Remove Re: Thread Title From Every Reply

[DarrenS]

Evidently vB4 had a setting to turn off the "Re: Thread title" that appears at the top of every single post:

Admin CP -> Settings -> Options -> Message Posting and Editing Options -> Automatically Quote Post / Thread Title

This setting is not present in vB5.

After making a fresh reply in my shiny new forum (updated from 4.2.5, in a dev environment) I see that the thread titles are no longer included in new posts. So all those millions of imported posts have "Re: [Thread Title]" now in the main body of the message (confirmed by editing an old post).

Can I delete or exclude these from the updated forum if I disable it in vB4 before backing up the database? I hope they won't be saved and imported as part of the post contents anyway.

[Wayne Luke]

The setting is gone because vBulletin 5 doesn't allow titles for replies or comments. Are you using the default style or one of the included themes? I ask because the default styles should automatically hide the title from migrated replies and comments.

If the title is actually within the content, there is no option or setting to hide this. The post would have to be edited to remove content from within it.

[DarrenS]

Thank you for the reply. I am starting with the vB5 default style (and slowly modifying it), but the titles are visible here at the top of every post. (I can also see them in the untouched Default vB5 Style.) How are they supposed to be hidden by the default styles if they are in the main body of the post?

I see that the reply titles have been removed completely from vB5. Is there a way to prevent the update from 4.2.5 from taking this field and prepending it to the post body field?

[Wayne Luke]

Looking at the upgrade steps, (specifically 5.0.0. Alpha 1 Step 146) there are no settings to prevent a pre-existing title from being added to the post.

Running the following query before upgrading, will remove the titles:

UPDATE post SET title='';

There is no method to remove these automatically after upgrading. Though you might be able to use a REPLACE INTO query and some sort of regular expression to change the reply content in the text table. If you haven't converted and are still in testing phase, I would update the database before the upgrade process to have the least chance of any failure.

Though, I don't recall hearing of any other complaints about this. If I had, I would have suggested that the title not be added back in 2012.

I don't know of a way to hide it with CSS.

[DarrenS]

That's helpful, thanks. We are still testing, so we can try this before the final migration.