Forum Housekeeping

[David]

Some of you may notice a few changes to the forum ;)

Tom has made a couple of requests for more forums and in view of the number of topics in the "General" and "Chat" forums, I've come to the conclusion that he is right.

There are 4 new forums and one new category. I have been through all the topics on the board and have moved those I think should be in the new forums so you may find that a topic you were following has moved. Don't forget, you can use the search facility if you need to (Tom).

Comments welcome B)

[James]

Hi David,

I think it is an improvement. It makes it easier to find threads without using Search, although in common with many forums on the Web, certain threads can disappear quickly from the front page and then it's a case of "out of sight, out of mind".

e.g. Terry's post about magazines - I meant to reply but it disappeared from the front page rather quickly due to another new topic and I forgot about it.

I wonder if there are any workable solutions to this? Perhaps I should just browse the forum indexes more rather than relying on the front page latest.

[francis]

I've started browsing forum indexes. I wonder how easy it would be to pull a listing togther of posts updated in the last 24 hours?

[David]

Originally posted by: James Barker
It makes it easier to find threads without using Search, although in common with many forums on the Web, certain threads can disappear quickly from the front page and then it's a case of "out of sight, out of mind".

That was a secondary reason for increasing the number of forums. I noticed that a number of topics recently went unanswered as they were buried beneath newer ones. It is easy just to look at the most recent topic in each forum and forget the forum index. In the short term we'll all just have to make the effort to look at the index. Longer term, the forum software will indicate unread posts in each forum so that you'll be able to see if there are posts you have missed. I don't intend to make any such changes before the summer though.

[Tom]

I don't know what a forum index is.

David: what about having a new forum for references and resources (to include Francis' post of today)?

[francis]

A forum index can be seen by either clicking on a forum index title on the left (General, Useful links, Design, etc) or even on the background surrounding the text. The mouse won't change into a hand to signify a link as the following JavaScript is used:

this.style.cursor='default'

when it would have been more helpful to change it to 'hand' (I think it's hand...) to give a visual clue that the whole area is a link rather than just something that changes colour when hovered over.

Clicking on one of those will give you a listing of all the subjects in that forum, and on the right is a "last post" column with info in.

I don't know if more forums would be a good idea - it's getting quite large at the moment and there's more to come with next year's subjects. And we'll be further annoying Terry with a really long, scrolling page. ;)

[David]

Originally posted by: Tom Turner
David: what about having a new forum for references and resources (to include Francis' post of today)?

Tom, I thought that the "Useful Links" forum would be used for references and resources.

I agree with Francis. I think that's enough for now and we can review the situation again in the future.

[Tom]

OK