I’ve been here at the Dope a long time. I’ve used AOL for almost all of my time here and have always used IE.
At the top of the IE browser window there are 3 icons: a heart for favorites, a running guy for IM and a peice of paper with a pencil. This peice of paper with a pencil will open up an e-mail with a link to whatever thread you’re reading and give your e-mail the subject of “Check out Straight Dope Message Board-- [insert name of thread]”
Boy am I unobservant.
Now that I look carefully, this only happens in the AOL browser, which is why I probably never noticed it before. I don’t usually use the AOL browser to read the Dope because AOL is too impatient and will give me a “page not found” error within two seconds. And we all know you need a bit longer than two seconds to get a response from the Dope.
Did this work for you? I do it, and it claims I don’t have access to that page. I thought the feature had been turned off a long time ago, but I didn’t know if it had been turned back on.
No, no… Biggirl is not talking about an SDMB feature. She’s talking about an AOL feature. The board used to have a similar feature, but for technical reasons, it had to be disabled. The AOL feature works completely differently: It just opens up a new e-mail window, and automatically inserts the URL and title of whatever page you’re currently on (so this would work with any page, not just the SDMB). From there, it’s exactly as if you had sent the e-mail yourself. At least, that’s what I presume is happening.
If you’re running Internet Explorer without AOL (like I am) you have a similar feature. Go to the File menu, scroll down to send (follow the arrow), and then you can send the link by email.
Yeah, but doing it through IE, I thought, wasn’t quite the same as the vB feature, which sends the entire thread, not just the page you’re on. Sure, one link covers all pages, but if you send as page in IE, I think you’re only sending the first page.
I tried it on another vB forum I post at that doesn’t have the “email a page” feature turned off, and it only sends a link to the thread, not the actual page with all the posts. So the vB feature works the same as the IE browser feature.
Now I don’t know if the mods approve or not, but using IEs “send page by email” feature you can send the whole page with all the posts, but you do have to repeat for every page in the thread.
In IE these features can also be accessed if you have the “mail” link in your menu toolbar.
Or just send the first page, and let the person getting it just hit the “page 2” link at the bottom.
And so far as I know, the technical difficulties with vBulletin’s “send page” feature would not apply to the Internet Explorer feature. I’ve never heard any complaint about people manually sending e-mails with links to threads, and from the Board’s point of view, use of the IE feature should be exactly equivalent to that.
Alternatively, click on Show Printable Version, then click the Show all XX Posts in This Thread link, THEN File|Send the link. Then you’d get all of the posts in one swell foop.