About the forum: last first or not?

Willem
If Naim did that you wouldn't know what the hell a thread was about after about five replies. Why can't you just click on the last page link at the top of the thread?

Bob

Or use the excellent "View New Posts" feature which people using the stupid new interface always forget about becuase its completely hidden and can never be found.

My adivce -- switch off the new interface (from the login screen) and use the "New Since Your Last Visit" feature.

Matthew

Or use the excellent "View New Posts" feature which people using the stupid new interface always forget about becuase its completely hidden and can never be found.

Matthew,
If you go to the top of the page and click on the you will get a nice surprise. The also has a handy drop down menu for jumping to different rooms.
John

John,

I know. However, I use the old style interface as such important features are not hidden in such arcane places.

Also the new interface doesn't allow you to put a subject on an individual reply.

Matthew

You can always go straight to the latest post of a thread by clicking on the link in the "Last Post" column for each listed topic - it's the name of the last person to post.

There's no need to search for hidden features.

--J

I know. However, I use the old style interface as such important features are not hidden in such arcane places.

Matthew,
You stick to your old fashioned technology, I'm sure the feature was left in for people in your demographic who can no longer cope with the fast pace of change the "youths" are able to handle.
John

The "messages since my last visit" feature is chaotic to the point of uselessness. Just how worthwhile is a list of 263 messages, sorted in reverse chronological order? If these messages were sorted and grouped by thread, it would be nominally useful.

What I really want is an icon beside each thread, which takes me to the first message in that thread since I visited last. This in conjunction with the highlighting of threads with new activity (which already happens) would make perusing the forum much more pleasant.

-=> Mike Hanson <=-

All of the above is advice from people who have too much time to waste navigating around the forum. The only way to do it properly is as follows:

1. Click new since your last visit. If that makes no sense you need to upgrade your forum settings to use the old version of the software designed for experts.

2. Go to the bottom of the results page and scan the list quickly looking for threads you are interested in and middle-click the link to open that thread in a new tab (If you don't understand that last bit you need to upgrade ur browser from IE). You can speed this process by filtering out any messages from the obvously stupid or annoying members and any messages in the deeply boring Hi-Fi section.

3. If there are more than one page of messages since your last visit you can ignore everything after page one. If someone said something remotely interesting it will have been replied to and therefore will be on the first page. Statitical analysis has shown this saves you a great deal of time at the risk of missing at most one worthwhile message per month.

4. Within 30 second of accessing the forum you will now have a set of tabs opened at the correct post (or very near to it) you need to start reading and you will have created this list with the minimum number of server round trips.

5. If you do the above while wearing, say, cargo pants and a pair of Vans Rowley XLT you will be behaving like a cutting edge IT savvy youth and will be entitled to say "Pah!" dismissively at any 30-something computer programmers with a fancy job at some poncey bank.

I hope that clears it all up.

Matthew

Thank you all very much for your contributions! It seems that no one feels the same as me about this. I can handle that.

When you open a weblog, you (almost) always get the latest contribution first. I guess that's possible because the number of contributants is small to very small (1) and they try to stick as close as possible to the original subject.

On a forum such as this there are potentially hundreds of contributants and they (you, we) tend to stray from the original subject.

Maybe it's because I'm too old fashioned (at 46), but I simply forget about using View New Post links and other queries and buttons. When I open a forum page I just want to see what's happening without having to start all sorts of queries. But then my telephone habits are those of an 85 year old and one of the reasons for buying Naim gear was that there are so few buttons on the front...

So, as long as you're happy whith the present situation, I'm happy!

Have fun!

willem

Willem - You are not alone, and I asked Richard about this in October. I suggested that the latest posts should appear first, but he told me to sod off (In the nicest possible way of course ). He actually said that there is nothing they can do about having to go to the first page of a topic initially - it's just the way Infopop have it.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Rasher:
...He actually said that there is nothing they can do about having to go to the first page of a topic initially - it's just the way Infopop have it.

---

But you don't have to go to the first page of a topic: you can always go straight to the latest post by clicking on the "Last Post" link for the topic in question.

--J

quote:

---

Originally posted by JeremyD:
you can always go straight to the latest post by clicking on the "Last Post" link for the topic in question.

---

I knew that