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Topic: Everything went dark! (Read 5057 times) previous topic - next topic

Everything went dark!

Well, we seem to be back again!

I trust the maintenance went well - it seemed to take a long time!

Robin

Re: Everything went dark!

Reply #1 –
Not exactly. We are working on a cut over to a new forum technology, but we had to abort for now. A preview should be up soon.

Re: Everything went dark!

Reply #2 –
A demo of the upcoming new forum, with all content through 09-April-2002, can now be seen here:

new form demo

Re: Everything went dark!

Reply #3 –
Why does the home page point to the experimental forum?

Re: Everything went dark!

Reply #4 –
I like the forum, but how does the edit feature work? I can change the text of my posting but not save my changes.

Re: Everything went dark!

Reply #5 –
Hm... this will take some getting used to, my first reaction is that it seems more difficult to read the most recent posts.

That being said, the new UI appears to be more consistent with the usual format for online fora.

Fred

Re: Everything went dark!

Reply #6 –
I dunno. There's an old saying, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." And not only wasn't it broke, the new system breaks something we already have. In the existing (old?) format, I could simply page down to pick out the names of the participants in each thread, no mouse clicking required until I pointed to the tread I wanted to open. Now we have to go into the thread to see who's been part of it. And I can't tell at a glance which threads I have participated in myself.

Time and time again I've seen software that is elegantly simple get ruined by too much fancying up - there's a grave danger you're doing the same thing with this new format, NWC folks. It looks nice but takes away some of the usefulness of the old system. Please don't change.

Re: Everything went dark!

Reply #7 –
I'm inclined to agree with the comments so far about the new forum format. I am an avid NWCer and my first port of call each day when I launch my browser is the NWC forum. I find that I am more likely to read contributions from the very knowlegeable regular contibutors like Fred, Marsu, Ertugrul, Grant and others (sorry if I didn't mention you), and of course Noteworthy, regardless of the topic thread. The real gems are usually to be found there. The new format makes this more difficult and requires more "drilling" to see who has contibuted.

Having said that, I and always willing to give new ideas a chance and I believe that everything must change. On that score, I wish every success to the the new style and I sincerely hope that it does not discourage our regulars from making their most helful contributions.

To my mind Noteworthy is a super piece of kit and the forum is second to none.

Re: Everything went dark!

Reply #9 –
Way cool! That fixes it for me, the drop-down box to select listing or excerpts is just the cat's whiskers. So now we can have it either way when perusing new listings, or view by threads with new content.

I've dropped quite a few fora because the UI was clunky and frustrating; the present proposal for the NWC forum is the slickest I've seen yet. Good show!

Fred

Re: Everything went dark!

Reply #10 –
As long as you're revamping, maybe it would be an idea to implement forced refreshing, since the dynamic html can often be updated within the course of a single browser session. From what I've been able to glean, the following should work, placed in the <HEAD> section:

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Pragma" CONTENT="no-cache">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Expires" CONTENT="-1">

(The second command is needed to make it work properly in IE5).

Cheers,
Fred

Re: Everything went dark!

Reply #11 –
You are asking about a demo version of the forum that did not allow any changes, much less changes to existing posts. We are considering a feature where authenticated users could edit their post, at least for a certain period of time. For now, though, no such feature exists.

Re: Everything went dark!

Reply #12 –
Well done Noteworthy ! Having expressed some doubts about version 1 of the new format I feel I have to congratulate you on the latest tweaks.  This is really cool !  I also notice the return of the feature that marks ALL the read postings in a thread as having been visited (that may be a function of browser settings, I'm not sure!).