UBB.Developers Forums General Discussion Suggestions and Feedback New column

Actually, it's not a matter of how much sleep I need, I rarely get much anyways[]/w3timages/icons/wink.gif[/]. I could code just about anything you need it to do, but with all suggested features I have to take into consideration how much server resources it would take to do it. Like for example being able to jump directly to the newest post in a thread. In order to do this I'd have to do a query/calculation to see how far deep in the thread the new reply is. And then I'd have to see what the user's default flat posts per page is, do a division by the total replies in the thread and then build the link. And I'd have to do that for each thread displayed on that page. So, obviously this could be done, but speaking practically this woudln't make for a very fast system.

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Scream
WWWThreads Developer

Whew! That is a lot of stuff! I'm pooped just reading about it []/w3timages/icons/wink.gif[/]

Oh well, to that end I'll say again, the ability to view new messages only is very important.

Last on that from me []/w3timages/icons/smile.gif[/]

Socrates
ForumExperts

I wouldnt mind that much if it wasnt perfect. If it would be easier to go to the next new post and instead of recalculating all the pages (that as you seem to say would take much resources...) just grab the 2 earlier posts and start building the pages from there, backwards and forwards, even if the previous page had only 6 replies I´d do it. Maybe others would not like this and preffer it as it is now, but I´d personally preffer that, its a time saver.

Mateo Byler
CruceDeCaminos.com

Darren,

Personally, on my forum, I'll team the 'sun' icon up with colored cell bgcolors, even though I think it marks it nicely as it is. I just want to highlight the new threads a little more clearly.

As it is now, you do save the loading of the other images... if you don't use icons w/posts, you could remove them entirely from postlist and then you would only be loading the small sun or 'new' marker image for a few threads, instead of the entire collection of icons, or 4 different folders, in addition to a new marker image. So I think it saves a little loading time there as it is, and you can save more if you want to customize it a bit.

It kind of depends on the forum, and going back to the old way would be pretty easy, I'm sure. There actually doesn't have to be a column there if you don't want it. The new marker image could go after the thread link.

Muhammad Chishti
Creative dIRECTOR
[:white]http://www.imcuniverse.com

The problem is finding out where the new reply is at. Say there are 30 replies in a thread, you've seen the thread before but not for a couple of days. Now, to jump to the newest unread reply I have to find out where that is. I know the last time that you visited the forum, so I can find out what replies are new since you last visited but where do they fall in the chain of replies? I could do a little more code and extract this out as well, but this has to be done for every new thread that is displayed on the postlist screen.

Like I said, it can be done, but in this case the postlist screen is one of the most heavily hit files and any increase in processor time to run this file adds up quickly.

I'll figure out a way to do this eventually, but sometimes it's a bit harder than it looks to do it properly.[]/w3timages/icons/wink.gif[/].

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Scream
WWWThreads Developer

I should not butt into a subject that I know absolutely nothing about, but is there a way to have all new posts e-mailed to a user? Then a user would not have to go to the Board at all.

I am trying to get our PERL coder to do this today... users are demanding it since our old forum had it. I think I mentioned it a few times to Scream but I guess he didn't have time. []/w3timages/icons/smile.gif[/]

Basically, the subscriptions would mean that when a new post is made to the forum, if a user is subscribed to that 'board', they would get a copy of it by e-mail w/link to the message... just like the e-mail notifications but notification of every post to the 'board' if you are subscribed.

Muhammad Chishti
Creative dIRECTOR
[:white]http://www.imcuniverse.com

Ummm...isn't this already under board subscriptions? As long as you have it enabled and cron running....

Unless it was changed, that sends a daily archive... and isn't very clear, to me anyway. What I'm talking about is an instant e-mail sent to subscribers of that board when the post is made.

Muhammad Chishti
Creative dIRECTOR
[:white]http://www.imcuniverse.com

So for anyone wanting to go back to orange and yellow post icons, removing the left hand column would be easy, but were there some major changes done to remove the differentiation of read and unread icon colours?

I don't really buy the bandwidth argument Scream mentioned earlier, unless it's a text based web site. Look at the file sizes, they are tiny, a little over 100 bytes. You still have to download the yellow icons so the extra set would take up 2-3kb. Probably a quarter of the size of their logo. And they're cached for future references.

Darren.
http://www.bullpen.com.au

There were some modifications done to remove the display of the different colored icons and the "new" image. So, yes it would be easy to remove the column, but it would be a bit more difficult to return to the old behavior as the code has been changed to display the current way.

And, I don't really by the bandwidth thing either, but it's just one of things that were mentioned/complained about the old way.

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Scream
WWWThreads Developer

Just set subscriptions.pl to be run more often, say once every 30 minutes? It's not instantaneous, but not that bad either.

If you have a really fast server, just have it set to run once a minute. And if this crashes your server...I had no part in it []/w3timages/icons/smile.gif[/]

Would a solution be to compare the postlist.pl of this version to the postlist.pl of the next?

