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andrew,
>It is already slow enough
(server performance?) to check the generic board
this is exactly why i need to divide the board; there are just too many messages posted every day, and the page ends up too big to browse quickly.
the easiest way to make this work is to develop this new format prescriptively, by giving y’all suggestions for subjects and then following your ideas and posting patterns to create more of ’em.
so give us some ideas while you’re out there civilly disobeying 😉
sean.
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andrew,
>It is already slow enough
(server performance?) to check the generic board
this is exactly why i need to divide the board; there are just too many messages posted every day, and the page ends up too big to browse quickly.
the easiest way to make this work is to develop this new format prescriptively, by giving y'all suggestions for subjects and then following your ideas and posting patterns to create more of 'em.
so give us some ideas while you're out there civilly disobeying ;)
sean.
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Dividing the board like this is one sure way to to solve the problem of being too busy. I believe if you were a smart contractor and had too much business to do well, you'd charge more. I'd rather pay a nominal amount ($10/yr? $20/yr)then have this sub-divison crap.
*And more.....Where will threads go when archived - all into one folder? Will archiveed threads be moved into subject threads?Big deal - can you at least a "new" topic with no messages to show up under the "your new messages" list? Otherwise a lot will go un answered because nobody sees them.I'm assuming that new messages - no matter what folder - will show up under "your new mesages" as previously.
*Well, Mr. Prescriptive -- and I realize the poor sysop is always pilloried as the bad guy -- the text of the pending messages loads quickly -- about 4 seconds at 56k, even faster if you don't request an update each time you return from a topic to the index.If the main board were paginated -- as with the old board -- performance would be terrific. Say, you could ask for the "top 10" displayed. This may be beyond the software's capabilities, but there are workarounds.Speaking of, why doesn't the new software mark links as followed? I assume it's because the weird tags the board puts on the URLs aren't consistent. The followed link marks were a nice way to quickly scan for topics that interested me in the past -- again to save time. Maybe the server could automatically create a "real" HTML index for the front page each time a change occurs with pointers or handles to the actual info. An ordinary list of links will load in no time as all -- especially if it is the only object.What slows performance, in my experience, is when there are multiple objects to be retrieved. Every time the browser pauses to "connect" to the server for the next object or to change pages, it multiplies out to a lot of delay. To delve into several subfolders would make the quick check many of us take for new messages onerous -- we'd have to look at every one to see if anything interesting has happened. Realistically, many, including me, just won't bother. Those who do won't do so as often, and discussions will develop at a glacial pace. None of this is good for the board.Yak, yak, yak.
*I agree with all.I'll print the bumper stickers, b "No Rules"One Big smoke filled room with lots of beer....b wild women...card games....and a piano man.Wild Man Jack : )
*Well, there you have it, the same basic thought expressed by me, lawyerly; Bill, earthily; Freddy, poetically; cryptically, AdirondackJack.The problem is not the technology. As it happens, the timing is good for me too; I need more time to push several projects to completion, then resume "normal life."R.I.P.
*Every time I hit the new messages button I get a list from the previous incarnation, circa "groin vault framing". I haven't the patience to scroll down forever, maybe the new stuff is at the bottom. I really miss the old linked threads. Needed to get back to my old life anyway. . . pre-breaktime (pbt ?)
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keep 'em coming. this is how i learn what to do. i agree w/ fred that the 'design' outlet may have ghettoized some extant topics, so i moved 'em back out to the main page, and i'm always open to more ideas. i do need to organize this discussion somehow, but i'd like to do it in a way that encourages miscegenation of ideas, not retricts traffic and discourse. i can't leave the page wide-open; we recieve upwards of 300 posts per day, and keeping the home page at a manageable size means auto-archiving every 7 days. within a month i would have to archive every 5 days. so to strike a balance i'd like to guide discussions by subject, but not completely discourage open and wide-ranging digressions. i've seen one idea for assigning a keyword to each new topic, and i'm intrigued. any other ideas?
*>why doesn't the new software mark links as followed?this board is generated from a database by a script, so every time you reconnect to a page, you recieve a new version of it, hence no followed-link properties. >slows performance, in my experience, is when there are multiple objects to be retrieved.I agree. every new connection adds tremendous overhead and risk of failure, so i'm loath to add more layers and complexity to this interface. however, there is a balance to be struck. pages can occupy only so many resources before they become too cumbersome to use, and breaktime is just about there. i don't want to experience the same problems from previous incarnations of the board, where home users w/ slower connections or underpowered cpu's kept crashing enroute to breaktime.
