Jump to first unread? And more ...

Apologies if this has been kicked around and I've missed it.The vast majority of boards that I've seen have a "jump to last unread message" button somewhere beside the topic title, where have a "topic's mood" button that I don't find very useful. Could we lose the mood and replace it with something more useful?Also, the main forum page has a light bulb (for new posts) beside each forum, but it appears that the light bulb is updated only once every 24 hours and does not reflect my last login. E.g., if I log in at 7 AM and log in again at 5 PM, the light bulbs are all shown as unlighted no matter whether there have been new posts since 7 AM. Could this be changed?

Hmmm! About "jump to last unread message", I think that *might* be possible. I'd have to think about it. Since there are as many as 15 messages per HTML page it wouldn't be possible to determine if you only read halfway down, but it *would* be possible to determine if messages newer than the last time you examined that page (or any page of that thread) have been posted, and then to go to the least recent newer message.This would take up a lot of cookie space. The times of last reference for each thread would have to be recorded in cookies, and while Netscape and IE may in reality use more cookie space than the standard, the original standard that I think is still in effect says that each site can only record 20 cookies. If that really is still the case, then if you read 21 threads, guess what? And some of the lost cookies could be the username and password that most people prefer websites to remember for them.If this could be done, the light bulbs in the thread lists for forums could be made much more accurate, too. I've been wanting to do something about their gross inaccuracy for a while.Another sort-of related feature I feel I need every once in a while is "display only messages in this thread from member x".Anyway, these are all on my list.--Percy

Er, we have "Jump to last unread message", at the right side of the topic line. I was referring to "Jump to first unread message". I don't think it's as bad as you say ... you don't have to keep track on a thread-by-thread basis, all you need is "when did this user last log in?" and "what threads have new posts since that time?" and "what is the first post in this thread after that time", and only the first is cookie-based. You don't want to update the display of the information until the user times out or explicitly reloads an index page (I think otherwise the user will miss new posts as he/she jumps from one forum display to another), so you just grab the last login time when the user first shows up and work with that afterwards.Internet Infidels does it all with five cookies (bblastvisit, bbpassword, bbthreadview, bbuserid, and sessionhash) in one file, and Theology Web does it all with one cookie (login). You just need to store and retrieve the information for all forums and threads from a line of text. There's probably standard ways of doing that, although I don't have any idea what they are.

Yep, I just misspoke! Perhaps, but there's a couple issues:

• During your last login, did you read all the messages posted up to the time when you logged off?
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• When did you "log off"? Since there's no explicit logoff you have to assume a logoff after some preselected period of no activity.

It's true what you say about putting a lot of information in a single cookie. The software we use doesn't currenly do that, but I don't have to stick with that approach. I think you know more than you're letting on - maybe I should assign you one of the bugs! --Percy

Yup, that's an issue. I believe most systems make the easy assumption: yes. IOW, if you log in and read no messages and immediately "log out" (whatever that may mean) and immediately log in again you see no new messages. Not perfect, but certainly can be implemented. Indeed. And I have no idea what period is reasonable; it's quite possible for someone to spend significant time composing a message. I might start with a time around an hour. Or ask some admins of other boards. Yes and no ... you want some AutoLISP stuff, especially database interactions, I'm your man. I was once an artist with Fortran IV FORMAT statements in the IBM 360; I could almost make a line printer do flips. But PERL or C ... nope. Never took to the time to pick 'em up.

In my experience, anyone fluent in a form of LISP has no trouble mastering other programming languages. I can make the code available to you if you're interested in learning Perl and tackling a bug or two. You'd have to install Apache on your machine in order to debug your work.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Administrator

I have no doubts of my ability to master PERL, and it might be ineresting ... let me think on it a bit.

One thing I knew about cookies but wasn't remembering in the earlier discussion was that everytime you click on a link, a packet of information is sent to the server for the website. The packet includes the cookies for that website. The larger the number and size of the cookies, the longer it takes for the packet to upload to the server.In a thorough scheme for preserving the state of what's already been read the cookie size could become large. For example, preserving the read progress in 500 threads could easily take more than the 4KB character limit of cookies. But providing a cookie per forum would be more workable. A cookie per thread wouldn't be workable because of the sheer number of cookies - there's a 300 cookie limit.For a long time member of EvC Forum (like me), the number and size of the cookies might noticeably affect performance. 20 cookies of 4KB each on a 100KB upload speed would take several seconds. I've decided I'm not worried about this. If that turns out to be true I'll establish a horizon and erase the oldest read states to make the performance impact negligible. This would mean that if you went back to a thread you hadn't examined in several months the cookie might no longer know your most recent state of progress, but I think that would be okay.--Percy

Would a choice to select "quote" or "reply" buttons be feasable for replying to posts? The "quote" selection would be used so as to eliminate cutting and pasting when the respondent wishes to bring forward the post being responded to. Otherwise the "reply" button would be used to bring up a blank field for the response. An example of where this is implemented is NoPC forum.

Wups! I jumped on this in the wrong place without checking forum topic. My apologies.

That's okay.There's a "reply w/quote" button we could enable. We disabled it a while back because of widespread abuse. The "reply w/quote" button puts the entire message you're replying to in a quoted region. The intention is that you'll delete the parts you don't want, and divide it into smaller pieces if necessary by adding more quote tags, but too many posters left the entire message quoted when they were only replying to a small part.We could give the "reply w/quote" button a trial period and see how it goes this time. We're not as constrained by available disk space as we once were, so we could even afford to be bit wasteful.In the longer term it would be more convenient if people could select a region of a message, click on a quote button, and have the text automatically quoted and placed in your message box at the cursor position, but this would take some programming effort and is not planned at this time.--Percy