I am the owner of a newly created Nintendo gaming forum and the clans on it will occasionally need to give posts one member had to another member, should the original post owner go inactive or something.

Best example of this dilemma is when they need to change leadership and the new leader needs to take control away from the old leader to have control of the topic.

I don't know how to change post or topic authors, so I tried something to improvise, since this is imperative to the operation of the clan scene on my forum.

I did the following:

I had someone copy all the contents for the post they want to "take over" from the original post owner and paste those contents into a new topic. After that, I merged the posts from the topic that had the old owner, and then I ran into a problem...

The posts appear before the owner of the new thread, and because of that he isn't author of the topic anymore.

This would be remedied if I was able to just change post/topic authors. Is it at all possible? If it isn't, how can I prevent the thread owner from changing when I'm merging topics?

-Screenshots-

The original post owner is ChaosShadow23, but Tamz needs the post because ChaosShadow23 is going on leave for a bit.


Here Tamz copied all the contents of the thread, but he doesn't want the posts in the other topic with the old post owner (ChaosShadow23) to go to waste.

So I merge the topics so Tamz's thread can have the posts from the older topic by ChaosShadow23 and...



Tamz is now the name that shows as the person owning said thread, BUT...



The posts from the older thread that ChaosShadow23 had appear ABOVE the topic author's post (how does that even work?). The topic author should always be the starting post, no? It always is on nearly every forum I visit. Clan threads, specifically, need posts in order. Having 2 posts that are supposed to be the second and third parts of the thread become the first and second parts of the thread because of a topic merge would cause a lot of organization problems.

Is there anyway around this problem, like having the topic author's post be the first post in a thread by default regardless of posting date?

This is assuming that there is no way to change post author. I've had accounts on vBulletin forums, SMF forums, XenForo forums, and phpBB3 forums and they all had the ability to change post and topic author. I would be really surprised if Forumotion doesn't have this ability.

Thanks for reading, would love some clarification on this.

Okay my friend who is an Administrator of another Forumotion forum told me changing of post authors is not yet supported by Forumotion. I'm really surprised and disappointed in this, as it's too late for us to switch to another software/host... so I have to make due with Forumotion.

I talked with him and I'm going to do the following instead of merging topics:

1. Lock the thread by the old owner and archive it, keeping the old posts intact.
2. The thread by the new post owner will have a link to the old thread within it.

On a good note this strongly encourages clans to not change leaders, but sometimes emergencies happen... so this is still unfortunate since we don't want duplicate threads every time there is a leadership change.

I'm going to mark this as solved. This is a really ghetto way of handling things, but whatever. If there's anything I should know pertaining to my question despite marking this as solved though, please fill me in.

Hopefully ya'll get with the program and get the change post authors function added in. It's more popular than you think.

Peace.