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The "new" topics are lost - and it isn't practical to look through every folder for them.
"Your new messages" works fine for me - but obviously some people need help on how to "reset" all the "new" flags off.
Perhaps changing "energy" to "weatherization" and including those particular framing, hvac, and related topics into that category would help. And fewer categories rather than more. And perhaps if instead of a black monday fiat, you had begun a thread or folder on the problems and asked for suggestions in advance.......maybe the next big change that you cook up might be aired in advance.
Frankly, it was working well from my prospective - and apparently some of the other frequent posters felt similarly. I'd rather pay a couple dollars a month to have it wide open and discourage occasional or one-timers than this categorization that is an anathema (sp?) to the kind of discourse that was occuring.
*Patrick - the following was received from Sean when I emailed with same problem. I don't quite understand what I did but it cured the problem and made it easier to use - especially "your new messages"."easy way to fix:go to the archive, vol 2, athttp://www.taunton.com/cgi-bin/WebX?13@@.ee6e1a9hit 'subcribe' on the bottom of the page:http://www.taunton.com/cgi-bin/WebX?29@@.ee6e1a9click 'your preferences' : http://www.taunton.com/cgi-bin/WebX?25@@.ee6e1a9go to bottom of page, click 'Mark subscription list as current (as if allnew messages had been read). ' , then 'update my preferences'return to the archive, vol 2, athttp://www.taunton.com/cgi-bin/WebX?13@@.ee6e1a9click 'cancel subscription' at bottom of page :http://www.taunton.com/cgi-bin/WebX?36@@.ee6e1a9they should now be marked as read."Hope this helps you "get back to my old life anyway".Ever confused, Bill
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>perhaps if instead of a
black monday fiat
how else to ensure rapid (rabid?) reaction?
i'm treating this all as a living document, so everything can be changed and moved, and keep in mind, i'm doing this all for the first time, so it's tough to say where any mistakes might be before i make them. i agree that fewer subjects, more generalized, seems easier to use.
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You could have posted "I need help desparately! The good business is overwhelming the hardware and software here at Breaktime. Should I break up the topics into folders or what? HELP!!!"
*And some suggestions:Create a button on at least the main page, perhaps all the pages, that will set all "new" to read. That way, a newcomer can make sense of "your new messages" and old timers (cyberly speaking of course - a few weeks) can check what they want and reset the rest - again making "your new messages" useful.MAKE ALL NEW TOPICS APPEAR AS "NEW MESSAGES" so they don't get lost in the multiplying folders. (Alternate - a page like "your new messages" which is "new topics" - from all folders.Explain "subscribe" better - I suspect it would be useful.Figure out if you can have topics appear in more than one folder - like the "2X6 walls" could be in both "weatherization" and "construction" - perhaps using keywords or a check box system at time of starting a new topic.more to come........
*Consider adding "computers" to business or a separate folder for "computers and cad" or "software" or some such title. It's much more separable from the rest than "framing" is from "energy".Also, will new archived threads be in similar folders?Will old archived threads be assigned to separate archive folders?Will you slow down the 7 day archive - at least for a while - to say 10 or 14 days?Do you earn hazardous duty bonuses this week?enough for now .........
*Bill, Something like for subscribers only. I'll buy that one, too!!!
*Sean, You're doing great, I think you just caught many of us by surprise. And the folder titles seem to speak for themselves well. Keep it simple now as many of the recomendations I have read sound complicating in nature. My suggestion; On top of pages abutton I can hit that refreshes all and drops down a list of all topics from all folders that I have posts in, or have somehow marked as topics I am following. Included of course would be a flagging button that when hit would refresh and tell me which topics have new posts since the last time I accessed it. Possible? Keep up the good work and the site, jack : ) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Jack - Doesn't "subscribe" all ready mark topics you want to keep track of and allow you to get just the list of those? Can't figure out if it's cross folder or not. "Mark" is also a nice feature - allows your own private index of individual posts - with room for your own comments/description.
