Cap'n Refsmmat

Allow me to test this. I'll come back and double-post in a moment. Test. Hmm, nope. Merged posts are updated with the timestamp of the latest post. However, if you merely edit a post, rather than merging a new one into it, the timestamp is not updated. If you want the post to appear new, just make a new post in the thread, rather than editing your old one.

It means there's less of a stigma from having a low reputation. Five star system? You can indeed counter a negative vote with a positive vote, but everyone's vote counts equally, so there can't be an elite group with thousands of reputation points that decides things. That was the biggest problem with the old system.

We don't use the old vBulletin system of giving certain members more power to alter reputation points than others. In vBulletin it was easy for one member to be handing out dozens of points at once -- or thousands, if things got out of hand. Now, it's all one point for everyone. Furthermore, your total reputation count does not display on each post. When viewing a discussion, you only see how each post fared, so every post is considered in isolation.

Okay, I just bumped up your positive vote limit by a large factor. I'm not sure about allowing more negative rep points; we'll have to see if that's something we really want. Lots of negative rep has caused problems in the past.

It addresses the issue because it turns out that $data['_longTitle'] gives me the un-truncated version of the topic title, which is now used in tooltips in search listings.

It appears the data passed to the template is undocumented, but apparently _longTitle gives the right tooltip value...

Perhaps they should be renamed "amidst-terms" to reflect that they occur amid the semester.

Most courses here have three evenly spaced exams, then a final at the end of the semester. My courses seem to place their exams all during the same week.

I have four midterm exams this week. It is on my to-do list for when I get time.

That's the way it's designed. Once you view the list, the number of unread notifications goes to zero. It still keeps the history of notifications, so you can go back and check ones you didn't get to check. Apparently it's really hard to take a "someone quoted your post" notification and determine exactly when you view their reply.

I'm trying to figure out how to do that. At the least, I'll make the tooltip contain the full title instead of "View result".

If you go to My Settings you can choose to have View New Content give you all unread posts, regardless of when you last visited. It seems to occasionally mess up and lose everything, though.

When viewing a topic, go just below the last post and just above the Fast Reply box, on the right in the light blue bar. There's a drop-down forum chooser there.

I think the greater act of hubris is to assume one has successfully solved every scientific question. That claim was made in the late 1800s ("we've nearly finished everything in physics!") and it hasn't turned out so well.

You know, now that you mention it, I'm going to install a new search system that promises to make search results actually sorted by relevancy, instead of the usual sorted-by-date crapshoot where you get every topic where your search words were posted in completely different posts on four different pages. Hope it works.

That's interesting. For some page numbers, it works. For others, it doesn't. I may have to submit a support request about that. You can use "Use advanced filters" to search by name and so on in the mean time.

It's hard to track last-visited times. If I could make it default to properly tracking your unread posts -- as vBulletin did -- I would. I'll check over on the IPB support forums, actually. And I'll see about moving Today's Active Content to a more reasonable location... That's because the Advanced Search is hidden behind an obtuse little icon. See the little gear next to the search box? Yeah, that's it. I like our new look, but some things are rather hidden. I'm going to register some complaints on the company's website; they actually listen to complaints, surprisingly. There's no button to jump back and forth, but you can go to My Settings and uncheck "Enable visual (RTE) editor?"

Point-by-point: View New Content gives you whatever has been posted since you last visited the site. If you want the last day's worth of posts, you want "Today's Active Content," in the blue bar near the bottom of the forum index. (Yeah, that location sucks.) Or, you can hit My Settings in the top right, and scroll to Search Settings. You can opt to have it track everything you've read, and show you all unread posts regardless of when you last visited. "Find My Content" on the left-hand side of their profile. Well... the search works exactly the same way as vBulletin's old search, so I'm not sure what I can do. What's particularly randomly nonsensical about it? Also, unfortunately I have no option for a merged posts separator or an edit time limit. I'm stuck with the default behavior there.

Awesome. Hope you enjoy SFN.

The "Mozilla" reference is a leftover from the old days. Some sites use user-agents to tell what features browsers support, and back when Netscape (internally called Mozilla) was dominant, Internet Explorer called itself "Mozilla" in user-agent strings so sites would think it supports fancy features, instead of giving IE a degraded version of the site. Something like that. There indeed should be no back-and-forth communication when you're highlighting and scrolling and so on. We don't get to keep records of your eFidgeting so we can send targeted marketing data to Ritalin manufacturers. It's possible that the way the HTML is structured makes it difficult for some browsers to scroll it. I'll have to experiment on my Windows machine. I just realized that I had put the Google Analytics code in completely the wrong place. It's fixed now. Perhaps that has been causing some of the speed problems. Anyone notice a change?

What web browser are you using? (If it's Internet Explorer, what version?) If you're not sure about the specific version details, just visit What's My User Agent? and copy and paste the user agent string here. In terms of webserver performance, we're nearly as fast as we can get. Half of our response time is simply the time it takes to get to the datacenter in the UK and back. I suspect some of the slowness is down to the style we're using and how it renders in webbrowsers.

Unfortunately, no. However, there is an option for View New Content that you may like: http://www.scienceforums.net/index.php?app=core&module=usercp Under "View New Content Method" you can choose to have it work by your last visit time or by tracking which threads you have and have not read. The latter option will have it show old threads if you haven't read them, even if they haven't been updated since your last visit. It should be very handy for people who don't read everything in New Content every time they visit SFN.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but SFN runs on the principle of rule by a minority. Regardless, there is now a SFN Blue style available in the style switcher. It looks very boring.

Really? I was never a fan of our old front page. The news item (the image on the front page) was never up to date, and just displaying a list of threads wasn't particularly engaging. However, the current SFN front page can definitely be improved upon. I'm going to be doing some programming to get better features on the front page so you can dive right in to interesting discussions. Also, we tried blue for the tab bar during the testing phase. It ended up not working at all -- there was too much blue all around. I'm fairly confident the theme works better with orange.

So, let me get this clear: This problem only occurs when you are logged in. SFN itself loads quickly. It's some sort of google ads or google something script that's taking minutes to transfer. Removing Google Adsense doesn't solve the problem. Removing Quantcast doesn't solve the problem. This is immensely puzzling. The best guess I have is that some JavaScript downloaded by IPB when you are logged in takes too long to run, but that doesn't coincide with your google observations. Also, you shouldn't have to download any of the JavaScript more than once a week, since your browser can cache it. I'm going to do more investigating and see what I can discover.