I haven’t tracked it, but I have had to log in several times to post.
And the square root dealie is that little square pic by the “Straight dope message board” link at the top of the screen, and there is also one by the profile button at the bottom of each post.
Forgot to add - I do have the “Automatically login” and “browse board with cookies” set to yes.
And I don’t have to log in every time I make a post - just occasionally, like the cookies timestamp is set to only a few hours into the future, and I’ve been logged in for more than that amount of time.
There is a timeout on the cookies created by the SDMB software. I will have to go look up the settings (don’t have time now) but the value is not that low. After what time interval do you have to login?
Purpose of the little vBulletin button: I’ll have to look up what it’s supposed to do.
Tells you whether or not the poster is online, depending on the color of the icon. Putting the cursor over it will display the associated text that explains this.
That square root thingie doesn’t do anything when I put a cursor on it in Netscape 6. Its either gray or light cream…
Did you try visiting straightdope.com & visiting the forums through there? Im told it sets a proper cookie that way & that works for me.
Ah. This wasn’t happening for me, so I tried it in IE5. Apparently whatever function they are using doesn’t work in Netscape.
However, I’ve noticed that it will show the board name and version with the square root symbol by the “Straight dope message board” link at the top of each page in both Netscape and IE. Oddly enough, the status line shows that it will execute “window.location=window.location” if you click on it. Kind of pointless, eh?
Thanks for the answer waterj2. For some reason, I saw the pop-up boxes appear when you hover over the “vBulletin logo button” on Windows 98 / IE 5.5, Windows 98 Netscape 4.7, but not on my main home machine running MacOS 9.0 and Netscape 6.2. The one in each post, as waterj2 says, shows whether the poster is online/offline. The one at the top of the page shows the version number for vBulletin.
The problem I see with the square root symbol and Netscape is that only the top portion of the image is hot. You can hover all day over the bottom 2/3s of it and the alternate text doesn’t show up. That isn’t the case with IE. There is the same problem with the down arrow on threads with new posts, but not the right arrow for last post.
I’m using Netscape 4.79 and IE 5.5.
Jim
Good catch Jim!
Some info on the logout problem.
My last post last night was about 5:30 AM GMT.
This morning, when I tried to post about 1/2 an hour ago, I was logged out.
This is odd, because I was actually up a little later than usual last night. So this is actually a shorter time span than some days that I have stayed logged in overnight.
Ok, make that 11:30 PM CST to about 7 AM CST.
Second time in two days. 10PM CST to around 6:15 AM CST
Zyada, note the new “sticky” thread at the top of ATMB.