*Briefly (you guys are getting too much free tech support from me as it is!):(1) The supposed performance benefit for individual users with slow connections of dividing the groups is false. If these users check only 2 or 3 groups on each visit (I think most of us have interests that broad), they will be downloading almost the exact same number of topics from not one but several pages -- in much more time!(2) The welcome page should be straight HTML, permitting followed-link notation, enhancing performance, and suppressing unnecessary deviance from the HTML standard (we Mac users are fanatics about consistent, predictable interfaces -- if it looks like HTML, it should act like HTML). Basically, the welcome page would be a "front" or "façade" that would disguise the board's variable "script." There is a concept, unique I think to the weird Mac architecture, called a handle, a pointer to a pointer. The first pointer, like a keyword, will always be the same for a given topic, and it points to a location where the topic's actual location is stored. Feel free to ask me about this! (By e-mail, I can hear the snores out there.)(3) Can't this software paginate the master topic list like the old software?!? So, page 1 has the most active 10 topics, stop there if you want, move on to page 2 if you prefer. This should decrease the archive frequency for our poor sysop considerably -- monthly would be great. Again, if the software can't do it, a façade page backed by a script processor could.(4) The "your new messages" idea is good, but again it slows things down to have to add the topics to your personal list, and you have to periodically go trolling for new topics -- yech. Bill is right, the new topics should all be in -- or accessible from -- one place. Or better yet, all topics available all the time, paginated.(5) This spellchecker thing -- don't PC's have those programs that will check spelling in any document in any program?(6) I think you've learned the value of diplomacy, whippersnapper! :)
*Bill,Thanks for the insights...Never have hit all the buttons and am trying them out now.Some don't make sense yet to me...when I hit "your new messages" it gave me a huge list of topics with no dates and not my postings?Somewhat lost in Site exploration,Jack : )PS- Does one "sign in" upon entering Breaktime?
*Andrew,Are you a "Web "God" b Master of the Inverse" as well as "b FHB type?"Not bored at all with your postings, keep teaching the "b I nots" among us.I have a beta Office 2000 program and will be trying to post from Word or Frontpage to see if I can match Joe's colorful work.Any help? New topic or folder?Learning too much, brain hurts, time for real lunch Breaktime,Jack : [
*I have the sign in page bookmarked - go there first when logging into internet.Somewhere - maybe "No! Don't!" I posted Sean's emailed instructions for cleaning up the "your new message" list. When he first archived things, they were all set to "new" so messed up the system (my system anyways) a lot. I suspect there is a way to use those same instructions to reset all the posts to "read" (not "new").Siging in and using that feature is a whole lot easier - but I suspect not many know it exists.Really powerful software - just not quite honed yet.
*With Taunton's history of newsstand vs mailbox magazine arrival times, I'd be wary of turning this forum into one available only to current FHB subscribers. If we do that, we stand a chance of having new postings becoming available to the general public on the newstands in hard copy 1-2 weeks before they are available to the subscribers of this forum over the 'net.
*or even before we post 'em!
*Getting "your new messages" to a clean slate:In concept - "subscribe" to everything you want to clear of "new message" status by going to that page - either a single topic, a whole folder, or the whole darn board - by clicking "subscribe" at the bottom of the page.Then go "your preferences" and towards the bottom of that you can mark all the subscriptions as "read".Now go back to the page you were on and "unsubscribe".Voila! No more "new messages".Now, if Sean can only fix the "new" topic vs. "new" message thing, it might be o.k.
*SEAN - what happened to the little symbols? can't tell threads from folders!
*Please, no topics in multiple folders.
*BillJust tried this and it won't work unless you bring up each topic individually, there's no other way to subscribe and then delete(unsubscribe). My list under new messages is several hundred deep. . . possibly every thread in the last 3 months.Thanx for the other info!
*Patrick - This just worked for me. I went to "Breaktime Home", clicked subscribe at bottom of page, went to "my preferences", to bottom, marked all as read, accept changes, went back to home, clicked "cancel sunscriptions", voila!
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sorry, still tweaking, the board, that is. have replaced icons for topics, tho i think leaving the folders in a larger size id's them just fine.
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Doesn't show up on my laptop - they all look same size. Does show up on desktop - though I would recommend a bigger graphic differentiation.
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I was afraid of that... can never cross-platform test enough!
this happens all the time in homebuilding, right? you add a feature that looks perfect to you, then someone else looks at it and finds 27 things wrong.
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Bill
It worked for me also, my "new messages" was cleaned off,but then I had to scour the board to reinstall all the threads I had previously subscribed to. What a collossal PAIN!!! Now I notice that my "new messages" is filling up again with stuff from threads that I haven't subscribed to as well, and each will have to be deleted individually in order not to wipe out all the subscriptions that I just RE_INSTALLED!!! What's the point of the "new messages folder"?
