A few questions about the website forum

Forum: User Feedback
Topic: A few questions about the website forum
started by: john.martzouco

Posted by john.martzouco on Nov. 27 2007,01:35

First off, let me thank you for this wonderful resource! This is a great forum with a very active and helpful group of people and I'm thoroughly enjoying myself!

There are a few things I'm noticing that I'd like to bring to the table. Not complaints, but questions... if nothing gets done about them, I'll be okay... I'll adapt.

1) I have a hard time finding my own posts on this forum. I use the Search page a lot, and have no trouble finding messages by roberts, jpeters and hatsrule by entering their name in the Search Keywords field... but when I enter my own, or part of my own, I get zero hits. Is this because I'm a new register and the database doesn't know how to dig up my posts? or because there's a dot in my user name? I've tried both This Month and Older... TM & Newer with the same results.

2) I find myself using exactly the same search criteria every time that I go the Search page. is there any way to persist my defaults so that the search process can be collapsed to simply Keyword entry and a click on a Search button? Maybe we all have different favorites, but I hot All Open Forums / This Month and Older plus the defaults that are already highlighted.

3) Is there any way that more than 5 thread entries can be displayed on a page? Most entries aren't very long, so I don't think that it would be a big download speed hit if the default number were closer to 20. Is the 5 post display done for Mobile users or for server-side bandwidth saving?

Cheers!
John

Posted by mikshaw on Nov. 27 2007,03:26

1) I didn't have trouble finding your posts. Did you select "All Open Forums" in the forums field?

2) There doesn't seem to be any way to do this. It has been mentioned a few times that it would be easier on the users to at least have "All Open Forums" and "From The Beginning" selected as defaults, but there hasn't been a definitive answer if this can be done with the current forum software.

3) I don't see any way to do this either. It seems that the forum software was probably chosen because it's small and simple, but it doesn't provide many of the advanced features you might see in other bulletin boards.

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on Nov. 27 2007,04:05

3) There is the print view option that puts all of the posts in a thread on 1 page, but is a stripped down version.

I assuming the options could be changed, but it's been like this for a while and I'm sure there's some reason behind it.

Posted by john.martzouco on Nov. 27 2007,11:13

@mikshaw,

1) Knowing you could achieve the goal gave me the confidence to persevere with it... I figured it out... I'm used to using "this month and older" because there's so much old material I need to catch up on... for my posts, I needed the default "and newer".

Thanks for the tip about "from the beginning", that will be more appropriate in all cases for me for a while.

@^thehatsrule^,

I'll check out the print option... thank you.

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on Nov. 27 2007,16:34

Just in case others scan by this post, it is always a good idea to read the stickies in forums < http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....;t=8658 >

Posted by Will Repair on Dec. 06 2007,16:39

This post is just to resolve a question I've had about the forum. I joined some time ago but could not post. I mentioned this on USENET. Someone noticed and posted to this forum. This is just to see if the issue was resolved.

Seems the answer is yes.