Posted on 10/10/2001 4:10:15 AM PDT by John Robinson
I'm testing a new thread layout. On latest posts, you will see a "beta" link for each article. Click it to read the article in the new thread style.
"Why fix it if it ain't broke?"
Well, it is broken, and it needs to be fixed. The old style Free Republic threads on average consumed 65 kilobytes per view. Multiply that by 600,000 articles served per day and that adds up to a big chunk of bandwidth.
I believe this new format will consume less resources. An eyeball estimate would put that average at about 15-20 kilobytes per view. You may have noticed how bandwidth starved Free Republic has been lately. It's been real slow during the morning. This new software, when fully implemented, should alleviate that problem.
Roll On!
When it comes to the posts by JH2, there is good and bad. In his rush to post everything about everything, he posts so many articles that the discussion gets fragmented. When he posts 5 different views of the same basic story, it really breaks up the discussion into 5 different threads on the same subject. Most of us know facts of the basic story under consideration, it is the discussion that is interesting.
When he posts in the middle of the night and there are few people on line, many of the threads just fade away. Later when someone does a search, they see the article was posted already so they do not post it again and a discussion never gets started. I am not saying he should stop posting, just that he should realize that there are some negative ramifications.
Splitting the threads up is a gread idea. Longer ones were impossible to load, and it will eliminate the thread-II, thread-III stuff.
The Reply # is not noise. I often trek up and down a thread by hitting the "To:##". Perhaps you could leave it where it was -- just color it dark grey and set the font smaller.
This "View Replies" option is nice... but it would be nice also to have the "To:##" link on the left where your eyes start to read.
Also, this navigation bar is cleaner
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than this one:
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Breaking the thread into manageable pieces isn't bad, should be quite good in fact, but messing with the format itself doesn't seem to help. (does the format actually affect the bandwidth that much?)
God Save America (Please)
I tend to prefer just bold rather than color for highlighting these things. The old format seems to be easier on the eyes.
Some things I'll have to try out more in order to appreciate them, like view replies and also getting only the last 20 posts when refreshing a long thread.
Over ...
But hey, it's just my opinion. If it becomes standard and we have to live with it, so be it I suppose.
But I don't like it.
I regularly go bonkers..... and that's just the hardware!
The Win 95 OS ( a freeby from my brother-in-law ) seems to self-destruct about every 6 months despite attentions from software that claims to fix window's problems....
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