If you're running MyBB with it's default templates for reporting then a report box should look something like this:
When it could look more like this -
Personally I believe this to be superior to a textbox method for more then one reason. For once it could eliminate the possibility of a user spamming reports which would be a waste of his time, and very uncommon, but it's gone . I also believe it makes the sight more professional, and the reports are easier to manage, this is simply a personal belief. But why not take a look for yourself, just read this tutorial and you will have this on your site in no time.
We're going to start out by navigating to your admin panel, logging in and doing the following.
Admin CP >
Templates & Style >
Templates >
Expanding Your Current Template >
Report Templates >
Expand >
Report >
Full Edit
Do a search for:
Code:
<input type="text" class="textbox" name="reason" size="40" maxlength="250" />
and replace it with the following:
PHP:
<SELECT NAME="reason">
<OPTION VALUE="Leeching" >Leeching
<OPTION VALUE="Low Quality" >Low Quality
<OPTION VALUE="Spamming" >Spamming
<OPTION VALUE="Hacking" >Hacking
</SELECT>
Also using this method you can display a different reason as the text displayed to the users, sounds confusing? Let me explain more. Using the:
PHP:
<OPTION VALUE="Low Quality" >Low Quality
method, we can edit what's in quotes to be posted to the report, and leave the [php>Low Quality[/php] as is and it would be displayed as such to the user. So we could do:
PHP:
<OPTION VALUE="Leech (If valid then delete, do not trash)" >Leeching
so users see -
but our staff sees -
hmm a pretty simple way to give pretty simple instructions.
Now if you want some more tips, look up what all you can do with drop-down boxes! w3schools is a good resource I'm assuming or just stick to google! For example one thing I learned is you can set the box to automatically select whichever report you want, without switching the order. This could be used for example, to auto-select the most popular report reason, without having to change any orders. Take your code, for example -
PHP:
<OPTION VALUE="Spamming" >Spamming
and between the text in quotes, and the ">", add the word, without quotes, "SELECTED". So your code would become:
PHP:
<OPTION VALUE="Spamming" SELECTED >Spamming
Perfect.
Let me know if you have any questions guys. Also I would like to say as a little in before, I'm well aware none of the code is php, but I think the colors for it are awesome , also I'm sure this has been posted but I'm trying to go in depth and show all aspects of this option. Enjoy enjoy and let me know if you want me to add some more tips like making a certain choice auto-selected!
I also posted this on mybb.com's forum but nobody replied which made me feel like writing the whole thing was useless lol, but unfortunately this site has seen MUCH better days so I may not even get any replies here.