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. ;-)

[Mad Dawgg]

"That's on the longterm todo list."

Great, but what about the potty attachement? Its a long way to the bathroom ya know.

[Izzy Dunne]

This would save the reader of my comment endless scrolling up, up, up, to find the original reply that I'M replying to.

Did you try clicking on the "to 231" link, below the post itself?

[sweetliberty]

Hey, check it out. John fixed the pager!

[Stultis]

Looks great, John. And the keyword searches now drill much further back in time than they used to! It bothered me before that we were "losing" so many articles that had been keyword indexed.

As a suggestion, I wonder if it would be possible to have some kind of "find related topics" function associated with keyword searches. That is a function that would bring up a list of keywords most commonly used in conjunction with the one the user is searching for.

Along similar lines, how about a keyword index page? This would alphabetically list all keywords used in the database (of course limited somehow, e.g. to the 5,000 or 10,000 most frequently occuring ones).

[facedown]

Excellent!

[John Robinson]

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

This is a much more complicated problem than it seems at first. I have two possible solutions. It all has to do with the database. I'll see about fixing that soon. It annoys me to no end.

[MileHi]

Niiiiiice!

[eureka!]

Looking good. Thanks for all you & John et. al do. A happy and blessed Thankgiving to you all...

[sweetliberty]

Click here

You should have a little window open. Just keep that minimized and it will alert you to new posts to you, FReepmail and you state message board, if you have your state set on your profile page.

[John Robinson]

Neat ideas, I'll keep them in mind. Thanks.

[sweetliberty]

Now, about that coffee dispenser.....

[Stop Legal Plunder]

"By popular demand"

Hmmm...I can't imagine anyone on Free Republic ever demanding anything; we're such a sensitive bunch. Nonetheless, I apologize if I contributed any excess enthusiam for my preferred new feature...

And thank you very much for supplying it anyway.

[Agnes Heep]

Looks good. If I could make a suggestion: reduce the column width on the response pages to about two-thirds of its present full-screen width.

[sweetliberty]

Check out the cool stuff John did now.

[Valin]

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


Well someone help him up and give him a drink!

[11th Earl of Mar]

Any thought given to the search function? How about making the default setting be search by 'date' not 'relevance.'

Everytime we want to check to see if an article has been posted, we have to do TWO searches in order to get the articles listed by date.

Also, why not have the 'search' function listed on every page? Within each thread and within our Comments page?

[null and void]

* NEW By popular demand Browse All Forums (Search is on the todo list.)

EXCELLENT!

* FIXED The pager now alerts on new comments to you in any forum (it used to only alert for the News/Activism forum.)

Better than EXCELLENT!

* CHANGED General Interest now General Interest (Chat).

Good, if you're going to move things to chat, you should call it chat!

* I added color to the sidebar, tell me (politely!) what you think.

Nice shade of blue.

* Lots of misc. things under the hood.

Oh? Like what?

[HairOfTheDog]

Thank you JohnRob! I love the fixed pager most of all...

and the rest looks lovely!

[HairOfTheDog]

You mean it's not General Interest (Hobbits 24/7)?

Hobbits are not 24/7. All those big meals and pints make us sleepy.

[AxelPaulsenJr]

The comments page has been very slow to load for two days now, any fix of that on the way?