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Topic: advanced search in this forum (Read 8487 times) previous topic - next topic

advanced search in this forum

Good evening,

as I won't be ther efor some days, I wanted to know how I could read what would be posted here while I'm offnet.
Here is what I found:
To know which posts are from 4th of December of 2001, click the Search Messages link and enter
04-Dec-2001 [Enter]
Better, you can look for some periods:
1[2-5]-Dec-2001
will return the messages containing posts from 2001/12/12 to 2001/12/15 :)
Looking for 1st, 11, 21, 31 of November?
.1-Nov-2001[Enter] et voilà, you got them!

It does work with names either: if you look for posts about SB16 OR SB32, enter SB[13][62]

This is the power of regexp (REGular EXPressions), from unix, which you had (regexp, not unix ;) in µ$Word 6, but not later... so bad!

But it is *here*, and I love it.

More, it should work too in the Scripto either, IIRW (it accept regexp either).

* Holy and Merry Christmas to all,
* Have a fine end of the Year,
* a funny Euro-start for who is concerned,
* and a Happy New Year to anybody!

Best regards,

Marsu

Re: advanced search in this forum

Reply #1 –
So why hide it? Would it not be a lot easier to have a separate date-range search feature? I am particulary interested for example in seeing every message since a given date
regards
Peter

Re: advanced search in this forum

Reply #2 –
Well, it's not "hidden"; it's only using advanced search.
to my knowledge, dates are used as the rest of the text, and they are not specific items (except thay are between italic signs); so a search by chronologic order would not be easy to implement.

However, you may have access to such a chronological way: the number of the thread is in chronological order.

Moreover, you can use the offline forum for such a usage with much more facility.

HTH!

Re: advanced search in this forum

Reply #3 –
We will be modernizing all aspects of the web site, including forum interaction, as the year progresses. We will keep this in mind.

Re: advanced search in this forum

Reply #4 –
Modernizing... sounds like perhaps a version 2 coming up? I'm not sure if I look forward to that or dread it (grin or sigh?). Please, please, please, NWC folks, take it easy - don't change anything for the sake of change. I've seen too many wonderful programs go from being elegant in their simplicity to being difficult to use because every conceivable bell and whistle is added. You have a great product now, don't overhaul it too badly. Please.

Re: advanced search in this forum

Reply #5 –
Well, supposing you're talking about a "site version 2", I'm completely of the same opinion of David.
However, I don't fear that such drastic changes -just for sake of changing- happen in the bad way, having noticed that the changes I've seen --and I've seen many, since (I think) Nov.1996!-- are always done in the "good direction".

"Small is beautiful" is one motto that made Unix so versatile and powerful. It seems that this is the case for NW either :) (That reminds me when NWC came with one single font allowing more flexibility, instead of DLLs for fixed sizes: smaller, but better! )

So I'm confident with what will appear :)

Re: advanced search in this forum

Reply #6 –
Regardless of what is happening with the program, we plan to modernize the forum, not for complexity sake, but rather ease of use. First changes will be retrofit, later a new design all together may appear. The retrofits will start showing up soon.

Re: advanced search in this forum

Reply #7 –
Hmm, it seems you already made some changes, as links appear underlined when mouses passes over... Unless it's a network-upgrade of IE 4 at the office :)

Re: advanced search in this forum

Reply #8 –
Correct. Changes so far:

- new link styles

- new recent activity link style (should be more friendly to those that use the visited link color to decide if they have read a certain reply)

- new and reply forms now start out with keyboard focus for more efficient typing (one less mouse click required)

Re: advanced search in this forum

Reply #9 –
After having tested it:
1. great
2. great
3. great

Thank you Eric!
 

Re: advanced search in this forum

Reply #10 –
NoteWorth Online wrote:

"- new recent activity link style (should be more friendly to those that use the visited link color to decide if they have read a certain reply)"

Prior to the changes to the site, when you selected an activity link all of the related replies changed to the visited link color. Now it appears that only the specific reply that is selected will show the visited color, which could give the impression that some of the responses in the thread have not been read when in fact they have. I was wondering if this is/was the intended design? Not knowing programing or web designing, I don't know if it is even possible to show, on any given day, what responses have been potentially read versus what new response have been added since last viewing. In any event, the new enhancements to the forum look great. Keep up the good work!

