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]

I like it.

[glock rocks]

That would work... just so I can somehow discern them.

[Dog Gone]

LOL! That's it. I can die and go to heaven now.

[my_pointy_head_is_sharp]

We didn't use to have that. Why do we need it now? Is there a way you can do it, so that we can circumvent it by our own computer settings - such as "Ignore Colors Specified on Web Pages"?

[smith288]

I think it looks pretty good... (you wont please everyone)

[my_pointy_head_is_sharp]

Can I just ask, why does it matter if it shows if you've visited a thread or not?

[FrogMom]

ARRRRGGGHHHHH!

Now they ALL open in the same window!

[glock rocks]

I can scroll down the latest posts thread and look for the red title to know which one I was reading before... makes it easier to find again. The ones I haven't read are blue.

[BlessedBeGod]

How do underlines/no underlines look for visit status?

That looks better! :-)

[my_pointy_head_is_sharp]

OK, I set my computer to Ignore Specified Colors. Now virtually everything is blue. Did we have that much blue before? The post number is blue, our names are blue, the Post Reply/Private Reply/etc. is all blue. And a bright blue, at that. Maybe if you made it a darker blue.

But still, I don't remember that much blue before.

[Dog Gone]

How do underlines/no underlines look for visit status?

Not good. It needs to be consistent with web protocol and change color.

Otherwise you're going to get a million complaints from people wondering why some threads aren't underlined.

[Dr. Eckleburg]

Wow. A spell-check. Now what do I blame any unintelligible posts of mine on?

[John Robinson]

The distinction has always been there, you probably configured your browser to use the same colors for both visited and unvisited links. My change overrode your setting. Trouble is, the default colors do not work well with various colored backgrounds. The best compromise I can offer at the moment is underline/no underline.
Try it for a little while until I come up with a workable alternative. Or maybe this way will grow on you. Shrug.

[smith288]

I added titles to my colors (boy, I wish you used styles here ) :(

Froggy	Pumpkin	Winter	Sea Foam	Blue-Ivory
#006600	#660000	#000066	#006666	#6600FF
#99FF99	#FF9900	#CCCCFF	#66FFCC	#FFFFCC

[my_pointy_head_is_sharp]

Oh, I didn't know you had it up there. The underlines don't bother me. I could live with that. What bothers me is all the blue. Blue titles everywhere. Way too much bright blue. (Can't we go back to the way it was?)

[John Robinson]

Yeah, I've heard that before. :-( Color sucks. I have a solution in mind that should please everybody-- but I can't get it in tonight.

[Soaring Feather]

I like the new changes, the colored side bar is nice.


Rah!!! Spell Check!!!!!

One suggestion on the Spell Check button, I know you have moved it around today I think the postion is is now is the best possible place.

Thank you.

[smith288]

(Can't we go back to the way it was?)

I should have had a bet going....

[my_pointy_head_is_sharp]

The underline/no-underline thing is OK. Doesn't bother me. But why is everything a bright blue? Can't we go back to the titles in black?

[my_pointy_head_is_sharp]

Hehe :D