I'm not complaining.....I love this forum and have learned so much. I visit the forum on a daily basis....even multiple times per day. When I have more than 5 minutes I even try to stay up with the coffee pot thread and post a hello every now and then. There are so many interesting threads and so much activity here. Most all questions I've had get answered within minutes of posting and I'm so thankful to all the help that I've received.
However, I find it difficult to stay up on current threads and I'm assuming I'm not the only one. I've managed many forums on all sorts of topics and currently manage and admin one that is dedicated to the memory of a longtime woodworker. The purpose of the forum and it's website is to raise $$$ to fund a scholarship program to send individuals to woodworking schools. Anyway.....the forum software I use is a freeware program that runs on SQL database backend. It's simple to use and the most important feature of it is it remembers the member and allows them to click on "NEW" to view the newest message of a thread.
Has anyone who runs this forum thought about adding a feature like this? After a thread grows to multiple pages I find that I spend more time backtracking to try to determine what is new versus old between visits.
Again...I'm not complaining. The knowledge contained here is the best on the internet and the fellow members are awesome.
Thank you for your time.
Jerry
I don't pay for all of the info I get here, so I am happy with whatever the owners want to give me. I make a starter post on the forums that I want to keep informed on so I get emailed all replies, then I read the replies as they are emailed to me.
Wes
Hi Wes,
I fully agree.....I was just merely throwing out the suggestion. If it can't be done..then I'm fine with that. However, like I said...I think it would be very cool functionality.
In my many years of teaching publication design (and a forum is simply an electronic publication), I always taught that "form follows function." The idea is to make communication simple, fast, and functional, not for the sender, but for the receiver of those messages. It's a lesson that many website developers and designers these days simply have no clue about.
Following their redesign, this forum became far slower and more tedious to use, depending on the browser and connection method one uses--certainly one of the slowest in terms of page loading and posting responses. But it "looks pretty," and I guess that's primarily what the publishers care most about.
I still manage to muddle through it because it focuses on a subject I care about, but it's often not easy, depending on where I am and what I'm using to access the information.
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