One thing I wouldn't mind is having the "view more of the latest posts" button simply expand that bubble. As if it just loads 5 more posts/comments, rather that redirects you to another page. It could be sequential up until a point (20?). This is mainly because all I want to see is if the 6th+ latest comment is something I haven't read, rather than the entire list.
The nomenclature could also probably be simplified; "+5 Comments" or some such.
That being said, I do like the option of redirecting to the entire list of latest comments.
/Requisite praise and accolades for making a sweet forum and accepting critique and suggestions from the asinine user base bent on destroying your baby.
I added a link on the myidkfa navigation bar that is a shortcut to mark everything on idkfa as "read."
I understand that while some people may want to stay current, or have a convenient and novel mechanism to read things, but for others it's just an annoyance. For the latter, this button is for you.
As a happy medium, if you click on "more", there's an option to mark as read everything that's older than 1 week.
Two suggestions:
1) Add an indicator for the number of times a post has been viewed.
2) Extend the black box around each avatar for posts for the entire length of the post. Would make formatting look cleaner, methinks. Well, maybe I'd have to see it. And maybe it would suck. But perhaps it's something to look into.
I fixed up the "Settings" page a bit. Previously, it looked like hell, and wasn't super intuitive. Now, it's a little more coherent, is formatted more like the rest of idkfa, and can dynamically show you what threads will look like by default (which, hopefully, leads people to play with the settings a bit more).
Hey Taztik, remember that new years questionnaire we used to do on v2? Can you retrieve that? I know online surveys are sooooo 2006, but I'm into it.
Also, fixed a bug that would search incorrectly when trying to look for users with periods in their names.
So a while ago, somebody requested an iPhone app for idkfa. That hasn't happened.
What I am working on is a more iPhone friendly version of idkfa to use in Mobile Safari. That is, sort of a new skin and layout format that's better suited to a mobile device.
It looks like hell, and is nowhere near done (and, depending on my waning interest, may never be done), but it's something in the works.
You can check out the work so far at: http://idkfa.com/m/
Making slight modifications to the user interface.
The search output was pretty messy, in that what was supposed to be returned as tabular data was just a wall of text. Now things like user images, user names, and discussion are aligned, and provide arguably better framing around the message excerpts.
Also, if you've read all of your posts, you are rewarded with a slightly cleaner list of Discussion Areas (no longer just puts a bunch of empty boxes at the end).
there's no more "save draft" function? i had a great response to erik's population post that I just lost :(.
Made some modifications to idkfa's support of Internet Explorer. Those who are stuck at work with IE6 or IE7 should see some improvements.
Slight improvement made to the Search function. There's now a small GUI that'll help you search stuff, hopefully without having to learn my arcane syntax.
So I was trying to put a picture in a post but it just wouldn't do it, I was sad. I have a .jpg file saved on my computer but I cannot for the life of me figure out how to put it in the post.
I folded. Like an ancient, sun-faded lawn chair.
I wanted a Professor Brothers avatar, but the detail was a bit much for 50x50 pixels.
As a compromise, I've increased static images (JPGs) to 200x200 pixels, and animations (GIFs) to 150x150 pixels. Size constraints still exist, and are the same (less than 1MB upload for each). I'm still letting you have 100% image quality on JPGs. GIFs I can't speak for.
I'm still limiting the size on each thread / item to 50x50px, but I'm displaying full size when you click on a user's page.
Go ahead and re-upload your images if you want to have the higher quality version displayed with your user page. I might in the future figure out a way to display them larger on the threads, but it'll have to be a way that doesn't disrupt the content of the message.
Does anybody have suggestions for content on the front page? The "Welcome back" message was intended to only be up for a week or so, but it's been two months. On the previous version of idkfa, we had a sort of "news" section, but I'm less inclined to re-implement that, as it fell victim to neglect pretty quickly. User stats and things might be interesting, but they generally don't have a lot to do with recent conversation. The "Discussion Areas" box shows which sections have activity, and the "Latest Post" box shows, well, the latest posts.
Ideas? I feel like the home page should be useful in some regard. Right now it's just a wall of text that people may or may not read the first time they see it, and then ignore it afterward.
Fixed a small problem with the Users Online page. There was a case where guest users would log in and a query would be formed incorrectly.
So... slight problem with idkfa's backend. Here's the problem:
I store a record for each message a user sees in something like ["kaiden", "Msg #256"]. This means that for every time you view a message, a record is entered into this table, and then is left alone on subsequent visits to the same message.
This is by far the easiest way to give people a "viewing history." However, it doesn't scale well. We have about 800 posts on idkfa, and about 30 users. With only that many people viewing, we already have ~4,500 records in the viewing history table. Worst case for this table (everybody logs in and views everything) would be 24,000 records. Which means that with relatively few people, and only over the course of a few months, we've already reached 18% of the worst case. The more records in this table, the longer it will take to search, and the longer it will take to calculate things like "Next Unread Post" or the "#Unseen" value in the discussion area list.
I worked with this for a couple of hours last night. I think I have a good idea how to better handle this. Instead of storing records like I have above, I'll store it like ["kaiden", "Msg #256", "Msg #300"]. This will mean that user "kaiden" has already viewed the range of posts from #256 to #300, and it can be assumed that every post in between has been viewed. With some careful updates, it will be the case that over time there will be less entries in this table with the more messages a given user views.
What this might mean is that in the near future, I might have to reset your viewing histories. I might have a way to keep them, but I can't promise anything. Also, post tagging might have to be postponed while I rework this system as well.
What this will enable in the future is the ability to mark entire threads, or even entire items as "read," as you can in other forums. This will mean if you've been a diligent lurker, you don't necessarily have to reread all 800+ posts just to get good use out of the history function.
Alright. Apparently a busy week at idkfa.
You can now edit posts. Rules are the following:
- You can edit each post only once.
- You must edit the post within 24 hours.
- You can edit up to 5 posts in a given month. Counter is reset when the month rolls over.
