Spice up 'new posts' tool

[BACK2MYROOTS]

AL-KHIYAL

You know I am one of your fans and I hope you won't take this the wrong way.

The 'New Posts' tool which is intended to flag fresh contributions to discussions isn't performing the function it was meant for.

It is quite often drowned by one or the other contributors to the exclusion of others. For example, I posted a new thread today which vanished within minutes as if dissolved!

Shouldn't it be allowed to reflect variety, to spice it up a bit ?

[Al-khiyal]

Salam akhi,

What exactly was the problem with the 'dissolved' post? When I checked 'new posts' I could see your posts from today on the list. The 'new posts' function is user-specific - if you have read the new posts, then they won't show up as 'new' for you if you check again. Effectively, the 'new posts' check will show you 'What's new since last time I checked'. Anyone surfing in who hasn't read a thing all day will get the full list. If you want to follow discussions on particular threads only, then you can go to your user control panel and subscribe to those threads, that way you'll get an email alert any time a reply is made to any of them.

[BACK2MYROOTS]

'User specific' ? You mean it shows different things for different people?

Let me put the question another way.

Would it be possible for the New Posts button to give all members access to a list of all the past contributions within say the past 24 hours, instead of showing only the last 2 or 3 ? That way it draws your attention to other contributions that you may want to look at, knowing that they are 'fresh', not just the ones you usually visit.

Am I making sense? lol

[Al-khiyal]

You're making sense, we're just crystallizing the mystery.

Yes, the list will appear different to different people. The magic of cookies allows the site to only show to an individual searcher what is new since that person last checked. So, theoretically, one hundred people could surf in and read different threads and if they each then searched for 'what's new' they'd be shown any new posts made that they had not read - and the list could be different for all of them. The feature is 'time specific' I think, so if they all left and returned an hour or so later, their search would only show any posts made in the time that they had been away. But someone who had not been on the site all day, surfing in hours afterwards, would still get the 'full list' of new posts. Possibly, if you 'clear cookies' when logging out, that might result in you being treated as 'visiting for the first time' when you come back again. That's an experiment I haven't ever done myself, so I cannot vouch for its efficacy.

[BACK2MYROOTS]

All is clear now. Thanks AL-KHIYAL.

One more thing, totally unrelated and purely out of curiosity. When you chose the name AL-KHIYAL , did you mean it to be understood as ''the shadow'' (colloq) or '' the stallion'' (plur) ?

Silly question!!

PS: Did you by any chance teach at the Language Centre in York in the 1980s?

[BACK2MYROOTS]

Mmm, no room for a laugh then. OK.

[Al-khiyal]

Salam akhi,

Not sulking, I was away for much of this day.

ana min al-3iraq - 'khiyal' can also mean 'ghost' with us, and as I haunted the site for a time before registering, it seemed OK for me.

York? Oooop Norf in Ingerland? la2, I was never teaching there. All my language learning came from the student's side of the classroom