How about I do another rewrite on the How-To section, and the FAQ links to it:

Go for it dude.

Dudes! Give her a break.

I have nothing productive to add to this discussion. I will say, however, that I love you, John, but it's incredibly disturbing when you say "dudes".

Re disturbing dudes: apparently there are plans for a sequel to Dude, Where's My Car?, to be titled Seriously, Dude, Where's My Car?

I've always imagined numerous sequels to I Know What You Did Last Summer and I Still Know What You Did Last Summer ending up with I Really, Honestly, Do Really Know What You Did Last Summer, Why Won't You Believe Me?

Re disturbing dudes: apparently there are plans for a sequel to Dude, Where's My Car?, to be titled Seriously, Dude, Where's My Car?

SWEET!

It is, indeed, the best sequel title ever. Been discussed in Natter a couple of times, as I recall...

t pointed look Natterwards

OK Proposed Rewrite of the third paragraph in the "how to navigate" section of the How-To, the one which begins

If you decide that you want to look at what someone posted several hundred posts back...

These aren't the only ways to navigate, however.

If you take a look at the URL in your browser's address bar while reading a thread, you'll see something like this at the end:

showthread.php?thread_id=25&post_id=256

and that last number, (256 in this example) is the number of the first post on the page you're reading. So if your profile is set to "ten posts to a page", you're reading posts 256 to 266.

If you want to skip ahead a hundred posts, you can edit it by hand: delete the 256, type in 356, and hit enter. Or to skip back a hundred posts put in 156, and so on.

One common use for this is to ease yourself back into a thread by skipping to the point 50 posts before the last post -- how do you know where the end of your thread is? That number's shown in the header of each post just after "EST", for instance "#1234 of 4567". You can skip to the point fifty before the end by skipping to post 4517, because that's 4567 minus fifty.

What do you think?

Notes:

• the How-To page has just "How To" in the title tag. Maybe "How To Page for buffistas.org" or something would make for a better bookmark/search result etc?
• I tried hacking URLs with numbers past the end of the thread and with negative numbers with no ill-effects. I hope.
• We don't specify in that part of the How-To what Last and Recent do specifically. I didn't attempt to explain, because, er ... I don't know.

It looks like, if you have no new messages, "last" and "recent" do the same thing. If you have new messages (beyond the page that you're looking at), last brings you to the last post, while recent gives you the last page of posts.

if you have no new messages, "last" and "recent" do the same thing.

Oh yeah. I'm remembering some discussion about this, and about some threads doing that and others not...

Discussion trailed off, but last and recent are equivalent on the RHS, but recent gives you a full page (if there are enough posts) for the main column threads.