Darren.
http://www.bullpen.com.au

No, I would take the code from V5.1.3 and merge the old code into the new postlist when Scream releases 5.1.4 (which I assume will be when the sun image change will be included).

Muhammad Chishti
Creative dIRECTOR
[:white]http://www.imcuniverse.com

There were 2 different places to look if a thread was nor or if it had new messages.
I figured by doing it this way then there is one place to look. Users can change the newmarker to whatever they want it to be for their site.

You had to look at two places, but you could tell the difference between the cases. Right now I don't like not knowing which threads are new. Maybe I'll get used to it but it's bugging me so far []/w3timages/icons/crazy.gif[/].

Lee

You never knew when the threads were new (not even before). Well, OK, that is an exaggeration--there was about one week when you could tell which threads were new but people complained they didn't like that change so Scream undid it. The old behavior was (as I understood it):
1) If there is anything at all new in the thread, make the post icon orange.
2) If there are any new replies to the thread put the "new" icon in the replies column.
Note that the only time when you wouldn't simultaneously have an orange post icon and a "new" icon in the replies column was when there was only one post in the thread. Thus, these two different icons really only conveyed one piece of information: there is something in the thread you haven't read. There was no way to tell that the thread was new (unless it had no replies).

When version 5.1b came out it was (briefly) possible to distinguish new threads from old ones because the post icon would only be orange if the thread was new (this was supposedly the intent all along but a bug had kept it from working). However, many people protested the new (correct) behavior, so Scream changed it back. See this thread and also my plea for a way to distinguish new threads.

The fact that there are regular users of this board who apparently never understood what the orange post icons and "new" icon meant (including me for a very long time) speaks volumes for the need to do something different (in my opinion).

Bill Dimm, MagPortal.com - [:red]free feeds for your site.

Soon I'm going to try some things with cell bgcolors and making the new posts bold... will post with what I get done. We're working on an e-mail nofitication modification first, though.

Muhammad Chishti
Creative dIRECTOR
[:white]http://www.imcuniverse.com

Hi Bill
There are no more orange and yellow icons or 'new' images anyway so maybe us "unwashed masses" who wronged the right never got it our way after all.

Having some icons orange and some yellow splattered throught the list was confusing, when you also had to check on the other side of the screen to see if this is a thread which has something new in it. For those on larger screen resolutions it was particularly inefficient as there was a significant gap between the two items supposed to be working in tandem.

My objection to the layout in that magical week was never about a dislike for distinguishing between new threads and threads with only new messages, but a dislike for complicated interface.

However, now there is a new column:
- if a thread was new and had a 'bold' sun icon,
- if a thread was not new but had new posts to it then it had a normal sun icon,
- and obviously if there was no new material at all, it had no icon
then I could see this as very beneficial.

Darren.
http://www.bullpen.com.au

That approach sounds good to me (and is actually somewhat similar to my suggestion a while ago of having red post icons for new threads, orange for new replies to old threads, and yellow for old everything--back in the days before all these suns). I think the sticking point now is whether or not Scream can determine which threads are new efficiently in the current code.

Bill Dimm, MagPortal.com - [:red]free feeds for your site.

Scream,

What I've always thought about this is that you shouldn't do this calculation in postlist, but rather only when the user clicks on something like a new link next to each thread head message. At that point, you would call showflat.pl or showthreaded.pl with a parameter of page=new or similar.

At the head of showflat.pl or showthreaded.pl you would look up all the messages posted since the user's last visit and could calculate which page to jump to at that point. This wouldn't be too much overhead since once you get into showflat.pl or showthreaded.pl you have already committed to pulling most if not all of the messages in that thread out of the database.

Is that a sensible idea?

Here is another idea... what I posted earlier, to make new messages have different cell bgcolors and bold text. Here is a screen shot of what it loks like in in postlist collapsed...

http://www.imcuniverse.com/images/imcforum2.gif

If the thread is new or has new messages, the cell bgolors are different, controlled by a CSS class. Also, the text in those cells is bold.

In postlist expanded, it looks like this:

http://www.imcuniverse.com/images/imcforum.gif

As you can see, only the individual new messages are marked as new...

In showthreaded, it looks like this:

http://www.imcuniverse.com/images/imcforum3.gif

Again, only new messages are marked.

Since this was done with 5.1.3, without the new sun icon column, the new images/icons/folders are still used. Don't know if they are really needed much with the alternate/bold cells... which (to me anyway) overshadow any difference in the icons.

Also note that the alternating cell bgcolors are removed for this to work well. It could work with them, though... I just don't think it would look very good. Demonstrated on a simple color scheme, with white as the dark and light table colors in the CSS.

So, what do you think? Should the 'new' images ([]http://www.wwwthreads.com/w3timages/new.gif[/]) be removed, and what about the 'new' folders/orange icons? I'm thinking of removing either one or both... not sure.

Also, maybe use the same 'new' cell bgcolor in showflat?

Any input?

Muhammad Chishti
Creative dIRECTOR
[:white]http://www.imcuniverse.com

I am not crazy about it.

Magicia (Site Manager)
http://uwo.world-gaming.cc