Free Republic Software Update for November 25th, 2003 (Update #4)

[John Robinson]

Terse report for now:

• NEW By popular demand Browse All Forums (Search is on the todo list.)
• FIXED The pager now alerts on new comments to you in any forum (it used to only alert for the News/Activism forum.)
• CHANGED General Interest now General Interest (Chat).
• I added color to the sidebar, tell me (politely!) what you think.
• Lots of misc. things under the hood.

There are a bunch of add'l changes/additions I'd like to make, and this is probably not the last update today. I'll update this thread if so.

Update #1

• You can choose your own color for each topic subscribed in your sidebar. See the subscriptions gadget (All but blue is probably dog ugly. Feel free to suggest new color schemes in standard web hexadecimal (one color for the background of the title the other for the background of the links)

Update #2

• A few trivial changes, mostly cosmetic.
• You can now search by time or relevance from the latest posts. And it remembers what your last search was and defaults to that. So NOW order by time can be your default search setting.
• Oh yeah, almost forgot, SPELL CHECK! (replies for now, articles will come later.)

Update #3

• New Posts to You from You has been vanquished. New posts will only alert when other people ping you.
• Playing with the position of the Spell check button. Sorry.
• Your personal menu has a new small treat inside.
• Fixed a couple bugs dealing with the spell check code.
• I'm not done yet.

Update #4:

• Okay, I have stopped dorking with the link colors. Back to the defaults they go. Thanks for baring my experiment, I figure it's the least you owe for All Forum posts. ;-)

[berkeleybeej]

I really hate to be a whiner, but is there anyway to add something to the polling section like: "I don't want to vote in this poll, so please send it to the bottom."

[prairiebreeze]

Who is this guy, General Interest? Is he any good?

Prairie

[stainlessbanner]

# Lots of misc. things under the hood.

The FRSearch is now bored .30 over with a performance cam. That dawg hunts!

[NittanyLion]

Looks great...

[Fzob]

Thanks

Love them and long overdue.

[4CJ]

Lots of misc. things under the hood.

Does it have a hemi? ;o)

[Rebelbase]

Oh, this is a serious suggestion : Make the Breaking News sidebar color a different shade from the other side bar topics.

That would make it easier to find on the fly.

[RandallFlagg]

WOO-HOO! I love it!

Thank you!

[Cultural Jihad]

Ping!

[McGruff]

So far it looks good and behaves well.

I won't mention the search by post time or relevance thing.
Don't need to bring that up again.

[backhoe]

John the "Browse All Forums" is a good idea- I've had several older members mention to me privately that spliting the board into several was a reason "you don't see me much there anymore."

The sidebar color looks nice, although I'll hold an opinion is abeyance for now- I have a little trouble distinguishing which links I have already clicked- but that's more my eyes than your change.

[4CJ]

Seriously, the color was a very nice touch.

[MinuteGal]

Many thanks for all your hard work to make FR even better than it is!

I'm still pining for the day that the number of the comment I'm replying to comes up along with the poster's name.

I can't tell you how many times I have to write, "I agree (disagree) with your comment # 231", etc.

This would save the reader of my comment endless scrolling up, up, up, to find the original reply that I'M replying to.

Also would save me the time in reproducing other freepers comments on the top of my own reply.

Hope you follow me on this!

Leni

[Snowy]

It looks really nice, John. I often thought that for *really* breaking and important news, the mods can make the title red. Just an idea...

[John Robinson]

I was thinking about user-defined colors assignable from the subscriptions page. I might hack that in right now just because it sounds interesting.

[RightWingMama]

very nice!

[RosieCotton]

Browse all is great! I really missed that!

[SquirrelKing]

Looks purty! Keep up the good work!

[TankerKC]

Shouldn't this be moved to chat? ;)

I was completely unaware of the ”Chat=General Interest” issue until this weekend. The new labeling will help with the confusion.