The "Quick Scrolling Front Page"

[monte350c]

This might seem incredibly obvious but - here goes anyhow.

I too have noticed the stories I'm interested in racing off the front page as the new posts come in. Lately I've been making use of the "Hotlist" feature the guys so thoughtfully put into the board.

Works great, and once a story is on the Hotlist you can easily read any new posts without having to go looking for it.

This board is still an amazing resource.

Ted.

[Electric Ed]

I like most everything about this board - except there are two features missing, which most of the other boards that I use do have.

a. The last post (comment) to a thread should go to the top. That way everyone can see a response to a thread that has scrolled onto Page 2.

b. There is no way to edit or delete one's own posts, when one realizes that they have made a mistake, or double posted. (Very frustrating)

Perhaps there is a way of accomplishing these features, but if there is, I haven't found it.

Electric Ed

[TomW]

Ed;

I think Scoop has a method to leave a story for "editorial comment" that allows the poster of a story to edit it for a specific time period but have no idea how to turn it on for the board.

The preview mode should allow you to catch typos and spelling errors as is. Not many seem to use it, however.

Personally I don't like the idea of comments being edited [by anyone]. I feel it could lead to scenarios where folks go back and change statements and revise history and could be abused.

Scoop has tons of options this board does not use for whatever reason.

Simply switching on voting would allow users to rate stories and comments so the cream would tend to float to the top. This was planned or at least I thought it was but it never got implemented.

T

[Matrix1000]

Not that this board is is bad at all but, another suggestion would be to use PHPBB http://phpbb.com/. It is a Linux/MySQL board that is very nice. Lots of features. Also the header for each post is only one or two lines which fits a lot more posts on one page.

I'd be happy to set it up for free (for otherpower.com) it if anyone is interested.

[Wolfie1]

Tom, I guess I'm still not clear on this voting concept. Let me explain how I think you mean and tell me where I've gone wrong.

Each story gets votes and the ones that have the highest scores get displayed on the first page.

Soon, the first page is filled.

A new, and equally worthy story gets posted. Where does it go? It's new, so it has no votes, so it doesn't go on the first page. As it isn't on the first page, it doesn't get seen so much, so it doesn't get too many votes. It never makes it to the first page where it deserves to be.

It seems that the first page might get filled will many excellent stories but they soon will be stale and dead. They are incumbulent stories!

What am I missing here?

Martin.

[elvin1949]

read the other pages on subjects that interest you and vote if you think it is good.

enough votes it gets on the front page.

later

elvin

[DanB]

Hi Matrix1000

thanks for the offer!  We may talk w/you if it comes to that.

We got stalled a bit, Scoop has issues with Apache 2, and it may be more trouble than it's worth to keep running with it much longer.  The folks who run/maintain our servers at Tummy.com have suggested PHPBB as well.... we may try that sometime.

[nack]

I fear that user rating systems are far too abusable.  I can see allowing rating/moderation to be done by admin types, but if everyone has rating priv's the ratings start to get absurd in a big hurry.  Don't believe me, just go look at slashdot and pick any (5, insightful) comment, then try to figure out what is either good, technically accurate, or insightful about the comment.

I also agree that editing is a BadThing.  Not having any editing capacity or moderation provides a more solid legal footing if ever sued, or prosecuted over the content of a posting, such as misappropriated copyrighted information used without owners consent, or instructions for making nuclear/chem/bio weapons (apparently a lesser offense).  As I understand it the lack of editing capacity defines you as a news carrier, which makes you largely exempt from liability with regards to postings made by users.  Don't remember much detail (legal details rarely interest me), but I am pretty sure that this is something that has come up in several actions that were launched as harassment or retaliation against sites.

Regarding the quick scrolling, I find that the "recent activity" menu item is most useful for keeping track of new posts in threads that scrolled away.  I haven't actually used the "hot list", but I think that allows you to effectively bookmark particular threads, so if you were using one for a reference this might be a good way to keep it around?