[John Robinson]

Okay, here's a sneak preview of how threads will look in my forum software. It's ugly w/o a style sheet, I'll have to fix that up. This is shoe-horned into FR's existing database structure, which is horrible, and so most of the cool stuff isn't available for show.

Bus Crashes in Tennessee

Just randomly choose new thread id's if you want something else. I'll add some type of link from Latest posts for this later.

You might want to install this style sheet to get a feel for the new classes:

.fr_title
{
    padding-top: 1%;
    padding-bottom: 1%;
}

.fr_collapsed
{
    font: bold 12pt Arial;
    text-align: center;
}

.fr_collapsed A
{
    text-decoration: none;
    color: #aaaaaa;
}

.fr_collapsed A:hover
{
    color: white;
}

.fr_page
{
    font: bold 8pt/10pt Arial;
    color: gray;
    text-align: center;
}

.fr_page A:hover
{
    color: white;
}

.fr_page_here
{
    text-decoration: none;
    color: white;
}

.fr_page_goto
{
    text-decoration: none;
    color: gray;
}

.fr_normal
{
    font: bold 8pt/10pt Arial;
    background-color: gray;
    border-style: outset;
    border-width: 1;
    margin-bottom: 1em;
}

.fr_article .fr_header
{
    font: 8pt Arial;
    border-bottom: thin groove #999999;
    padding: 1px 6px;
}

.fr_comment .fr_header
{
    font: bold 8pt/10pt Arial;
    border-bottom: thin groove #999999;
    padding: 1px 6px;
}

.fr_normal .fr_header
{
    background-color: #777777;
}

.fr_normal .fr_header A
{
    text-decoration: none;
    color: #aaaaaa;
}

.fr_normal .fr_header A:hover
{
    text-decoration: none;
    color: white;
}

.fr_normal .fr_body
{
    font: 10pt Bookman Old Style, serif;
    margin-left: 30px;
    margin-right: 30px;
}

.fr_removed
{
    font: bold 8pt/10pt Arial;
    background-color: maroon;
    border-style: outset;
    border-width: 1;
    margin-bottom: 1em;
}

.fr_removed .fr_header
{
    font: bold 8pt/10pt Arial;
    background-color: maroon;
    border-bottom: thin solid #999999;
}

.fr_removed .fr_body
{
    font: 10pt Bookman Old Style, serif;
    margin-left: 30px;
    margin-right: 30px;
}

.fr_menu
{
    font: normal 8pt/10pt Arial;
    text-align: center;
    white-space: nowrap;
    margin-bottom: 1em;
    color: #aaaaaa;
}

.fr_menu B
{
    font-weight: normal;
}

.fr_menu A
{
    text-decoration: none;
    color: #dddddd;
}

.fr_menu A:hover
{
    text-decoration: none;
    color: white;
    /* font-weight: bold; */
}

.fr_copy
{
    font: italic 8pt/10pt Arial;
    text-decoration: none;
    color: gray;
}

.fr_default
{
    display: none;
}

.fr_quote
{
    border-top: ridge thin;
    border-bottom: ridge thin;
    padding-top: .5em;
    padding-bottom: .5em;
    font-style: italic;
}

BODY#forum
{
    background-image: url("http://www.freerepublic.com/bg/smblue_rock.gif");
}

.fr_body A:link {color:"#101090"; text-decoration: none } 
.fr_body A:visited {color:"#702090"; text-decoration: none; font-style: italic }
.fr_body A:hover {text-decoration: underline} 

.fr_hi
{
  BACKGROUND-COLOR: #eeee00;
}

Believe it or not, this started out as GWB's style sheet.

[RedWing9]

My first thought is gag! Sorry, but that is a major change to the look of FR. Most users probably are going to freak when they look at that. :)

I especially always preferred FR continuous thread look, rather than the "broken into 20's" look of the Delphi's and others. It makes it REALLY hard to have a conversation because you have to constantly click links to read what post #40 was referencing in post #2, etc.

[George W. Bush]

Now I know I have died and gone to BBS Heaven!

Believe it or not, this started out as GWB's style sheet.

I think you made too many improvements to bother giving me any credit. This is a real knockout, John! I really like the dark art look. Maybe I'll try for the Mary-Poppins-too-much-Prozac look for some contrast.

I'm tending to side a little with RedWing9. 20 posts at a time is a little short. But somewhere in the range of 30-40 would be pretty good for getting a lot of comment on a single page while still cutting down on bandwidth from the huge pages. I get so tired of long Refreshes. But if you have a strong preference for 20 per page, I can easily live with 20 better than the Refresh times we currently have on threads bigger than 100K. A lot of us don't have cable/DSL. I did notice you're making provision in the software for numbers of posts per page so you can change it or possibly allow users to set their own custom posts/page setting. Very solid. This new design reeks of dependability and future options for growth. Me like!

For rolling up stylesheets to test with, it would be good if the thread had some BLOCKQUOTE'd text in one of the replies. I didn't find any. Also, an example of highlighted text would be helpful.

(BTW, your <SPAN CLASS="hi"> highlighting doesn't seem to work but <EM> does.)

[steveegg]

Two major bugs with NS 4.77 (fixed one, still working on the other one):

-The background image does not load. The fix is to change the "BODY#forum" line to "BODY".
-The text boxes do not fill the screen. I'm still trying to work this one out.

Other than that, looks like a good job. Would like to test on one of the threads that broke NS 4.77 ( this thread would be good), but I don't have the time (patience, really) to hunt through the posts to get to it.

[SunnyUsa]

HUH?

This must just be for geeks! ;)

[steveegg]

1 additional unanticipated minor bug in NS 4.77; the fs_header fonts don't work. If you can get them to work, you're a much better programmer than I, as I've tried just about every last trick to spoof them to working. As GWB noted, hover doesn't work in NS 4.x (though it does in NS 6).

That's it for the list of bugs in NS 4.7x (not as bad as you thought, probably <VBG>).

[xm177e2]

Some negatives:

1) if you have a fast connection, you might want to get more posts at a time than 100 (I'd rather get the entire thread at once than have to click through as I'm reading it)

2) By using the "post comment" option, when people make comments on the thread it doesn't notify the poster. JH2 and Kat might like that, but the rest of us like to know when people contribute to threads we've posted. Maybe you could include a check box on the "post article" thread for whether "post comment" will flag the thread poster to the comment, that way JH2 and Kat can engage in hit-and-run posting, I can't imagine what their Self-Search feature currently looks like!