Troubleshooting vBulletin Problems Discuss Removing threads display from a forum to create a hybrid "sub-forum container" in the vBulletinSetup Information forums; I was asking if there is a way to remove thread display from a forum without converting it into a category. I then answered my own question. Here's the tip: ...

[Ville]

I was asking if there is a way to remove thread display from a forum without converting it into a category. I then answered my own question. Here's the tip:

I made initially a dirty hack for this; I added a few conditionals to FORUMDISPLAY to exclude thread listing, icon key, and forum rules from the one forum where I don't want them to be displayed. But then I discovered that changing just one line in forumdisplay.php would do the trick, mostly. I changed the line

if ($foruminfo['cancontainthreads'])

around line 438 to

if (($foruminfo['cancontainthreads']) AND ($foruminfo['forumid'] != 13))

This turns thread display, and the legend off for the forum that I want to only display the sub-forums (the number "13" represents the forum ID that you would see when viewing the forum normally, in my example it is "13", like so: http://community.zjournal.com/forumdisplay.php?f=13).

The $foruminfo['cancontainthreads'] variable that controls the thread display is set in the Forum Manager by "Act as Forum", but turning it off turns the forum into a category which won't list the total number of posts in the sub-forums, or show the most recent message title in the sub-forums like a regular forum does.

After the above addition the key for "Forum Contains New Posts", "Forum Contains No New Posts", and "Forum is Closed for Posting" is still displayed. Since I have replaced the sub-forum graphics with custom graphics in the "sub-forum container forum" that key is now irrelevant, and I took it out in FORUMDISPLAY template around lines 468..489 by locating "<!-- icon key -->"; it has an opening conditional "<if condition="$show['threadslist']">" and the corresponding "<else />" little ways down in the code. I then added the following immediately after the "<else />":

<if condition="$foruminfo[title] != 'Columnists'">

.. and closed the conditional by placing "</if>" immediately before "<!-- / icon key -->".

"Columnists" is the name of the sub-forum container forum in my example, i.e. z/Journal Mainframe Community > Mainframe Forums > Columnists, and it's forum ID is "13".

The end-result is a category-like forum, or a forum-like category which is works well as a container for sub-forums.

My example can be seen here (it's the forum I created this hack for).