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. ;-)

[Stultis]

I must get a job.

[justshe]

You sure? Yours and my dyslexic fingers have been our TRADEMARK!!!!

We will just have to find a new 'identity'.....LOL!

[Lazamataz]

Nope. Any more guesses by anyone else?

[Mo1]

I have a way with words .. trust me .. they'll know .. LOL

[Revel]

Forum seems to be slower today than normal. There are long pauses when requesting articles or reply boxes. It seems to be slow only in the aspect that the request to FR is slow in getting acknowledged. Not complaining....just thought that it might be valubable information.

[honeygrl]

I'd like to guess "1"

[steveegg]

You don't HAVE to either use spell check or change any words it suggests. It merely brings up a scroll box with 1 or more suggested changes below the word that's misspelled, and the word you typed is still selected.

[Stultis]

Bet you're right. I remember one, specifically. Anybody got the link?

[goldstategop]

I would have liked to see an editing tool that would allow us to revisit submitted posts and fix goofs. Its just a miserely complaint of mind so pay me no attention. Keep up the good work!

[wildbill]

When we post, why oh why do we HAVE to go through the list of 50 states and assorted countries BEFORE we get to the "post" button?

Shouldn't posting to specific states be an option?

[Tares]

Oh yeah, almost forgot, SPELL CHECK!

I like this one very much. After I finished posting, I went looking for this thread---I knew they'd be one. Thanks for updating the software and posting a thread on it, as always. Another donation check will soon be in the mail.

[eyespysomething]

HEY! I like the spellcheck! Thanks. The dropdown selection is neat-o!

I'm is not going to look now idiot like.

[general_re]

It shouldn't require too much more overhead than a regular user-initiated search, depending on how the data is organized. Suppose I'm searching for articles by keyword, and I want all the articles with the keywords "California", "Schwarzenegger", and "budget", so I do a Boolean "AND" search to connect those three keywords. And the system returns all articles that match all three keywords.

Now suppose I post an article, and add those three keywords - in order to make suggestions, the system will do that same Boolean "AND" search, to find all the articles with those three keywords, same as a user-initiated search. Then, it has an extra step of comparing the keyword lists of the articles that that search returns in order to see if they hit some predetermined target for another common keyword - for example, if 75% of the articles returned by searching on the first three keywords also have the keyword "deficit", then it could suggest "deficit" as an additional keyword for the current article. Or something like that.

I'm not sure there would be any advantage to not writing index changes on-the-fly - you're going to have to write them somewhere, even if you just want to accumulate the changes and rewrite the index later, which makes index adds a two-step process, instead of the single step of merging on-the-fly. That way, you'd end up writing changes somewhere temporary, and then rewriting them later on when you want to add them to the index. Presumably the server is already capable of deferred-writes when it's under load anyway, so I don't think formalizing that system will really gain you much, but it might be worth examining for a bit just in case...

[Lazamataz]

I'd like to guess "1"

DINGDINGDINGDINGDING!!!

We have a weiner!

And here's the thread....

Winners of this contest get an all-expense-paid trip to my bed where they will be ravaged for days.

[Lazamataz]

Make sure you play the music. It's a necessary part of the experience.

[EdReform]

Excellent! Thanks John!

[GretchenEE]

I like the soft color sidebar. Haven't checked out everything else yet - time crunch -

Could you use one color for "News / Activism
Activism / Chapters" and a slightly different color for "News / Activism Breaking News" so they can be distinguished during page scrolls?

You're doing an excellent job, as always, John. Many thanks.

Just noted the spell checker while previewing. Awesome!

[WinOne4TheGipper]

Great job.

[justshe]

Zatamazal.....nope....no guesses here....just thought you would like to see what comes up for those who are a bit backwards: Damsel, steams, steamroller, stems, steamily, stammers.

I think it has potential!

[honeygrl]

"Winners of this contest get an all-expense-paid trip to my bed where they will be ravaged for days."

bwahaha! Do I get a barf bag for the motion sickness? :-p