Yeah, now that's what I'm talking about.  And moving the [edit] link down, makes it easier to find also.  I got half way through responding to my first post before I happened to notice the edit link.

And I think I double spaced the edits, on the original post.

There's also a DELETE link if you become a Pro member. Pro status is awarded to Premium members and "friends of the forum".

I see that now also, I believe it was on the title line before.

Looks like you cleaned up the picture box on the thread detail panel, but not on the "comments" section.  So all my comments have an empty box with a red x, since I didn't post a picture yet.

Maybe you should add a link to your photo?

Oh, and I bumped up the font size on the Member/Poster User ID.

That's better.  Maybe I'll get round to it someday.

So why is the Create New Discussion button just a white blob?  There's a pop-up tool tip that explains what it is, I'm just not used to seeing unidentified white blobs - usually folks have pretty icons (which are occassionally self explanitory).

Because I had to create it myself. I can (and will) make it pretty at some point, but I wanted to get something out there quickly.

I like on the old forum that we could see when the topic was from and also who was on at any time... will this new one do that too?

We may add a recent visitors list, but I'm not sure what you mean by "could see when the topic was from"?

On the old forum, I could see who is on and it would be nice to still see that.

And what I mean is that when someone posted in the old forum I could see the date/time of that new post and it would be at the top of the list.  And if someone posted a reply to it, I could tell because it would be back up top again and have a different color.  And I didn't have to be a part of the discussion in order to follow along.  But the only reason I knew you had posted this response here is because I happened to remember that it used to have 9 posts on this topic and noticed that it now had 10.  Otherwise I wouldn't know you had replied.

I like the HTML formatting, etc., but I feel like I have less overview of the forum topics now.  When there are lots of topics, it seems like it will be impossible to follow along.

Admittedly, I haven't been on this one very long and maybe I'm missing something...?

Another thing I've noticed is that on the old forum, it would stretch to the width of my monitor.  I have a wide monitor and it would fill the width.

Here, when I'm at the main page, both the list of articles and the list of discussions are in narrow columns with the text wrapping after just a few words.  After lots of discussions are added, there will be LOTS of scrolling.  The whole right half of my monitor is white.

Btw, not trying to be overly-critical, just giving feedback as you requested.

It's coming. Can't do it all at once.

Not sure what you mean--the original creator of the Topic/Subject is posted in the thread along with the date they created it. Also each entry/comment has a header with the person who posted it and the date they posted it and the date they changed it. (Although it does say "xx Days ago" instead of a specific date, which people seem to prefer since they can't determine quickly if a date is old or new except by looking at the year.

I believe that Viking is refering to the old forum front page:

Topic Title(reply count)/Section/Date Started/Hits

Here we only have the Topic Title & reply count, personally I didn't care about the Hits.  And also on my browser the link is in blue when it's new/changed and purple when it hasn't changed since I last viewed the page.  This I use to note which thread I should check out for more recent responses.

I have now added a COLOR-coded cue to the Discussion TOC.

When you are signed in, and you go to the homepage, the Discussion TOC will contain RED colored text for Discussions that have comments since your last sign-in.

I still have some work to do on actual sign-in / sign-out automation, but for the most part its working. The problem is, if you remember your sign on, it is saved as a cookie for 10 days.

If you leave and come back in the same day, obviously you want the Previous Visit date/timestamp to remain what it was, not jump to "now". But then again, I could make the Previous Visit a session cookie which expires when you close your browser session and is created when you return to the site--but I'm not sure I like that. I'll have to see what happens with other site's forums.

I kind of like the ability to refresh and have the highlighted discussions refresh to those changed since I last refreshed, and to unhighlight once I have read them (or at least clicked them).

Typically I log in at the start of the day, review new topics and those with new responses, then for the remainder of the day I refresh from time to time to see anything new (topic or response) since the last refresh.  And I'm guessing many folks here do the same thing!

I do the same thing as Neil except that I close the browser when I'm done.  I don't sign out, though.  So if you store the last visited date/time and compare the topic create/change date/time and highlight any that are after, that would work for me.  Perhaps if the last visited date/time was updated when the browser was refreshed as well as closed, that would also work for Neil's scenario.

Just a thought.

I do the same thing as neilrh.

I made another change to the way we store cookies.

On Firefox, I had to go to the Tools | Page Info dialog box, then click on the Privacy icon, then click Show Cookies while on midrangenews.com Then I deleted all of the midrangeNews.com cookies. Closed the browser and restarted it.

So far it seems to be accurate. For some reason Firefox is keeping multiple generations of cookies for a site. Perhaps its something to do with the updates to Firefox, I do not know.

I've added 2 new buttons to the ribbon for Editing Comments/Content on this site:

Font Color

Font Background Color

There are just to the right of the BOLD|ITAL|UNDERLINE buttons.

I did notice that they seem to behave oddly sometimes, so view their results, and adjust things accordingly.

Any chance we could have a "HOME" link at the bottom of the page, or maybe a "TOP" link.

Once you get to the last response you need to scroll back to the top of the page to go back to the site front page, this is annoying at 20 responses.... but some of the old forum threads went to 100+ responses, that's a lot of scrolling.

