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. ;-)

[Admin Moderator]

Know what?

[M Kehoe]

I would tell you good work, but I'm ignoring this thread.

5.56mm

[aquawrench]

ROCK ON

[Dog Gone]

OK - out with it - how many total posts?

I need to know whether the number includes both replies to me and actual posts by me. Otherwise, I'm going to have to voluntarily enter Freeper Rehabilitation at an undisclosed site.

[oceanperch]

Thank U a million times for SPELL CHECK.

I was thinking that the replies thanking you for that feature would be the far most replies ever on this forum and even more folks will post now with this added feature.

Hooray for spell check!

[Spunky]

"The pager functions perfectly fine without JavaScript, just open this link in a new window..."

Thanks for your response John, but where do I find the pager function?

I go to the News/Activism/latest post thread and I do not see anywhere where it says "pager" or whatever it is I need in order to let me know each time someone responds to my posting.

I don't know if I am even on the right track here. Appreciate your help on this also.

[sweetliberty]

"Already found a glitch in it: It doesn't like quotation marks in a post that DOES NOT use HTML tags."

It doesn't like quotation marks in the tag line either.

[oceanperch]

I never knew or cared to know who the mods. were around here.

You all came out at once here can't you leave your sex life behind closed doors for God's sake!

Next thing you know you will be screaming for equal rights and wanting to get married. : )

[sweetliberty]

"(Sheesh--next up, edit posts)"

That'd be a dandy, but could have some serious drawbacks too.

[Lead Moderator]

Just to you!

[John Robinson]

It would leave a trail (like this thread's history) and each revision would be viewable. I'd also include the ability for the user to remove his own comments (and the entire history) for those special moments..

[Dog Gone]

Just to you!

Aha! Then I've only made 2,652 posts here, because it's my practice never to post comments on a thread. I'm quite shy.

[oceanperch]

171 threads and 5,800 replies.

Yet I am on my third keyboard too.

Oh yeah I get manic when typing.

[sweetliberty]

It would be a nice feature if posters used it judiciously, but it seems that if people got too carried away with making modifications, it could mess up the sense of a thread. Especially if there was a "you said this or that" and "no, I didn't." Maybe it wouldn't matter.

I know a lot of people have said they wanted an ignore feature, too. I have reservations about that one. If you have a bunch of people all ignoring different posters, add to that the posts that get pulled, and it seems you could end up with threads that are not very coherent. A forum board is not quite like a chat room where sometimes it is essential to ignore certain people because of the way they invade real time chatting. It just doesn't seem to make much sense here. I suspect in the end, I will be overruled on this one, but wanted to put in my 2 cents anyway.

[Dog Gone]

You know, I don't want to be rude or anything, especially given how many positive changes you've made to the forum just today, but...

That magenta color you've selected as a sidebar color should be renamed Massachussetts Gay Marriage

[onyx]

ROFLMAO!! Perfect, DG, perfect. I forgot what I wanted to post to John Robinson. LOL.

[John Robinson]

It's for the queer topics.

[John Robinson]

And it sure beats pink.

[j_tull]

God bless you, man. You've been busy and it looks great, now if only you could fix my vanity email...

[Sidebar Moderator]

I don't like the color either, but what influence do I have?