I love this new feature!
Mouse over a thread title. A popover box should come up with a preview of what’s in the OP.
Great feature - enough to make me reconsider asking for the old format back! (j/k)
I’m impressed! Good job everyone!
Ric
Maybe it’s because I’m in Opera, but all I see when I hover my mouse over the thread title is the URL…
I concur with dantheman. It does work with Mozilla 1.5, though.
Just tried this with both Mozilla 1.5 (not Firebird) and IE 6. Seems to work pretty consistently in IE, but only sporadically in Mozilla. Don’t know what the difference is other than that I’m on a pokey dial-up connection, and maybe Mozilla needs to digest more data first.
If anyone is curious, the effect is that a small, Post-It style yellow box pops up with at least part of the OP’s text when you mouse over a thread title. Pretty neat, as Rico said.
Ick !
Yellow clutterboxes on a blue background, and very few places you can put the mouse without the damned things obscuring the thread list.
Ick, Ick, Ick !
I’ve just seen this feature. Yeah, cool! 
I love it. It’s great when I’m logging in on my pathetic dial-up connection.
I find that it doesn’t work on every thread title, and stops working once you’ve viewed the thread. The second seems like a feature (although in light of my poor memory, not an especially welcome feature), but the first strikes me as a bug.
Hmmm - speak for yourself. What I get is a hot-pink box with lilac writing. :eek:
One of the joys of being stuck with using your 13-year-old daughter’s PC. 
Well, it seems to work in Mozilla Firebird 0.7 on Windows XP also, but the reply screen is formatted strangely and parts of it are cut off. I think I may be forced to use IE again. AUUGHHH! Oh, well, at least I can use MyIE2 or something like that to kill popups, but still, I love my Firebird.
Best.Feature.Ever.
Well, nearly. I got addicted to the mouseover thread preview at another board, and I think it’s cool to see it here. I hope it’s staying!
As I said in the ‘wow’ thread I really love this feature! I think the reason why it works on some threads and not on others is that it only works on threads started since the upgrade. Threads started before do not get the preview. It puzzled me at first, but I think that is the reason.
When I found that some threads didn’t get the preview box I was afraid that the feature might have been turned off already! I would be very disappointed if it was. I really like it.
I like it. The SDMB is notoriously slow with dial-up (which i have) and it’s convenient for me! I can see how it could be a bother though, with boxes popping up everywhere.
It is a great feature. However after about 5 seconds it goes away and I have to move my cursor and then go back over it again. And it only does it on about half of the threads? What is with this?
That’s a very good thing, if it’s the case. There are two ways that feature could work. The first method, which I think was implemented as a hack at many older vBulletin boards, made a separate request to the database to fetch the thread, whenever you moused over a thread. Rather than saving bandwidth and other server resources by not opening threads you’re not interested in, this method would effectively require the server to open a thread for every link you moused over, even if you didn’t read it. I think that you can all imagine the effect that this would have on our hampsters.
The second way in which this could be done is for the board to add another piece of information to the forum index each time a thread is started, containing the first few lines (and only the first few lines) of the new thread. This method would only be slightly more resource-intensive than simply displaying the thread list as usual. However, it would only work for those threads where the Board knew that it was supposed to put that information in when the thread was started, and in the old version, it didn’t keep track of that.
So this feature showing up only on the post-upgrade threads is a sign that the Board is using the second method, the one which does not demand instant hari-kari from the hampsters. Which is a good thing.
Unfortunately, nothing – not even hari-kari – is instant with the SDMB hamsters.