Or maybe bolt the Midrange News banner to the top of the screen as something that doesn't scroll.

Neil, I was just thinking about that as I scrolled through 20+ comments using my iPad last night.  On a PC keyboard, the HOME button itself will normally take you back to the top of the page, whereas END will bring you to the bottom.

So I'm not so sure that would be helpful, but I'll think about it.

But adding a Homepage icon or something is certainly something I'm looking at.

Thanks!

I just updated the RPG source entry routines.

Previously if you added source code (RPG IV or anything else) it would wrap it in the Syntax Highlighter styles. however, if you Edited that Comment containing the source code, it would compress out all the formatting and space and linefeeds.

With the change I added today, you can now use the "Insert Code Using Syntaxhighlighting" button (above the FontSize in the toolbar) and the formatting will be retained when and if you edit your own post/comment.

Here's an example that I edited just now:

..... /INCLUDE QSYSINC/QRPGLESRC,QUSRJOBI                               
      /INCLUDE QSYSINC/QRPGLESRC,QUSEC                                  
                                                                        
     D PSDS           SDS                                               
     D  JobName                      10A   Overlay(PSDS:244)            
     D  JobUser                      10A   Overlay(PSDS:254)            
     D  JobNbr                        6A   Overlay(PSDS:264)            
                                                                        
     D CvtDate         PR                  ExtPgm('QWCCVTDT')           
     D  inFmt                        10A   Const OPTIONS(*VARSIZE)
     D*       This line is added during Edit my Comment.
     D  inDate                       64A   Const OPTIONS(*VARSIZE)      
     D  outFmt                       10A   Const OPTIONS(*VARSIZE)      
     D  outDate                      64A         OPTIONS(*VARSIZE)      
     D  api_error                          Like(QUSEC) OPTIONS(*VARSIZE)

There is still that "bug" in the syntax highlighter with respect to issuing a %TRIML() on every line of code. This causes (for example) RPG IV code to be shifted left in the resulting output.  Other languages, such as C++, SQL and the rest don't care because the first 7 positions of the line are reserved. But it makes RPG IV look goofy.

My solution is to type five periods on the first line of code. By doing that the syntax highlighter will still do a TRIML, but it will use zero as the maximum number of spaces to truncate. So it is just a work-around.

I had fixed this at one point (about a year ago) but then the guy who wrote the syntaxhighlighter updated his code and said "that's dumb" to my enhancement and promptly re-introduced the TRIML "feature". I may fix it again when I have time, but until then, if you care about the TRIML "feature", then use the work-around that I've suggested here.

Hello,

I am wondering if I am not checking in the right place to view the latest discussion posts.  From looking at the list of "LATEST DISCUSSIONS", it apears that the most recent posting was from 9 days ago.  Can that be right?  The old forum (http://www.rpgiv.com/rpgivforum/main) seemed much more active.

Thanks.

Yes, with the holiday in the U.S. and the migration over the course of the last 2 weeks, people got out of the habit of reading/posting on the Forum. The new Discussion Forum is must less active. Maybe when we make it a separate link and folks and monitor just the Forum vs the home page (although I personally don't see the difference) it will invite more activity.

I personally think that the old forum was discontinued too early, before this one is ready for prime time.  As Bob has said, he can't do it all at once, but then I would have preferred to leave the old one active until this one could adequately fill its shoes.  This one has some nifty editing features, etc., but is otherwise not ready.  Can't see who else is on, hard to have an overview of the topics as before, etc.

I was afraid this would happen, i.e. activity would drop and people would go elsewhere.

In case you noticed, I've implemented the Sort Ascending/Descending toggle for Comments.

I'm still working on the end-user interface however. So while there are click-here links, they will (today) just redisplay the same page.

When I click on sort ascending or descending, it kicks me out of the topic back to the main page.

Sort Asc and Sort Desc are implemented, but as I said the Links on this page are NOT turned on at the moment. There is way to force everything to be ascending or descend by modifying your custom options in your member profile (the My Profile link in the main menu).

Then go to the Advanced Tab. Then add the following entry to the list of options:

cmtseq: desc

I have mine set to this, and all Comments are sorted with most-recent first.

The goal is to automatically change this when you click on the Sort Asc/Desc link, but I want to make sure I don't screw up anything else. So for now, if you want to customize the order of the comments, add that CMTSEQ: DESC entry to your member profile.

That worked - thanks!  Maybe that's good default until the links work.

Bob, what about letting us upload photo icons here instead of just a link to the photo hosted elsewhere?  The file is so small 16x16 so they would take almost none of your server space.  I'm thinking more people would do it if they didn't have to host the photo elsewhere.

Viking, does your ISP give you a personal web page? That's where I keep files I want to be visible everywhere. I don't even have a web page there, just a few JPG's. Before Google Docs, I used to share a (read only) spreadsheet that way, too.

I'm trying to get my picture to show up with my comments but am obviously doing someting wrong. I added the link to my profile that shows up with the picture in google docs but it doesnt seem to work. Any ideas?

I also noticed that when I right-click on the picture icon and look at properties, only part of the URL is shown. 

Well, I could never get the google docs to work but it looks like dropbox works fine.