What would you add, change, or remove?

[rajama]

Some questions for all the members here:

• If you could make a change to SFN' date=' what would it be?
  [*']What would you change about the front page?
  
• What would you remove from SFN?
  
• What have you seen on other forums that you think we should have?

 

I just posted a few things on SFN after some months away and… well, when I was here before I had trouble keeping track of who I was replying to in any particular thread, probably because I dislike the THREADED MODE.

 

Maybe this could be made more useful?

 

If you have control over aspects of the interface, could we have an extra anchor attached to (say) the thread tools hyperlink, and include it in the path of each response. This would stop the page moving up, keeping it at the same position when looking through the list of responses. In Firefox the page would be seen to not move at all – of course, IE will jump down each time, but it’s not far…

 

I know you may have to deal with accessibility issues, and forum pages provide lots of anchors, which case you will probably not want to jump straight to a ‘bookmark’ for some lazy sighted person, so maybe this would need to be some kind of preference switch?

 

Just a thought.

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

Do elaborate. We have the Hybrid and Linear modes available as well. What disadvantages do they have, and what could the thread tools hyperlink do to help Threaded Mode?

[rajama]

Do elaborate. We have the Hybrid and Linear modes available as well. What disadvantages do they have, and what could the thread tools hyperlink do to help Threaded Mode?

 

As I posted, I sometimes find it difficult to keep track of individual conversations within a thread in Linear Mode, which is otherwise the most usable of the three options, so I switch to the Threaded Mode to see if anyone else is actually replying to other responses or only to the original post, and if they are, who is talking to who…

 

What I didn’t mention was that my monitor has only a 1024x768 resolution, so in Threaded Mode, flicking through the tree of posts causes the page to return to the header each time the next post is displayed, rather than remain static as it would if the page were fully displayed - having room for the tree and the current post - on a larger screen.

 

So, my suggestion is to place an anchor on the blue bar above the scrolling thread tree window. You already have several hyperlinks there, so one of them could be used…

 

If the anchor were referenced by the links in the tree, this would ensure the page view would return to the blue bar as the user clicked through the postings…

 

Of course, on a high resolution display the page would also scroll to the blue bar, but there maybe no need to do so as most posts are only 296px high.

 

Also, while in Firefox the page would be seen to not move at all (as it would open at the anchor point) IE will jump down each time, which may prove irritating...especially on a large display.

 

So - if you thought it worth investigating - maybe a toggle?

 

I’m not sure on this (having revisited it) as the interface is very slick and adding any new behaviour might be distracting… what do you think?

[insane_alien]

how about allowing a custom date format instead of having it set to mm-dd-yyyy

us brits use the dd-mm-yyyy format. its only a little formatting menu.

[aj47]

On other forums i've seen 'view unanswered posts' which I thought was a good idea. Any chance having something similar on SFN?

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

http://www.scienceforums.net/search.php?do=process&replyless=1&replylimit=0

 

I'll look to see if we can add that to the header somewhere.

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

Done.