It seems when you’re reading those mammoth, six-page threads, sometimes you forget who started the damn thing, which sometimes makes a difference when you’re reading what they’re saying on page six.
Would it be possible (or beneficial) to make the screenname of the OP a different color (or something) to set it off from everyone else’s posts?
And if so, how many signatures do I have to get to sign my petition?
One should do it.
This would be The Grapist’s dream come true
The people to petition are the friendly folks at JelSoft, who wrote vBulletin which is the software used by the SDMB. If it’s not a feature in the base software you’ll never see it here.
This is an excellent feature request. You should probably start a thread at the vBulletin Feedback forum at:
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=55
While it should possible to do this via a hack, it is highly unlikely that such a feature would be enabled on the SDMB unless it is part of the standard vBulletin feature set.
What if the OP does not post again?
I think it’s an excellent idea, actually.
I, for one, welcome our new grapist overlords.
(Seriously, if someone starts a thread at the vBulletin feedback forum I’ll come on and show my support.)
I think it would be useful to have the thread starter name and date started displayed on every page, along with it’s title, especially in threads that are several pages long. That way, even if the OP doesn’t post again, it’s just a scroll up to the top to see who it was.
On the forum pages, the thread start date could be useful too. Occasionally something that’s fairly old pops up again, and it would help to know if it’s a new thread with the same name, or that old one that I might have read, but didn’t care to follow or whatever. It might cut down on the several-page additions to zombie threads, too. I would hope that this, at least, could be something already available with VBulletin?
I really want to ‘grape’ this post, but since I don’t want to wind up getting the post locked down, I’ll leave it.
Glad to hear others might like this feature. I went ahead and posted over on vBulletin. The thread is here, if you want to show your support (DooWah for President, 2008!).
mnemosyne, I hope you don’t mind, but I also included your suggestion in my thread. And by “included” I mean I copied and pasted what you wrote. Of course, that’s what I did with my own words, so hopefully you’ll be cool with that.
I’m not sure if the vB boards use “OP” as a common term. I seem to see more of “thread starter” or “topic starter”. Perhaps you might want to edit your post and/or title to reflect that.
Somebody on the vBulletin boards responded:
“Already possible, with HTML markup. All it takes is some tweaking to make it [v]isible on the first post of the thread.”
I’m not really sure what this means. Is this something we can do for ourselves, if we choose, or something that has to be done to the entire site as a whole?
That answer seems rather vague. I’m not sure what s/he’s trying to say.
It certainly is possible to do this by customizing the code that runs the vB software (usually called a MOD or a hack), but unless it comes as a standard feature in vB it is not likely to be implemented on the SDMB.
Technically, it is also possible to do this on the user side (i.e. on your computer), but in order to implement it you would need to parse the output of the sdmb pages through some script which makes the required change and then displays it to you on your browser.
I got some more details over on the vBulletin board. They said this should work:
<if condition="$thread[postusername]==$post[username]">
code for thread starter
</if>
So… I assume this would have to be done to the boards as a whole. Does anybody think it would not be a useful feature?
We do not venture far afield from the plain vanilla vB coding.
For two reasons:
If this becomes a feature in a scheduled version of vB, we’ll consider it.
The questions are how useful would it be and does the utility outweigh the effort of installing and maintaining it. The Reader’s answer to the latter is no.
I don’t think it’s very useful in itself. You could just re-open the first page in a new browser window. It seems to me that the effort involved in that is dwarfed by the effort of wading through a multi-page thread.
I personally think it would be a useful feature, but that’s not the issue here. Installing the hack is rather simple, but the issue is of maintaining hacks across upgrades, which is not a trivial task and therefore not undertaken at the SDMB.
Gotcha. I had no idea how easy or hard it would be, so thanks for explaining that. No biggie!