That's... weird. Good to know, nice feature to have, but still weird.

As long as I'm registering complaints, here's a few other notes (which Truss told me to post here, so blame him):

- The difference in graphics for threads with new posts and threads without is pretty minimal, especially for the ones with odd icons (information, etc). I've mostly gotten used to it, but it would be nice if the icons could be clearer on that point.

- For that matter, it would be nice if there were a non-graphical way of knowing whether there are new posts in a forum/thread. A text note beside the forum thread, or next to the icon would serve just fine - while it's a minor point, it'd be nice to not have to wait for the images to load (which can be slow even on a fast connection - and sometimes the images don't load on the first try).

- And on an unrelated note: I am aware that DCF's structure makes it impossible to mark an individual thread as read (as opposed to an entire forum). However, it would be very much appreciated if a "mark thread" or even "mark post" feature were in any future forum versions that might appear -- not being able to mark an individual thread is very frustrating at times.

-- Anne

You live with Truss, he's the graphics d00d. Tell him to make new icons. ;-)

Basically color == new, monochrome == old.

>- For that matter, it would be nice if there were a non-graphical way
>of knowing whether there are new posts in a forum/thread. A text note
>beside the forum thread, or next to the icon would serve just fine -
>while it's a minor point, it'd be nice to not have to wait for the
>images to load (which can be slow even on a fast connection - and
>sometimes the images don't load on the first try).

Sounds like a weird browser thing - the image URLs never change, so I'd expect the browser to have them cached. I forget if the icons have decent ALT text...

>- And on an unrelated note: I am aware that DCF's structure makes it
>impossible to mark an individual thread as read (as opposed to an
>entire forum). However, it would be very much appreciated if a "mark
>thread" or even "mark post" feature were in any future forum versions
>that might appear -- not being able to mark an individual thread is
>very frustrating at times.

That's being considered for the new design. The issue is one of server load. You'd have to store a 'newsrc' style system for each forum user on the server, and check posts against that every time you generate a view. For a forum like this one with 200 users that's not too bad, but it would scale poorly for a generalized forum system - some forums have tens of thousands of registered users.

It is something Jer, Josh, and I will discuss more if the forum concepts move along. Marking by thread is probably easier, and less load, than marking by post. Think of it this way - if you have 10 forums and mark by forum you just need to store 10 timestamps per user. And you only need to check the timestamps when generating views - if the thread's/post's last updated timestamp is later than the mark, is is new.

If you have 10 forums and allow 200 threads per forum, and allow marking by thread, you have to store up to 2,000 timestamps per user. Then when generating the lobby view you have to check if any of the threads have a timestamp later than their last mark timestamp, if *any* do, then it is new.

Now per-post marking is a different beast. You'd have to store article numbers. If any of the threads have a post count higher than the highest 'marked' number for the thread, then it has new content.

This is all done by news - but with news all the work is done by the client the user is running, not all on the server.

Yeah, we're thinking about it.

>You live with Truss, he's the graphics d00d. Tell him to make new
>icons. ;-)

I did. He said no.

>Basically color == new, monochrome == old.

I'm aware of that... but it's still not as clear as it ought to be. If there were just two icons for threads (yellow = new, monochrome = old), it would work fine - but with multiple types of icons (including the little information-sign things, the books, the anchors, etc), it gets confusing. It's nothing I can't figure out with a second look or half a second's thought, but I'm a big fan of making things extremely obvious and unambiguous, which the current scheme isn't. Of course, I may be the only one who prefers that, so feel free to ignore me if that's the case (this applies to this entire post).

>Sounds like a weird browser thing - the image URLs never change, so
>I'd expect the browser to have them cached. I forget if the icons
>have decent ALT text...

As far as I can tell, they don't have any ALT text, or at least none that I've seen. I'm betting the images not loading problem is a weird browser thing (and not one I have the motivation to fix, since it doesn't matter -that- much). My complaint was more from an ease-of-use standpoint - why use images when text would work just as well, if not better in some cases?

-- Anne

I acutally had some random thoguhts on this...admittedly, I don't know how well dsome of them would work, since i'm a sysadmin, not a web developer.

Would it be possible to store by-thread read marks client side (by cookie, or something similar)...then, if al lthe threads in a forum are up-to-date, mark the forum read as in the current system?

Again, I have no idea how (if) this would work, but it struck me a while back, and I never got around to posting it...figured I would, now, since it's vaguely under discussion.

Not in any reliable way. The cookie spec limits a client to a maximum of 20 cookies per site. And there is also a limit on the maximum number of bytes a client can store per *site* - total of all cookies. There is also a limit per cookie. Storing timestamps for every thread could add up to a lot of information to be storing. And, of course, it locks you to that browser on that machine. If you went from work to home, or school to home, etc, all of your marks would be gone - everything would be unread. If you use NS4 with roaming it might be ok, but that's not likely these days.

One of the big advantages to a web forum, over say news, is that it is client independent.

ew...that's what I get for knowing incredibly little about cookies...I'm almost sorry I asked..

>And, of course,
>it locks you to that browser on that machine. If you went from work
>to home, or school to home, etc, all of your marks would be gone -
>everything would be unread. If you use NS4 with roaming it might be
>ok, but that's not likely these days.

that's why I was saying by-forum read marks should/would still be server side...so if you'd only half-read the forum, you shouldn't switch machines...but if you've read everything, a mark like is curently used would be placed server-side.

ok, so I'm not really explaining this as well as it is in my head...the cookie size/number limit pretty much kills this idea, anyway.

>One of the big advantages to a web forum, over say news, is that it is
>client independent.

no arguement there