I still remember your thread from way back when you discovered ahead of time that RSS feeds were enabled on the boards, only for it to be disabled very shortly after. Hope we’re third time lucky this time.
Rss - for ADDs who can’t surf fast enough! 
Yeah, with the old software the system was drastically slowed down by the feed and we had to disable it to get functionality back. It was a software bug that we could not find or fix and it took this upgrade to get us to this point.
Seems okay so far, though I’m not sure everybody’s hitting on this, not everyone reads announcements and not everyone wants RSS feeds. I’m going to mention this on the front page of the site in the morning and see what happens after that.
TubaDiva turned on a feature which put an icon on the threads you’d posted to, when you viewed the forum list. I happen to frequent another vBulletin board, and it’s a very nice, useful feature.
Unfortunately, it brought the SDMB to a standstill. I guess that the server had to search all the threads in a forum for each user who opened the forum, and the server just couldn’t cope. So TubaDiva had to turn it off again. I, personally, would like to see it restored, if it won’t interfere with the speed of the boards too much.
I think what he is saying is people being able to post multple times in a poll thread. Once to answer the OP, and again, to comment, or clarify on their post.
ETA: Lynn is right, I don’t know what I’m talking about. Ignore the above.
Try it now, please.
I’d appreciate feedback on the experience as this should make searches more accurate and less resource intensive using these filtering options.
It worked great and responded very quick to a *4 day *search displaying as posts for all forums.
Thank you TubaDiva.
I recall that you had set the default Find post from: to 6 months before. That seemed to help at the time.
Maybe, hopefully, with that default and the small more exact search increments, **Jerry **can try reducing the search wait window down to 2 or 3 minutes after the Google-bot lets up.
I need to fine tune the search default – I recall I had changed it before but this time around it keeps defaulting to “any date” which is not useful.
I’m considering using “last visit” or “last day” as the default to further refine it. Isn’t that what most folks want anyway most of the time, the most recent postings?
I like a variety of time frames to choose from. Generally, if I’m looking for something “last day” I can find it myself, without burdening the server too much. At least I don’t think I’m tasking the server too much by clicking on page 1, 2, or 3. Then I just use my browser’s “find” command, to search on those pages.
Most of my Dope searching is for things that I read ages ago, and I know it’s more than 6 months but I’m not sure how many years.
Does the old way of posting “alterego’s answer is exactly what I needed, thanks!” and then asking the mods to close it not work?
I think that is too short of a period. Too many searchers would get back no results or the wrong results and get frustrated having to wait another 5 minutes to try again. I don’t know the right answer, I just know you had 6 months last time and it seem to work OK.
A few years back, a little dot was added to the thread icons to indicate where any particular user had posted. Enabling that one feature slowed the board to a halt. A bunch of polls with bar graphs would have the potential for a similar effect because each bar is comprised of several small segments, loaded one at a time until the correct length is achieved.
The additional workload that would be thrusted upon the mods would also have to be considered.
If it’s a choice between bells and whistles on one side and speed on the other I’ll take the speed. One of the things I enjoy most about this board is the absence of frills and fripperies. Words, words, words, as Hamlet said, although admittedly he wasn’t talking about his requirements in an internet forum.
It wasn’t displaying the dot that dunnit.
Agreed. Please, no avatars or new smilies.
This is the choice we have always made.
It’s fun to have accessories and toys and etc. and we want the place to be as spiffy as we can make it but most of all we want people to be able to read and write to the board, that’s the first and most important thing.
Over the years we’ve held back a lot of other features because we couldn’s support everything and felt anything that compromised the main mission – reading and writing posts – was an extra.
Hopefully we’re at the point where we can have a little something something extra, a bit of gravy. We’re working on it.
What’s the thought on tags? Has it been discussed and vetoed, tabled for now or is it currently being considered?
Tags are under consideration. We’ll keep you posted as things develop.
Thank you and odd timing.
I had just thought of an easy one. PMs are limited to 5 recipients to prevent spam I imagine. Is there any chance of raising that to 9 or 10? I imagine that would be a boon for game players and DopeFest organizers. I doubt it would be abused.
I am utterly lost on how RSS improves over just opening the Forum’s first page. Also, since I subscribed I can’t figure out the rhyme or reason to why the threads listed on the feed are listed and why they are listed in the order they are listed in.
