News Fader & Ticker

From a half-remembered UBB script to a proper highlights reel

Back in the early web-forum days, plenty of boards ran a little "news fader" widget — a handful of admin-typed lines quietly cycling through a small box, easy to miss if you weren't looking, easy to love if you were. This started life as exactly that: a nostalgic nod to one of those old scripts, rebuilt from scratch for a modern XenForo board.

It didn't stay simple for long. News Fader & Ticker has grown into a fully configurable highlights reel, with two distinct ways to show it off:

• Fade — the classic look: one item at a time, gently crossfading in a fixed-height box.
• Ticker — a genuine right-to-left scrolling ticker line, news-channel style, items separated by a middle dot.

Switch between them with one click, and everything else adapts to fit — no need to rebuild your setup from scratch.

What's configurable, in short: pretty much everything.

• Your choice of icon — FontAwesome, an emoji, or your own image URL — or none at all.
• Optional current date/time as its own item, with a customisable prefix.
• Adjustable interval (Fade) or scroll speed (Ticker), both independently tunable.
• Shuffle your items on every page load, or keep a fixed order.
• Pause automatically while a visitor's mouse is over the widget, so nothing scrolls away mid-read.
• Left, centre, or right alignment; a smaller "minor" header option; a trailing blank line at the end of each loop if you want a breather before it repeats.
• Full BBCode support in every item — bold, colour, links, the works.

Whether you want something that quietly hums along in the background or a proper old-school news ticker across your forum index, it's all one widget, one set of options, built to feel exactly as configurable as it needed to become.