Discussions Web Part in SharePoint (MOSS) 2007
The Discussion Web Part in SharePoint has always been a bit quirky. It doesn’t act like most other discussion applications and can often confuse users.
One specific confusing "feature" is this. When you start a discussion, the Subject is visible as a link in the Web Part. If you click on the Subject, the same site will reload, and the Discussion Web Part will show this message:
There are no items to show in this view of the "[Discussion Name]" discussion board. To create a new item, click "Add new discussion" below.
What does that mean? Didn’t you just create a discussion thread? What SharePoint has done is "open up" your existing discussion thread in the Web Part. Since no one has replied to your post yet, there are no items to show. This isn’t what most people expect.
The best way to deal with this is to have your users drill into the Discussion Web Part by clicking on the Web Part title and look at things there.
Hasn’t changed in 2010. Very annoying! Why wouldn’t they program the web part to have the discussion open in it’s own page? I’m trying to make this intuitive for my users, and giving them extra steps and instructions to work around Sharepoint’s quirks isn’t going to make people like Sharepoint.
This is an old small thread but hopefully you will get notified of this post.
When I applied a custom master page to a site the discussion boards stopped working. Pretty sure it was in the css somewhere so I copied the code from a board that worked and got it working almost correctly.
In my MOSS site when the Subject it clicked it takes the user to the Flat view – different as what is mentioned in this post. In the broke board it takes the user to the Allitems view. I can see this if I view the source code but not in SP Designer. Is there a way to change where the Subject link is pointing to?
I do not have acess to the server.
Thanks in advance!