New A2K feature requests.

Never mind. I will go quietly.

Never go quietly into the night EB! Make them get a court ordered restraint!

OK, I was all set to submit a post, suggesting that we ought to have a separate tab for all the people on the "follower" list, in order to make that feature more useful. But then I happened to look up and saw a "My Friends" tab, which did exactly what I was planning to suggest. So, in the words of Emily Litella: "Never mind."

Ah, I see. I had wondered how the "following" someone helped in any way. I hadn't noticed the "my friends" link.

Thanks,

I hadn't noted that "My Friends" link either. And had I not clicked on it just now, I might never have known that George ate a biscuit sandwich, a banana, and a cappuccino yesterday.

Yay! The friend/follower thingie is helping me fold back in with belonging. Thanks, Craven!

Is clicking on follow supposed to make you ignore someone?

http://able2know.org/topic/141331-2#post-3906136

I hope not! My little green bars don't say I have ignored the people I'm following... All the people I'm following show up in my "friends" posts.

I love the "My Post". between that and "New Post" they are the two pages I frequent the most. What I don't like about the "My Post" page though is when I "vote down" a thread it is still there in the list with "Topic voted down (view) " being in it's place. I can understand that maybe you might want to go back to the thread every once in a while, but you don't want it in the list of threads that you view often or maybe you don't want it pushing a thread that doesn't get as much activity as say another more active thread (that you have voted down) gets.

Is there maybe a way to get a tab under my post for threads you have voted down but still post in, but maybe not often?

Right now the main reason it stays visible at all on the topic lists is that it is the only way to undo it. I think an upcoming change (the ability to filter out whole tags, which Monger requested back in 2008 on this thread) will make us revisit this, as if you have a page full of collapsed topics it's not very useful.

But for that, we'd have to make something like you suggest, which is a page listing your voting history to allow you to undo something later. So something like that is gonna take a bit of time but it's already on our todo list.

I have a boring but useful feature that I sometimes wish A2K had.

When I vote down a thread, its title goes away, and lists like "My Posts" only show it in small print saying "Topic Voted down (view)" Clicking "view" opens the thread so I can see it. But how do I know I want to see it in the first place? The only way to find out is to "view" it, only to hide it again if it turns out I don't. That's the case for most of these threads -- why else would I have hidden them? So the detour of viewing them makes for annoying little turbulences in my otherwise smooth workflow.

Here's a solution I thought of: When I move my mouse over a member name like "Robert Gentel", a little text box pops up saying "View Profile". Analogously, when I move the mouse on the "view" link, couldn't A2K pop up a text box with the hidden thread's title? That way, I'd know what thread the "view" link would be opening, and wouldn't click it if it's a thread I don't want to see.

Obviously this is not an essential feature, or even an important one. But it's still a "nice to have". If it can be implemented with little hazzle, it's probably worth it.

Very good idea, and yes it is an easy tweak (30 seconds, my favorite kind) so it's done. Thanks!

That isn't a link, so I applied a title there that I'm not sure all browsers will show a tooltip for, and it also needs testing in two scenarios (a topic with a title including a single quote, a topic with a title including a double quote) to see if the title breaks anything (pseudocode is title="$title" so if the title contains a quote it might need to be escaped).

If you run into a topic with single or double quotes please try it (will need to refresh page after vote, as the titles are only inserted to the view link on pageload).

Indeed it is. Wow that was fast. Thanks!
I'm using Firefox 3.5.7, no titles with single or double quotes so far.

I wondered if there could be shorter lists of "my tags" and "featured threads".

Perhaps it's another IE6 weirdness, but when I'm on the New Posts page, and want to go to the next page of New Posts, it's a long scroll down to the end of My Tags and Featured Threads (with no top/bottom option - which is what I think is the IE6 weirdness).

did a stint on IE6 earlier today.

agreed on no buttons...

The links are there, but unfortunately IE6 doesn't support the absolute positioning to keep them on the screen like on other browsers, so the links are uselessly lying in the footer of the page and I can't do much about that.

But I'll look into other ways to make the grids more navigable, and suggest keyboard shortcuts in the meantime. You may find that they are much better than scrolling anyway.

For example, if you press the space bar it scrolls down on your page quickly (two hits and you are at bottom) and the home key takes you to the top. Now you probably already know this, but we also have something nicer that is semi hidden, which are "access keys" you can use to page through the grid even more easily.

For example, in Chrome just pressing Alt+N on the topic list pages will go to the next page (Alt+P) is previous. That is why the "N" and the "P" are underlined on the links as that is a common way to denote that those are the access keys.

IE works almost the same way, but you have to add "Enter" to click the access key link. So if you press Alt+N+Enter it will go to the next page and if you press Alt+P+Enter it will go to the previous page on IE.

Sounds like a bunch, but give it a try. I didn't finish implementing them everywhere I'd like (or as consistently as I'd like) but they can be a much faster way to navigate when you get the hang of it, and I'll do better about making them consistent and accessible site-wide.

I'll absolutely give those techniques a try in the a.m.

I'm happily home in the land of Firefox now, so don't have the same iszzzue.

Thank you for the suggestions.

doesn't that just sound like the definition of IE6

the real question is, how can we get the rest of the interweb to adopt the Top & End buttons?

R(you have really spoiled us with them)P