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. ;-)

[The Mayor]

I like it, you've done good, as always..

[dighton]

Thank you.

[TonyInOhio]

KEWL.

[Petronski]

Actually, I was referring to Kennedy being 'on the floor,' presumably next to an empty Chivas bottle.

[RobFromGa]

how does the "pager" function work? and how do I enable java script to get the "pager" to work?

[Great_Dame]

Hubby set me up with a new monitor today and I thought that was why FR looked different! Nice job! Good use of color and the whole chat clarification thing. You rock!

[smith288]

I would throw in a white separator row between each category on the right just to break them up a bit.

just a <tr><td bgcolor="white">&nbsp;</td></tr>

[eddie willers]

Thanks so much for the 'Browse all' option for the forums and the other good work you did.

The color side bar works for me as well.

Good job!

[smith288]

And we still get notified of our own comments we just made? Any timeframe on that fix?

[eastforker]

This is just an idea but how hard would it be to let users delete comments in "my comments".Many times I am pinged to articles I care nothing about but I still want to remain on the ping list of some posters.The my comments section gets real cluttered at times.For instance I will bump a thread just to be able to find it a week or so later.Thank you again for this forum.

[GrandMoM]

Thanks John, very pleasant look!

[eddie willers]

I'm still pining for the day that the number of the comment I'm replying to comes up along with the poster's name.

Oh Leni.....it's been there forever!

Look at the line underneath my name at the the end of this post and you will see a blue [To 33] which tells not only which post you were replying to, but if you click on it, it will take you there.

[Vermonter]

John, If you're tinkering in the search area, or personal preferences, one thing that has always annoyed me is when I do a search on a keyword and automatically get a sort by relevance.

Many times I would rather have them sort by most recent but have to do a second search to accomplish this. How about an option or preference to allow the user to specify how he wants it done?

Thanks

[Fierce Allegiance]

Thanks for the changes. The search feature at the top of the page should alleviate double-posts because it's easier to use AND searches by multiple relevant words.

Nice changes. Well done!

[pt17]

John, the sidebar's color is good. Adds contrast.

[eddie willers]

Check it out ping.

[RedBloodedAmerican]

Nice. But my computer still doesn't dispense coffee.

I know, I know....it's all Bush's fault...

[Mad Dawgg]

"Oh great, Kennedy is on the floor....................."

I hope someone gets him up soon or PETA will show up en masse and try and roll him into the Potomac.

[John Robinson]

That's on the longterm todo list.

[sweetliberty]

Way to go John! Thank, thank you, thank you for fixing the pager. Also, for working on the browse all forums feature. I noticed the sidebar right off this morning. It's unobstrusive. I'm okay with it.

Thanks for all your hard work John. Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.