Why can’t everyone use desktops?!…
Yep, it works poorly on tablets right now I’m afraid. Sorting that out is one of the things on the List.
Haven’t had a great deal of time to use the new forum as yet, but just thought I’d say that it’s working great on my iPad. Liking the clean design, responsiveness and the two-column layout, so da iawn Ifan! Ti’n seren.
-Aran Why can’t everyone use desktops?!…
Get yourself out of the Dark Ages, Aran! I access SSIW on my mobile quite a few times every day. In fact, I’m almost ready to give my PC away!
I’d like to repeat the request above from Diane about the width of the two columns being under the user’s control.
I’d go further, and like to have the option to make either one of them disappear at will with a mouse click (and of course be able to reappear at will) so (and I’m speaking as a laptop/desktop user) I can use the full width of my screen (if I want to, to be either reading/posting in a thread, or just looking down the list of threads.
There was a comment above about the number of mouse clicks needed, or having to use the mouse excessively, vis a vis the left hand column: I’m not sure if this is what the OP was getting at, but from my point of view, I don’t like the fact that you can only go up and down the list of threads on the left hand side by using the mouse.
There should also be the ability to page up and down it (e.g. using keyboard page-down/page-up.
And it would be nice to have a slider bar on the right of the left-hand column (which does need the mouse of course). And also the ability to click down to the last post, then back to the first post at will. That’s what I’d call easy navigation, and I’m a bit surprised that people have said how easy this new forum is to navigate, since that’s what I find hard about it.Maybe we are talking about slightly different things.
I suspect people won’t find it so easy to navigate once it gets a few tens of thusands more posts under its belt, assuming it stays much as it is.
I know this thread is about finding only new posts, and I know that’s what a lot of busy people want to do most of the time, but there is at least one other way of wanting to use a forum like this, which is of course an ever-growing knowledge-base, and that’s in “browse mode”, as oppose to “search mode”, or “read latest” mode.
I spent a lot of my time as a new user on the old forum just casually browsing through it, seeing what had gone before, e.g.when the old courses were still bright and shiny new, and very interesting it was too. I was not looking for specific information (I was sometimes,but by no means always).
I don’t think this new forum, at least at present, fits comfortably with the model of browsing. Perhaps everyone nowadays is too busy to browse.
OK, I shall now get of my soapbox for a while, and retire with my pipe, slippers, cushion to sit on and cat to sit on me (or vice versa), and retire to the library…
@Mike I think tags will solve the problem of browsing - much the same way you might use tags to browse a blog. But think I understand the feeling of “what’s going to happen when we have thousands of posts” - it’s kind of like using an e-reader and not being able to see how far you are through a book, a strange kind of claustrophobia almost. Would there be a way of archiving posts I wonder for those of us who like to visually put things in boxes? but then if posts were archived by date (as with being able to see a blog’s contents by date groups) would you go by date of first post or last? Hmm…definitely off topic now, and glad I’m not designing these things 
I’ve read a lot about tags but not sure how they work - I think I understand how I could use them to search, but not sure how I would use them to browse, as per the conversation Mike and Amy have been having - can anyone explain that?
Many thanks!
R
Not sure about the plans for this forum Bontddu, but the tags available and their relative popularity can be represented visual via a “tag cloud”. If you see a tag that interests you (for example #bod), you could select that tag from the cloud and browse through the posts tagged with it, in order to view all the posts about that versatile verbnoun. Many blogs use this idea. No doubt other ways of doing this exist out there in the webisphere.
Hwyl,
Stu
I miss the bar on the old forum that said User Control Panel . view your posts . View new posts . View active topics .
How would I look up my old posts to see if anything had been added while I was away from the forum for a while? I think I really prefer the old ‘active posts’ as I could scroll down it more quickly to find what interested me.
Mary
I think I really prefer the old ‘active posts’
Hi Mary - ‘active posts’ on the old forum were listed in order of which had the most recent comments - that’s exactly the same as the list on the left hand side here…
We’ll be making it easier to find your own posts/threads in the next few weeks…
Just to echo what Mary said, the “view new posts” was really useful and was how I used the old forum all the time, That way I could stay on top of all that was going on. If I missed a day or two, the “View New Posts” was a great way of catching up. Be nice to have that as a feature.
If I missed a day or two, the “View New Posts” was a great way of catching up.
The left-hand column is essentially ‘View new topics’ - and ‘View new topics’ was just ‘View new posts’ going back further in time. Any time you visit, the posts on the top of the left hand column (just as with ‘View new posts’) will be the most recent, and if there’s new stuff in them since you last read them, they’ll be green…
It’s not quite the same, it doesn’t now take you to exactly the unread post, or give an indication of where this is.
It’s not quite the same, it doesn’t now take you to exactly the unread post, or give an indication of where this is.
This is true in terms of functionality after seeing the list of posts, but the list of posts itself is exactly the same (in terms of the order).
Was just discussing this whole thing with Mrs G as we’ve just done a website refresh and she (as a non SSIW user) was of the view that the chronology and scrolling windows makes for a really efficient workflow. Oddly enough, we were agreed on this. The only caveat that we hit on simultaneously is that we’re both skim readers and wondered does this make a difference?
That’s really interesting, Andy, diolch yn fawr. Particularly in the light that pretty much all web content research shows that everyone skims initially…
It’s not quite the same, it doesn’t now take you to exactly the unread post, or give an indication of where this is.
This is true in terms of functionality after seeing the list of posts, but the list of posts itself is exactly the same (in terms of the order).
Yes, true. I do think part two is worth doing, though. It’d probably halve the time it takes me to read each thread if I didn’t have to do the mental arithmetic to work out when I last read the thread, so which ‘2 hours ago’ etc. correspond to unread.
Yes, true. I do think part two is worth doing, though.
Agreed. We thought we had a fix, but it didn’t work, so we’re going to be revisiting this again next week…