What are the little bars under some posts?

What are those little bars under some post titles that fill up and change color? What do they represent?Sorry for the silly question!

Don't worry, everyone asks. Some just read the answer before they post the question.Those bars indicate the amount of activity. Red means the topic is getting losts of posts in a short time. Something like that anyway.

The longer the bar, the more active the thread is. For example, a thread with 300 posts evenly distributed over a period of 3 years would have a very short and green bar. However, a thread with 300 posts evenly distributed over a period of 3 weeks would have a long orange, possibly red, bar. It tells both the admins and members how active a thread is and warns us if there is an overactive thread that needs to be closed down temporarily for people to breathe.

Red all the way to the right means 50 (or more) messages posted to the topic in the last 48 hours. At least that's how I understand it.Adminnemooseus

Yeah. One OP by Ken and 49 posts editing and amplifying the OP.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Is there a special way to copy somebody's comments? I've been copying and pasting.

Kinda. C&P works best.Click on the red reply button to reply to a particular message. That sends notification to the poster that you've replied.To make things easy to read, use the UBB coding. In reply mode there is a link to the codes on the left. Click on "UBB Code is ON" for a cheat sheet.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

How do you get the background color behind a pasted quote from someone's message?

Go to this thread for all your needs.

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Hate world.Revenge soon!

I take "AM" to mean "Activity Monitor" but it's not very clear as peeps have said "everyone asks"would it be an idea to edit the page so rather than it reading "AM:" it reads "Thread Activity" or "Hot or Not?"

Maybe the activity meter needs to be rethought. Most board software has a stupid (sorry, is my prejudice showing?) "active or not" indicator that has nothing to do with activity level. These boards have a setting on the control panel that allows the administrator to set how many posts make a thread an "active" thread. A common number for this setting is 15 or 20. Therefore, all threads with more than 15 or 20 posts are indicated with the "active" icon, often a red folder or flames or some such image.But a thread with more than 15 or 20 posts gets this indication even when it's been a year since anyone posted, and that's just plain dumb.The board software used by EvC Forum, dBoard from PerSoft, uses an activity meter which is an actual proportional measure of recent activity. The parameters are settable by administrators through the control panel. At present, the time period is set to 48 hours (2 days), and the number of posts above which to indicate maximum activity is 50. So if there have been 50 or more posts in the last 48 hours, then the bar will extend all the way to the right and it will be red.But, as I said, the measure is proportional to time. If there have been 25 posts in the past 48 hours, but they all occurred in the past day, that's a higher activity level than if they had all occurred a day ago. In other words, the older a post within the time period, the less impact it has on raising the activity level.But as has been said, the activity meter is often a source of questions, and I'm always interested in improving the board software. I think your suggestion is to change "AM" that appears in front on the bar for each thread to "Thread Activity" or "Hot or Not" or something else more explanatory. I would like to do this, but I don't want to give up that much real estate to text that would appear for every single thread.A compromise that might work and actually provide more information would be to make the bar also be a link to a page that contains a clear description of the activity meter, as well as the stats for the past time period hours for the thread.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

I agree that standard 'Hot topic'indicators are worse than useless and can encourage the resuraction of long dead topics, where as a system like the one used here does give a far better indication of actuall activitySo there's a thought that might work AND help improve the signal to noise ratio of the page by reducing the screen realestate taken up by non post items.As the curent activity bar changes colour as the activity rises you could re-wite this so, for example, the background of the 'index' box to the left of the thread title box would take on the colour of the bar.This would give the same info and de clutter the page a bit.just a thought