How to use the new able2know

You will have to ask the site's administrator Jespah, I'll just keep going on my merry way, including drinking my rum and coke whilst posting.

And here's a tip for others. Are you annoyed by how the default view shows each reply in a standard-sized box, so you have to scroll down inside the post box to read the full post?

Click on your name (top right), click on "Edit preferences", and under "Topic Preferences", toggle "Expand all posts" to yes.

On a first critical meta note - sorry guys! - my first impression is that the new site seems to encourage starting new threads on a topic rather than building on existing ones that have a lot of background info, and through the default setting I just mentioned, encouraging short rather than long posts.

Which will suit a lot of people well, and will be useful in for example the Technology forum, like how Craven mentioned that individual technical questions should get their own thread rather than be lumped into one Mac thread for example. But I'm afraid that on the Politics forum both things would encourage (more) ADD-like posting...

OK thanks!

I can't see any option like that....dumb and dumber.

I don't think "unanswered posts" has an equivalent on the new site.


On the homepage, select Topic age: all, Sort by: new posts


There doesn't currently seem to be an equivalent to this on the new site. But I second your implied opinion that such an equivalent would be useful. I think it would make it much easier for me to keep track of topics that interest me.

If you click on the Able2Know logo to go to the homepage, what you see is this list called "able2know - All topics", right? Right below "able2know - All topics", it says "Topic age". "Day" is in black, the other words are in blue. You can click on "Week", "Month" etc to let the list below show the most popular topics posted in those longer periods of time, rather than just the ones that were started today. Click "All time" to get the threads started at any time. That's step one.

Step two: to the right of these words, still in the light blue bar, it says "Sort by", and then you have a drop down menu. Default setting is "Most votes". If you switch it to "New posts", you get a list of the threads that have been answered last!

Thanks Thomas for pointing me there! Instead of cluttering the thread with thank-you notes, I'll just vote for the post that helped me from now on, ok?

However, I gotta admit that I dont understand how that function works -- what exactly does voting for an individual post do? I mean, if you vote for a topic (or the starting post of a topic), it goes up in the listing on the homepage and tag pages etc. But what does voting for an individual reply do?

Thanks NIMH - suffering web blindness - never noticed the date frames on the home page.

I think it's a reward for that individual. If you go to your profile, one of the parameters below your picture is "Reputation". I take it that your reputation improves as correspondents vote your posts "up".

This would seem to tie in with your "meta critique". This is obviously useful for questions that have a right or wrong answer. But in the politics threads? I have a feeling correspondents might tend to vote their own team up and the other team down, with no particular attention to evidence and reason. We'll see.

OK, the tagging option seems to be kaputt? I just went to the What Made You Smile Today thread, and ... well, let me try to replicate it now with my FreeCell thread.

In the My Tags box, above "tag topic", I type in: game, freecell, bored. They all get added. There is now no more "tag topic" button under "my tags", but there's an "edit tags" link. I click it, the box and "tag topic" button reappear, and I type in: cards, solitaire. I click the "tag topic" button, and the answer is "Tags removed". But the tags have been changed to: cards, freecell, bored -- meaning that they added "cards", but only by throwing out "game"!

I dont see any logic at work, is it broken?

If you go into a particular topic ala Nimh's instructions about new posts there is a 'questions' link in the breadcrumb - clicking on this then gives you the 'unanswered' option - COOOOLLLLLQQQQQ

Hi,

I used to be Brand X...but since none of my former info would work...I'm now Brand WTF.

Sounds good to me!

interesting, gonna take some getting used to, but interesting

Another aspect I just discovered: In your "preferences" you can set a "post threshold". If a post has been voted down below your "post threshold", A2K will collapse it for you when you look at it.

I may have to take a vacation day to figure out the new site. But it looks great!

What happened to the "edit" function? Was this already explained? Did I miss the memo?

EDIT: oh, wait, it's there. It just doesn't stay up for very long. What's the time limit?

EDIT EDIT: the "delete" function doesn't seem to work. Is there a trick to that?

At least it has got rid of Calamity Jane's avvie. I daren't look at that before I went to bed.

And I wasn't responding to Miller. I was simply giving one of the advantages. To balance things up a bit.

Nor was I responding to myself.