Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

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To: SI Brad who wrote (489)	3/5/2012 9:49:00 AM
From: xxyy	Respond to of 3249

Brad, thanks for being so responsive. My view is #1 is the most important (and the easiest to implement), and will make a lot of people happy. No matter where the cursor goes :). Also, might insert a "RE: " at the top of every new topic, to remind people to fill in a title. #6 is easy to implement - I believe you can find an open source javascript spell checker, include the .js file in every "write" page and you're done. But, that js is probably slow so it's a tradeoff between speed & features. #2, my opinion, is you can get 90% of the functionality people want by simply recording the most-recent message they've seen. And then, give people the option of reading all the messages since then (possibly up to a max of X). I like the 'digest' mode, but I'd say almost every time I want "messages since I last came" as opposed to fixed chunks of 40 or 100 of the last messages. -- My view is mostly that changes to threading and hierarchy, those are a bit harder, and somewhat 'advanced user features' and at least personally I'd be okay if you waited until your 're-write' of the site.

To: SI Brad who wrote (489)	3/5/2012 10:02:40 AM
From: dave1mn2	1 Recommendation Respond to of 3249

re: SI format sucks Thanks gobs Brad. You're top shelf :-) "(1) ... takes 5 minutes, ..." Good. Thank you. "2) ... If you hit "next 100", can I assume you've read all 100 messages? Or do you care only about messages that you click on individually or as part of "Replies (3)"?" I see how that causes you multiple problems ... If I click on a msg. either from the main msg. list, or as a reply, I'd like that color change to stay for say, a couple of pages of history (120 posts?). I've been told more, is part of IV's problem. "next 100" ... I would prefer you not assume all those have been read. "(3) Full thread support. When you click on "Replies (3)", you would see not just the 3 immediate replies, but the entire thread (everything for that "RE"[topic]"). Offer to toggle between "flat view" or "hierarchical"." Might have some terminology problems here. I think you guys call this whole bd. a thread. I call a single original post and all of it's replies a thread. Ideally, threaded view, as a toggled choice would be, Subject, Reply 1, Reply 2, Etc. Expanded or not, whatever is easier but replies of replies have to be in the same list. Otherwise you can get lost in a maze. "(6) ... Do we need a spellchecker ..." If we're keeping score :-) "without offending the long-time SI users or making the site more visually complicated." Something you must consider very carefully! Thanks for your effort and attitude!

To: SI Brad who wrote (489)	3/5/2012 10:14:11 AM
From: scout4value	Respond to of 3249

Brad I think xxyy hit it on the head with message 483 The inability to follow a multi sided conversation is my main complaint with SI

To: SI Brad who wrote (489)	3/5/2012 10:49:33 AM
From: RalphR	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3249

Re: Site 1. This would be much better, but still requires someone to actually do the first RE: 2. If you opened 100, I think it's fine to push the last read to the newest of the 100. 3, etc. sounds good spell checker - I actually agree that if anyone really wanted that, their browser supports it well already. (That goes in the 20%? :) ) We don't need to start a new thread. As you can tell we mix up lots of stuff in one. Thanks much for your interest!

To: SI Brad who wrote (489)	3/5/2012 1:28:59 PM
From: Covenant	4 Recommendations Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 3249

Re: SI format sucks First I have to say I'm extremely impressed with how responsive you are, and the system you've built is both fast and reliable. (1) automatically include the "RE:[topic]" as the first line in the editor when you reply to an "RE:". That one takes 5 minutes, but I need to work on getting the cursor to start in the right place (it wants to start before the RE). There are actually two issues here. The first is a) creation of the topic/subject/title. The second is b) maintaining a topic. a) The software strips out carriage returns and other formatting on initial posts, grabbing the first 80 characters, including characters not intended to be part of the subject by the author. This results in the board index showing somewhat random topics which differ from how the authors try to present the topics. b) Replies have no continuity due to lack of subject, and also the same issues as a). (2) keep track of unread messages in the database rather than relying on the browser. Trickier, but probably doable. If you hit "next 100", can I assume you've read all 100 messages? Or do you care only about messages that you click on individually or as part of "Replies (3)"? Part is a nice to have feature for people who access with multiple machines/browsers, having history taken care of by SI. That is not a deficiency. Where the software is deficient is it provides a different link depending on where the post is seen. If the post is seen by clicking on replies, one link is provided. If it is read from the index, then the the link is different. Browser history shows a link is read only for the exact link. Since the links are different, the browser does not know it has already been to the post when seeing the second link. There is an engineering problem to resolving this because multiple replies (1 level) are shown when clicking on replies to the post, so there is not a one to one relationship. Seeing all replies is nice, and I'm willing to trade this off against just seeing one and having my browser history matching my reading history. Count me as a vote in favor of continuing to see multiple replies. There is also a scalability issue when looking at indexing the entire database and who has read what. The full cure here could cost speed, and that might not be cost well spent. (3) Full thread support. When you click on "Replies (3)", you would see not just the 3 immediate replies, but the entire thread (everything for that "RE"[topic]"). Offer to toggle between "flat view" or "hierarchical". (4) In the flat thread view, by default you would start reading with the message you were at, but have an option to jump to the top of the thread (which is the parent of the message that had the first RE). (5) in hierarchical view, you would need to view the entire thread at once. Ideally we would suppress messages that you have already read (assuming #2 is accomplished) by compressing those into a single expandable line. Those would be great! Some threads can go into hundreds of replies, so size limitation (# of posts) is another consideration. (6) better spellchecker. Do we need a spellchecker at all, since modern browsers already highlight misspellings? I'm agnostic about the spelling function of the spellchecker. The spellchecker also acts as a message preview. Yet when the message is posted, the format is changed by the software, with the software stripping out some line breaks, indentations, etc. 7) How about support for rich text formatting or something similar for people's posts? This enables more visually appealing posts where information can be differentiated and expressed in a variety of ways. 8) Embedding additional file types (e.g. pdf, excel) is another nice to have feature. There are two subsets here. Updloading and then embedding, or embedding the file which is already located somewhere on the web. (e.g. pdfs for for various types of corporate documents, excel for BHI weekly industry rig reports or NE fleet status reports).