A thread to discuss naming threads, board policy, new thread suggestions, and anything else that has to do with board administration and maintenance. Guaranteed to include lively debate and polls. Natter discouraged, but not deleted.
Current Stompy Feet: ita, Jon B, DXMachina, P.M. Marcontell, Liese S., amych
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.
John - your "How-to" looks good. I may make a few small changes. e.g. "you're reading posts 256 to 265", not 266, and "the date and time", instead of "EST".
What do you think of "How to be a Buffista" for the page title?
I may make a few small changes
Of course.
What do you think of "How to be a Buffista" for the page title?
I don't really think it's the right title for
that
page. It's more of a "how does this work?" thing. Do we have a good quote for that kind of situation?
You could use "You may ask yourself, how do I work this?" if you want an obscure Talking Heads reference.
Seriously, Dude, Where's My Car?
To bring this back bureauracywards, do I guess from this that when we finish 'Dude, where's my precious?' we can simply move on to 'LotR 2: Seriously, Dude, where's my Precious?'
Q. NAFDA? Is that an international Buffista treaty?
A. Ummm..... No. It's the North American Free Discussion Area. We have many posters who aren't from North America and are therefore half a season or more behind. In order to keep them unspoiled, we limit discussion of current episodes to specific threads. These are the NAFDA threads. If it's not labeled as a NAFDA thread, don't talk about current episodes in it.
Suggested addition:
We also ask that you don't discuss one show's current season in another show's topic without whitefont, because some people are on tape delay. This means that events from the current season of Buffy should be whitefonted in the Angel topic and vice versa.
Hey, if it's going to be a rule it oughta be written down...