Re: advanced search in this forum

Reply #11 –
It makes each reply have its own "visited" status. This was required for IE, which did not consider the #reply[n] portion of the URI to be significant when showing with the visited color.

There are better ways, but they require cookies or logins, both of which we are considering.

Re: advanced search in this forum

Reply #12 –
Sorry, but I like it better the other way - click on one link and it marks all the replies to the same answer as read (since I will have read them all at the same time).

Ideally I suppose, what is wanted is to mark all the current replies as read, but then when new replies come along, to leave them as unread. But I suspect that is getting too complicated.

Robin

Re: advanced search in this forum

Reply #13 –
well, Robin, the previous behavior was not satisfactory if you came back later, and that new posts had been added to the same thread: they were marked as read, though they were not.

Re: advanced search in this forum

Reply #14 –
I'm with Robin on this one. Clicking on multiple replies, going in and out of new windows is slightly tiresome :-(

Peter

Re: advanced search in this forum

Reply #15 –
The previous forum marked replies to threads as read and it was difficult to pick up a new reply.
With this version you can see immediately replies you have not read directly but you have to click on all links to replies in a thread to mark them as read.
I prefer this method but a "Mark All As Read" button, like that provided in Email and News software would be useful.

Re: advanced search in this forum

Reply #16 –
Yes, the "Mark all as read" option would be a good one, provided it worked per message.
I suppose there are arguments for and against the new solution. Being a tidy type of person, who likes to see that all the messages are read, it's a pain to have to click on every link to mark them as read. On the other hand, I can see that marking all the replies to a message as read means that you can't (as easily) tell when there are new replies.
The solution is the one I gave earlier - when you click on a reply, all the replies so far are marked as read. I can see it wouldn't be a trivial solution, though - is there a way of marking links as visited, except by actually visiting them? I bet if there is, it would be browser-specific (i.e. you would have to do one thing for MSIE, and another for Netscape etc.)

Oh well, don't try too hard, Eric! You've got an almost perfect music software application to perfect ;-)

Robin

Re: advanced search in this forum

Reply #17 –
This is a browser function not under the control of the web site. The new link style simply tricks the browser into thinking each reply is a new page. Given the current forum architecture (statically served pages, altered dynamically only as postings occur), there is no way to mark all links as read from the server end.

Let's wait and see what happens...

Re: advanced search in this forum

Reply #18 –
I suspected as much! Oh well, keep up the good work!

Robin

Re: advanced search in this forum

Reply #19 –
Just thought this morning that if we could have the most-recent entries sorted by thread plus replies, it could be more easy to know which thread is completely read or not, even if not all the lines are marked.
I'm not thinking of the same presentation as in the "Active contents" page, where only the titles of the threads are visible.
Would this be easy to do, and first, would it be ok for Robin and Peter?

BTW, a thing that could be useful either: in the Reply window, if we could see the title of the thread, it would be helpful. Just before sending *this* reply, I wondered if I was replying to the right thread. I wasn't; I was about to reply to the 2353 thread instead of 2331 (I saw it via the URL). just a thought...

Re: advanced search in this forum

Reply #20 –
I never had that problem with the new replies before.
I think its because the browser remembered seeing up to post 2000 #12 eg. when a new post came it shows up as new because there was no 2000 #13 the last time it was at the page.
Im running IE 5.0

hope that makes sense.

Re: advanced search in this forum

Reply #21 –
Search on chronological order on modified (since my departure) threads is very useful when you come back from vacation but I have not found yet a way to do it. The thread number is not relevant in this case.
Please Noteworthy can you add a list of the names of the thread that have been modified during a period of time startig e.g. 3 months ago and ending at yesterday midnight. The list should include name, date, time and be sorted by date and time and updated each midnight.
With this and the part of the "recent" list I can easily find what has been modified from date1 and now or between date1 time1 and date2 time2.