Free Republic Software Update for November 25th, 2003 (Update #4)

[John Robinson]

Terse report for now:

• NEW By popular demand Browse All Forums (Search is on the todo list.)
• FIXED The pager now alerts on new comments to you in any forum (it used to only alert for the News/Activism forum.)
• CHANGED General Interest now General Interest (Chat).
• I added color to the sidebar, tell me (politely!) what you think.
• Lots of misc. things under the hood.

There are a bunch of add'l changes/additions I'd like to make, and this is probably not the last update today. I'll update this thread if so.

Update #1

• You can choose your own color for each topic subscribed in your sidebar. See the subscriptions gadget (All but blue is probably dog ugly. Feel free to suggest new color schemes in standard web hexadecimal (one color for the background of the title the other for the background of the links)

Update #2

• A few trivial changes, mostly cosmetic.
• You can now search by time or relevance from the latest posts. And it remembers what your last search was and defaults to that. So NOW order by time can be your default search setting.
• Oh yeah, almost forgot, SPELL CHECK! (replies for now, articles will come later.)

Update #3

• New Posts to You from You has been vanquished. New posts will only alert when other people ping you.
• Playing with the position of the Spell check button. Sorry.
• Your personal menu has a new small treat inside.
• Fixed a couple bugs dealing with the spell check code.
• I'm not done yet.

Update #4:

• Okay, I have stopped dorking with the link colors. Back to the defaults they go. Thanks for baring my experiment, I figure it's the least you owe for All Forum posts. ;-)

[b4its2late]

Thanks! Looks great.

[Stultis]

I'm not disagreeing. I like the idea of boolean (w/ wildc*rd) searching, and that would certainly be facilitated with article word summaries generated by the software (at least I assume that's how it's generally done with databases too large to search full text).

I'm just thinking about ways to help users in producing more complete, consistent and useful sets of keywords; bearing in mind that good keywords will often not be words actually used in the article, or will be words too common to be included in a software generated word-dex, or words used in an idiosyncratic fashion. For example I sometimes index articles about anti-americanism and the like with the keyword "5" (for "fifth column"). Say I was posting an article about American communists in the "McCarthy" era. If I supplied the keyword "communists," simply from that, and/or from examining the article, and/or examing keywords commonly associated with "communists," the software can ask if I also want to included (any of) the keywords "5," "treason," "CPUSA," "McCarthy," "Espionage," etc.

Running articles and user supplied keywords through this software analysis, and providing an opportunity to add/review keywords from a software generated list would (it seems to me) tend to produce more consistent keyword indexing. Users posting articles would get a sense, and a list, of "consenses" keywords used by other freepers in posting similar articles.

[John Robinson]

Thanks but no thanks. I'm quite happy with my mouse.

[Lead Moderator]

Click on your name on the upper right hand corner of the Latest Posts page.

On the resulting page, you will find a link for "My Subscriptions". You can change the order of your sidebars, how many articles are in each, and also what the background color is for that sidebar.

You can also add other sidebars or remove sidebars and such as described on this thread.

Whoa. A spell checker just appeared. That certainly threw me.

[Stultis]

BUILT IN SPELL CHECKING!!!

And too cool with the drop lists. Thanks! I really needed that.

[John Robinson]

#990000 for the title background and #FF0000 for the links background?

EEEP!

[John Robinson]

You'll need to make a table and set the table's bgcolor now.

[Cai Della]

I have always thought the sidebar should be on the left side. The light blue is good but the sidebar would look better if it were set off with a thin dark blue border.

[Mo1]

OMG !!! ... OMG!!! .. Check it out .. We have SPELL CHECK

Hot Dang .. FR IS THE BEST!!!!

[general_re]

"You have added keywords A, B, and C. Previous articles with keywords A, B, and C often include keyword D. Would you like to add keyword D to this article?" Something like that?

If you do that, though, you're adding a keyword-search to the posting process, such that it'll have to search through the index to match the current user-supplied keywords with other user-supplied keywords in other articles, and then draw out associated keywords that are not included in the current submission, in order to present them to you as possibilities. You could do that, but I'd want to know more about how often the search function we're already proposing would be used, how often articles are posted - and hence, how often the index search would be used in that context - and what kind of loads we're talking about for the server for all these new search functions. It's easy enough to imagine these things, especially when you have unlimited imaginary hardware to run it on, and someone else to sit down and do the actual coding ;)

[Stultis]

Running articles and user supplied keywords through this software analysis, and providing an opportunity to add/review keywords from a software generated list would (it seems to me) tend to produce more consistent keyword indexing. Users posting articles would get a sense, and a list, of "consenses" keywords used by other freepers in posting similar articles.

'Course it also might consume too much overhead, or slow down JohnHuang2 and kattracks too much.

BTW, John, how about making more of the statistics (that normally only moderators can see) visible on user pages? It would be fun to see how many articles some of our champions, like John and kattracks, really have posted, or how many replies champion chatters like Lazamataz have posted (without reading the article).

[John Robinson]

I wouldn't want to embarrass anyone. :-)

[Mo1]

You'll need to make a table and set the table's bgcolor now

Well .. since I'm a bit brain challenged .. could ya give me a hint or point me in the right direction, because I'm not sure if I know how to do that

[steveegg]

Let's just say I hate pink.

[justshe]

OH!!!!!!

This is WONDERFUL.......a spell checker!!!!! Thank you, John. This is like Christmas early!

[steveegg]

Whoa. A spell checker just appeared. That certainly threw me.

All spell check does is make sure that you have the wrong idiom :-)

[knak]

I love it! Ooh, just noticed a spell checker!

[Freedom2specul8]

I Love the changes!

I have a suggestion..
Is there anyway to add an option to delete all the mail at the same time instead of one at a time..

IE: Click here to check all items..
Then all items, (frmail) could be deleted.

:)

[steveegg]

BTW, dark red/red would make breaking stand out :-)

[Lead Moderator]

JohnHuang2		Copy
Account #	23347
Signup	1999-06-17
Messages	59,121,792 articles, 24,007,214 duplicates, 572,541,112 replies
Status	King of Ping

kattracks		Copy
Account #	18670
Signup	1999-06-17
Messages	59,121,791 articles, 24,007,214 instances of beating JohnHuang2, 572,541,113 replies
Status	Defending Spelling Bee Champion