[webber]

I have no idea what you guys are talking about when to talk about "list", "bumping", "pinging", "BTT"'ing, etc. What is the purpose of all this? How do you access the list? how do you start a list? Why would you want to have a "list"? I've been submitting, and posing for a little while now, but never used the above features, but now that it's being talked about a lot, I became curious as to what they are talking about and what I may be missing out on. Please descibe it to me like I just joined FR, and know nothing except how to post an article and post a reply because........that's all I know how to do. I've used the BTTT, Ping things without REALLY knowing what that does or means except that it gives an "affirmative" response to the post I'm replying to.

[John Robinson]

Long ago, it was possible to write any name in the "To:" field on a reply. People would post a reply to a fictitious name, say bang_list, if the article the reply would be attached to was of significant interest to some group of people. Individuals from the interested group would then be able to search the "To:" field for these replies. This provided an ad hoc index of articles for special interests.

Because the former implementation of the "To:" field caused a record keeping headache, not to mention its terrible inefficiencies, I modified the programming to accept only real user names (internally, this is much more efficient.)

However, it wouldn't be possible to maintain the ad hoc index if only real users could be addressed, so I created a special class of records that could be addressed and searched similar to users. This is what became the ill-named bump list register. I've regretted naming it that ever since. :-D

I've threatened on many separate occassions to move all these bump lists into keywords or topics of their own, but just haven't yet attempted this massive undertaking. There just never seems to be enough time for all these projects. :-D

[John Robinson]

Addendum:

I created the bump list register as a public-maintained resource. But probably because of its poorly chosen name, and deficiencies in the user interface, it was often screwed up. I locked it down and proceeded to work on implementing keywords, etc.

I honestly think the whole design of the bump list stuff is one big flaw, so I haven't bothered cleaning up the implementation.

[Timesink]

I have no idea what you guys are talking about when to talk about "list", "bumping", "pinging", "BTT"'ing, etc. What is the purpose of all this? How do you access the list? how do you start a list? Why would you want to have a "list"? I've been submitting, and posing for a little while now, but never used the above features, but now that it's being talked about a lot, I became curious as to what they are talking about and what I may be missing out on. Please descibe it to me like I just joined FR, and know nothing except how to post an article and post a reply because........that's all I know how to do. I've used the BTTT, Ping things without REALLY knowing what that does or means except that it gives an "affirmative" response to the post I'm replying to.

"BTTT" isn't a command at all. It's just an acronym for "Bump To The Top!". If you make a post in any thread, addressed to anyone (or no one), that thread is immediately "bumped" to the top of the Latest Posts page, which for most Freepers is the "front page" they use when checking out what's going on discussion-wise. In other words, all it does is make sure that for the next few minutes, anyone accessing the Latest Posts page will see that that thread exists. It's done when a Freeper thinks a given thread is important enough that more people should see it. That's all there is to BTTT.

A "bump" is synonymous with a "BTTT." I think BTTT is used more by really old-time Freepers, while everyone else tends to just say "bump." They are totally equal.

To "ping" is simply to respond in a thread to a specific person or group of persons. Say for example your Freeper friend Fidel is a total tinfoil kook who lives for conspiracy theory threads about TWA Flight 800. The next time you noticed one posted, you would click on the "Post Reply" button of any post in that thread. Except on the next page, you'd blank out the "To:" field and replace the name in it with the name "Fidel." That way, the next time Fidel logs in, he'll see that someone has left a post for him, and when he checks, he'll see a link to the TWA 800 thread. And as I said, you can ping multiple people in a single post. Some people have set up informal "ping lists" for those interested in various subjects. For example, lots of people are on Freeper mhking's "Hold Muh Beer" ping list, where he pings Freepers to at least a dozen news stories per day about people making idiots out of themselves.

As for "bump lists": Essentially, they're glorified ping lists. Instead of an individual having to manually keep a list of all the Freepers interested in a particular topic, he/she could create a "bump list" for that topic and simply "ping" one name instead of 10 or 50 or 100 names. People interested could then simply periodically check the bump lists they were interested in by visiting the bump list page and clicking on the lists they liked (Here is the list of available bump lists; just pick one at random and click on it; War_list remains extremely active). Or they could make bookmarks for their web browser, etc.

I speak of bump lists in the past tense because, while the ones that currently exist work fine, no new ones can be created, and haven't been for almost a year. This was a decision made by John Robinson, who wrote the FR software. He was going to replace bump lists with keywords (which you see at the beginning of every thread), but for unknown reasons he only barely got started on the keywords feature before he stopped work on it. And bump lists, sadly, were left dead. But the bump lists we still have are used a LOT.