt red like in 2.0, but it uses a similar style. The downside is the new MyAssistant window is not used, and the old one is defaulted. This works for 2.1, but I'm not sure if it does in 2.2.

Precisely which probably means more than 99% of people don't really care. I've only used used IPB from 2.1 so I don't remember the red box, but I never had an issue with the popup on the PC's I browse from. I guess there's always room for improvement, but personally I like it

I am sure Dean will code this for 2.2 he did for 2.1 but I would like to see it as a standard feature again like an admin CP option in PM Setup

Does this have any other side effects? It sounds like it would, but you're the expert.

Gogf - That's interesting to know. I know when I installed the mod to return to the old red pm classic look that members said they preferred it.

3DKiwi

I'd love to see a user-level option for this, definitely.

It would disable many of the other ajax features as well. Basically where ever that javascript is used. Would have almost the same effect if you turned off javascript, but not completely.

If you only want it to effect the PM alert, there is a template in the Global HTML that you could change. Dont remember the name of it off hand, but it has the words "notification" and "pm" in it.

the side effect a mod has is that you have to do the same file-edits over and over again if a new ipb version is released.

If it's just a matter of doing what luke said, then this can be easily be foreseen by default, which means no file edits for us. Just switch an option in the ACP to switch the view style for the PM box.

The user selectable option, with an admin default setting that can or cannot be overriden by the user, would be great.

Is it so hard to just fix My Assistant, so that it would display properly?!