Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Pastimes : SI Beta Site Launch - 7/01/99 -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Biddle who wrote (186)	7/5/1999 12:37:00 PM
From: John Biddle	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2340

First of all I'd like to say that I like the beta better than the production version. And it's not slow, as they warned; at least not yet. I particularly like the addition of the "Next 10" option and the way they implemented it. Sending all 10 at once seems to minimize download time and my guess is that they sped up the algorithm to get the messages out of the database because I seem to get 10 as fast or faster than I used to get 1 on the production system. I am not necessarily a reliable source of info on this last, though, because I use BrowseMaster and haven't experienced the 1 at a time SI slowness for quite a while. As I said, I like "10 at a time" feature, but I like the BrowseMaster "Get Remaining" even better. Beta SI is a better implementation, cleaner technically, and less buggy than BrowseMaster, but the convenience of not having to click repeatedly on next 10 is even more appealing. They could add this feature by sending the first 10 and then sending additional batches of 10 at a time, adding them to the existing screen in the background as BrowseMaster does. This would give the user the full benefit of a better feature and keep the efficiency in the back-end by searching for and sending 10 at a time, rather than making the user wait for the entire batch, which could be quite large. I use a laptop and travel frequently. I'd like to see a way to download large chunks of a thread to a file which I could take with me and read on a plane. I do this using BrowseMaster by "Get Remaining" and then saving to a file after bringing in hundreds of messages. I just delete them when done reading them. This is buggy in BrowseMaster, since "Get Remaining" often stops well before end with an error. Maybe you would do this better. Having an option to go right to a file from the start would save my cutting and pasting as well, saving even more time. I would prefer it if in SubjectMarks they didn't separate threads with new messages from those without but rather color coded them. Personal quirk. The previously mentioned ideas of changing background color for ease of reading are fine, but I'd suggest changing groups of lines like in the old green bar paper (yeah, I've been around awhile). I'd like to see SI open a new browser window when following links. This makes returning to the previous thread faster, especially if you add "Get Remaining". I like the navigator picklist. However, they should use the same terminology for destinations everywhere, though. They call it Inbox in one place and message center in another. Standardize, standardize. I like to see as much of the message on screen as I can. I'd like to be able to eliminate the SI menubar from view, but there are only options to change what shows, not to turn it off. Too bad. Another feature of BrowseMaster that I like very much is the ability to selectively mark individual posters to be ignored and then not seeing posts from them anymore, no matter who they were addressed to. I'd even like to see this extended to include messages to that person also, (optionally of course) since one or two messages from the problem poster can cause 25 responses which are just as worthless, but the people making them are usually otherwise well worth reading. One more way to make my experience using SI more worthwhile would be for posters to have a way, when they compose messages, to indicate that a message was off-topic. Sometimes my time is pressed and I like to ignore these posts. If I had my profile set to ignore off-topic posts, I'd expect them not to display, just like those from people whose posts I had chosen to ignore. When I had more time, I could turn off-topic posts back on. Keep up the good work. John Biddle

To: John Biddle who wrote (186)	7/5/1999 10:58:00 PM
From: Toby Zidle	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 2340

John, I mentioned three features that are present for individual messages, but not in the group of ten messages: 1) Ability to change the message number in the 'reply' box to link directly to that message. 2) Ability to reply to that message (in the group of ten). 3) Ability to look at replies to that message (in the group of ten). I'm curious why you want the feature. I have to assume you mean feature #1, because the benefits of features #2 and #3 seem so clear. The benefit of #1 is, admittedly, less clear. Let's set up a scenario for feature #1: There's a fairly active thread that you haven't looked at over a long weekend (like this one). Subject Marks tells you that you have 75 unread messages in the SI Beta thread. Message #187 (of 222) from John is a message I know I want to respond to, but I want to read beyond it for several messages first to see that no one has responded in my place. (I don't like to repeat someone else's earlier message just because I hadn't yet read it.) So now I'm down around message #204 when I feel that I can reply to #187. I can't get back to #187 directly. I have to go to #204, then enter #187 in the 'reply' box. There's one scenario. Admittedly the case for feature #1 isn't as strong as the others. But it would be more convenient to go back directly to your message from within a group of ten. You do have a point that the alignments may be hard to program, but SI programmers seem to handle the alignments elsewhere just fine. I hope this one example answered your question.