Cap'n Refsmmat

Real men weave baskets in space.

You probably subscribed to the thread. ("Watch Topic" button at the top of each page.)

We post suspensions in the Announcements forum, but I don't think many people keep up-to-date on that. I'll see if I can get banned members to appear different from regular members, like they used to.

cabinintheforest has been banned for persistent profile message spamming. Many of the messages were abusive and had to be deleted.

There's the +/- thing by each and every post.

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.

CR; Think you know, I understand this and that you simply dropped negative points for awhile, which was fine. However something must effect the Profile Reputation Number and I suspect it come comes approval/disapproval of threads. If so, the fact the profile count doesn't show on a posters post, means very little.

It means there's less of a stigma from having a low reputation.

Yes, again I understand as this is the old "five Star" system which I've kind of wondered if a positive point, takes from a Negative Count. I've seen this on a long gone political forum, where a small group figured this out, knocking all plus five star post back to a negative count. I've seen quite a few post, with IMO unexplainable negative counts (not mine) for newer members and somehow I'm sure some of these came from members that knew these folks elsewhere.

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.

Ah. Of course. That would have been my guess, too. So... Oh... Wait. I don't program in PHP. In laymen's terms, can you please describe how this addresses the issue?

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.

Does it really? I got completely random results when I tried to search for 41,000. The old search tool had lots of options. I could make it search only in selected subfora, look only for posts by a particular user, have it report results either as posts or as threads. I can't even find an advanced search tool with this new scheme.

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.

OK, thanks for that. And yes, the location sucks. When the underlying software thinks I have last visited seems quite random. Sometimes it will thinks I last visited 8 minutes ago, other times, two days ago. The appearance is that it just pulls a number out of the hat.

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...

Does it really? I got completely random results when I tried to search for 41,000. The old search tool had lots of options. I could make it search only in selected subfora, look only for posts by a particular user, have it report results either as posts or as threads. I can't even find an advanced search tool with this new scheme.

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.

Another complaint: The underlying formatter is both too smart and too stupid at the same time. Heck, it is worse than Microstuff's Word, which is saying a mouthful. It is very easy to get mixed fonts when cutting and pasting. It is very easy to get stuck in a list. Where is the Make plain text button?

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?