And what's the processing order of new threads, some seem to get "foldered" while others stay out on the "general" (my term ) board. Surely any given thread can fit one of the existing folders?????
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>some seem to get "foldered" while others stay out on the
"general" (my term ) board
patrick,
i've decided to let the users decide where a post will go. i will periodically filter thru the general archives to look for topics which could be useful to folks skimming thru specific folders, but for now, it's up to each individual to decide where his/ her topic makes the most sense.
about the 'your new messages' function: it's a nonstandard add-on script, and there's no support for modifying it, so if you choose to use it to read breaktime, caveat emptor, you may be better off just relying on subscriptions.
sean.
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Patrick - now I understand better. For me, "ytour new messages" work because I would like to glance at everything - though admit that I somtimes just click on thread and click right away on "your new messages" to deep six it from the list.
I thought with subscriptions there was a separate list - like read subscriptions - that only listed those (few? special?) threads of interest and you just went through the list - which should be sorted do all the most recent are at the top. I suppose if you subscride to a lot - like a third or half - you'd like to have a "your new messages" function which only dealt with threads you'd subscrided to.
Sean - are you listening? I'll guess that is possible.
As for new threads, I thought Sean was going to set it up so new threads could only be started in folders BUT it appears they can be started in the "general" to root level still. I'll bet that's a change Sean does soon.
Hope I've helped and not confused it. I really like the "your new messages" a lot - makes folders tolerable - wish all "new" topics were picked up in "new messages".
*BillYou seem to be using the functions the way they were designed, and I'm still muddling through. The subscription list works ok for me, and then I tend to scan the rest of the board to see what's new. I would like the "your new messages" to have only new threads, to alert me, having already checked out the previous ones and having subscribed to those of interest. It would save endlessly surfing the multi folders to see what was Truly new!
*Hey! Good thinking! How about another link/button: "New Discussions" ? Sounds like a winner!SEAN!! Are you listening?!
*Sean,All is now working quite well for me....Please no changes for a few days.And Bill thanks for all the help; I've discovered what most of the "buttons" do.Jack : )
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hahahaha...
there is permanance in change...
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permanence in change...........hmmm...
sean your gonna blow one of my two last braincells someday!
Jack : )
*Webmasters are a "special" kind of people. Be kind to them, we need them more than they need us.What do we have now -- ahybrid of the old way and the new way of organizing the board? I haven't dared post a topic for fear of doing the wrong thing. Oh, heck, here goes -- just try to characterize PL boogers, Sean.
*SeanI've been fighting the new board for almost a week now, so here are some non-kneejerk suggestions:1) Have (((every))) thread delegated to a folder, make the post-er select the folder by clicking on a drop down list or whatever suits your syssop mind. No more, to folder or not to folder, that is the question. Folder it or lose it!!!2) Have all 'new threads' linked into a folder entitled "New (whatever)" where they can then be read and selected for subscription or deleted from the "new" folder, thus the subscriber can keep track of his/her own list of what's new and NOT HAVE TO SCROLL 6(?) FRIGGIN FOLDERS AND THE NON FOLDERED LIST EVERY BLOODY TIME!!!!!!!! Do I sound annoyed??? Is the pope a . . . ??? Before the board got so popular I used to read pretty much everything, now I hardly have time to read new posts to threads I've 'subscribed' to let alone endlessly scroll looking for new topics of interest!! I keep hanging onto the doppelganger that computers are supposed to make things easier (whaddadork!!) SIMPLIFY, SIMPLIFY, SIMPLIFY!!!! For the sake of those of us who not only have a day job, but a Life as well!!! But who admit to a certain addiction to this forum.-Patrick
*I share some of Partrick's frustration and again suggest a new "button" at the top - right next to "Topics with New Messages" (previously "Your New Messages") which is "New Topics".As far as forcing all new topics into folders, isn't that something you're planning or that was announced?
*Sean,Not only do we all push your "buttons" we have the audacity to ask for more buttons.I think the site works perfectly now though I do like the "new topics list" button proposal.KISS.....Sean.....all,Jack : )PS- Hope your not working 24/7 !
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These sub boards can only become a nuisance. It is already slow enough (server performance?) to check the generic board; to search several sub-boards will just be too much time....
As an act of civil disobedience, I'd like to incite the similarly-minded to post to this "folder" only.
Maybe particularly interesting threads could be copied to sub-folders and kept for posterity, but on a day-to-day basis it would be painfully cumbersome.