Upcoming changes to the forum

[John Robinson]

I'm working on the following changes to the forum software:

Thread URLs will change.

Old links will be redirected to maintain bookmark compatibility. The new links will be more descriptive, offering the date of the article and perhaps a meaningful filename.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1510575/posts doesn't say much.
http://www.freerepublic.com/2005/10/27/freeptoon/p1 says so much more.

Time zone handled by browser.

The timestamps on threads will change to your computer's local time zone, but only if you have JavaScript enabled. Otherwise they will be in US/Eastern. Your FR preference will be ignored (and will be phased out in favor of browser-side time zone handling.) The beauty of this arrangement is that as long as your computer displays the time in your time zone, FR will "Do The Right Thing"(tm).

Fixed number of comments.

No more than 50 comments per page will be shown. Your preference of 20, 100 or 250 is going to be ignored. I know this is a bit of a heartbreak for some, I understand it is a sacrifice. There are very good and very strong reasons this is changing.

Article text.

Only the first page of the thread will show the article text, and will always show the article text. Subsequent pages will only ever show a summary. In the future, a little browser-side magic could make the article text appear when you click a link.

All for one and one for all.

Everybody logged in or not will see the same content and links. For example, in the existing software, if you're not logged in you won't see the "Report Abuse" links. This check is going away, everybody will now see the same row of buttons.

In exchange, we'll have cache-friendly forum pages. This means:

• Faster downloads. If nothing changed on the thread you won't have to download it again. Also, local caches can store the page and deliver it much quicker.

• Better response time. Our servers will have to do less processing. Better yet, the front-end server will probably already have a generated copy of a thread in cache memory. Your request will be served instantly.

Update 10/30/05

I've expanded the scope of changes. I'm cleaning up the information we present to search engines like Google and Yahoo. Our site will be more useful to third-party search engines and thus more useful to you. For the most part this will not directly impact our human visitors. There will be changes that could break bookmarks of certain types of pages, but the chances such bookmarks have ever been made are slim.

[Lady Jag]

Changes coming PING

Change can be good.

[unixfox]

For all you do this thread's for you!

Thanks!

[LadyPilgrim]

Thanks John...God Bless you!

[Scutter]

Very well thought-out and useful changes, John. Have you thought of using iframes to separate the article text from the posts? This would let you keep the article on every page, without having to increase the load on the server.

[kingattax]

PONG

[firewalk]

Thanks Oxen

[WakeUpAndVote]

Do what needs to be done, if it were not for you and your partners maintaining FR...........

I don't even want to think about it.

I can't give much, but I give what I can. If it were not for FR, I would not have much contact with Old Sarge in Iraq either.

Thank you for what you do.

God bless America, You and our Free Republic.

[HKMk23]

...or scroll to the top of any thread, click "Pings", then click "More", then click "My Comments (self-search)".

...or goto your Profile page (http://www.freerepublic.com/~getmeouttapalmbeachc/ ) and click on the "In Forum" link in the menu.

[Gucho]

Good Changes PING!


Bump

[Tares]

Technically, I think the easiest way to handle this is to apply a CSS class name derived from the poster's name to the div fully containing the message. Something like this:

<div class="message u22380">some vapid or daft comment</div>

I know precious little HTML (and no Java) and don’t know how to write code for a CSS or JavaScript that would add the div tags in the proper spots to the downloaded code, but I suspect it would not be too difficult for you to add the div at your end. Could/would you do this? I don’t think it would add significantly to the file size. (Or alternatively, point me to a web site where I could learn to do it on my end)

And then instruct CSS to hide that user's messages: .u22380 { display: none } This of course would all be transparent to the end-user.

If the div tags were included on your end, I think I could add this to my browser's CSS.

Thanks for all your work on the forum.

[adam_az]

"As soon as I can sort it out, I'd like to enable posters to be able to update their own articles (and comments for that matter.) And, at least for articles, to allow a select list of other people to be able to edit the article (i.e. some type of article with several authors.)"

That would be great, it would be wiki type functionality for a group. A great use for the pages will, since they are updatable, turn into repositories where FReepers could follow particular things, posting quotes from relevent stories into the main article over time, for example. Keep in mind though, they will end up VERY long threads!

[adam_az]

In fact, these long threads would end up like a permanent message board on a subject - it would be an interesting dynamic change for the board, for sure.

[editor-surveyor]

We always knew that you're a genius, do you have to keep proving it ? :o)

[JLO]

Thanks for the ping about this, Tonk!

[Sir_Ed]

I agree with the "more than 50" comment.

I save some threads, and having to click and save a 2,000+ thread as a series of 50-posts per page is really tedious.

Mybe there is some way to create a "printer-friendly" file that saves all of a thread in its entirety as one file?

Thaanks for all your hard work, by the way...I love this site.

Ed

[John Robinson]

I'll consider some type of archival link. Something like 500 comments per page. Maybe a thousand. Just under what it would take to kill a browser, I imagine.

[Valin]

had decided I was just talking to myself on this thread.....

That's why I always have Dieter my invisible friend around. We have long talks, and he helps me figure things out, od course sometimes he doesn't give good advise, like the time he told me to smear myself with chocolate syrup and run naked down the street.

[LikeLight]

I abhor puke-inducing cutesy smilies, avatars, and other images that add nothing to the discussion.

Amen and Amen!

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Damn....FAST at this end....Could be the changes at my end though!

[IIntense]

LOL. Your latest diary entry:

I suspect I may be suffering from paranoia. Egad, maybe I'm delusional!

Aha! I can see clearly now la, la, la. The bosses of the big house threw their Demohabits overboard. What about ME? Take me with you...save my sanity.

Change my voter registration now!

(You aren't thinking of replacing me with one of those dog thingies, are you?) I promise I will wag my tail, walk on a leash (ugh), sit up and beg for your friends, and lick your face. Just don't call me a Democrat!