This has been bothering me, I will keep up with a thread and then after it has been dormant for a while it's like it disappears. In particular I am talking about a couple threads in the rules questions section. They don’t even appear if you go down the list of threads in Rules Questions and if you use the search feature one of them comes up and the other I have not been able to find anywhere, luckily I still had a post I put on the thread in my profile and linked to it from there. Upon having this trouble I started saving all the threads I was looking at in my Favorites on the web-browser. I was hoping there was some better way of keeping track of these things.
Is there a way of saving ALL the posts you do in your profile and organizing them or are you just stuck with Recent Posts? For instance organizing all posts under the headings of which thread you posted them in and further organize those threads under which forum they were in. I really would like to keep track of all the posts that I make even if they are old and in threads that have magically disappeared from the forums.
The other question I have is about subscribing to recent posts on a thread or by a person. Where do these new posts go that you can keep track of them after you subscribe or are you notified in some way of the new post? Is there a way to keep that organized? Or does it just end up as a jumbled list like the Recent Posts part of your profile? I haven’t subscribed to any new posts on any threads so I don’t know exactly what it does, that might be the answer to my first question.
Anyone with some insight on this, I would appreciate any information. Thank you.
Could we get some additional functionality on the boards in general? I don't know where to post this, but seriously, no image posting, no PM, no notification. . .
There's some serious utility missing from these forums.
Thanks guys, I hope this gets enough momentum behind it to cause some action because while the forums are not non-functional they are certainly not user friendly.
Yes, image posting, PMs, and notifications would be awesome along with a little extra work on people's personal profile pages to make things more organized. I think people should have their own archive with links to every post they have ever made (that might be a little too much to hope for).
I say all this because I can see some of these threads being referred to for years by people when it comes to rules questions and the like. But that won't happen if the thread disappears after a few days of dormancy and all that will happen is they will have to start a new thread and hope that they get equally good answers as the old thread. (As I have apparently done here.)
I don’t know anyone good with Code for Paizo to hire but it is good to know they are at least working on this, maybe in a year or so the forums will be G2G.
Just because something is functional doesn’t mean it can’t be improved, take the entire 3.5 system for example - lol.
Thanks Charles Evans 25. I had not noticed the individual forum archives, unfortunately that doesn’t help me at all because the thread that I was talking about isn’t even in the Rules Questions Archive. I don’t know if it got moved or what but it is GONE.
Yeah I checked all the pages under rules forum. It wasn’t there. But luckily I did have it saved in my web browser. I put a new post on there to see what would happen and it went right to the top of the Rules Questions forum.
BUT, even when I use the search on that forum and exactly type in the name of the thread it still doesn’t bring it up. And even though I have made several posts in this thread it doesn’t show up as "dotted" for me so when I hit the "focus" button it doesn’t pop up then either.
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I use Google advanced search and limit it to paizo to find 'missing' threads.
Yes, image posting, PMs, and notifications would be awesome along with a little extra work on people's personal profile pages to make things more organized. I think people should have their own archive with links to every post they have ever made (that might be a little too much to hope for).
Image posting won't happen. the crew has said before that it is too disruptive to the for of the boards. I believe PMs were on the list of upgrades... but was pretty far down. Notifications can already be done with RF feeds (the little orange box in the upper left of every thread
Thanks Charles Evans 25. I had not noticed the individual forum archives, unfortunately that doesn’t help me at all because the thread that I was talking about isn’t even in the Rules Questions Archive. I don’t know if it got moved or what but it is GONE.
If it was in the playtesting forums, i think those were hidden during the last update. You can still find the thread using the google advance search I linked to above
I will probably have to get familiar with Google advanced searches. It wasn’t in a playtesting forum it was in the Rules Questions forum and still is, I put a new post in the thread and it popped back up but I STILL can’t get to it using the search. It's weird.
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I will probably have to get familiar with Google advanced searches. It wasn’t in a playtesting forum it was in the Rules Questions forum and still is, I put a new post in the thread and it popped back up but I STILL can’t get to it using the search. It's weird.
Durring high traffic times, such as when one server is down, or a big new product comes out, the search on the paizo site gets limited to only the first message of the thread, if the words weren't in the first post of the thread, it wouldn't come up
No, I wasn't just searching for words in the thread; I was specifically targeting that thread to try to find it. I mean I was searching for the Title of the thread, it found another thread but not the one I was searching for.
It would also be an improvement, I think, to see the thread in the archives sorted by alphabetical order rather than by time order like the main forums.
It would also be an improvement, I think, to see the thread in the archives sorted by alphabetical order rather than by time order like the main forums.
Actually, that sounds terrible; I generally have no idea what a thread might have been called, and I have a much better idea when it might have died out.
But really, what is needed is a (much) better search function.
Why not develop a page called "My Threads" that keeps a full list of every thread you've posted in sorted by when you last posted?
Why not develop a page called "My Threads" that keeps a full list of every thread you've posted in sorted by when you last posted?
Because this will eventually get overwhelmed. I've probably posted in roughly four thousand threads. I need a robust search function to find my material - not a catalog.
Why not develop a page called "My Threads" that keeps a full list of every thread you've posted in sorted by when you last posted?Because this will eventually get overwhelmed. I've probably posted in roughly four thousand threads. I need a robust search function to find my material - not a catalog.
4,000 threads with only 5,400 posts? Impressive.
The big thing I would like to see is a favorite thread feature (or watch thread or bookmark... whatever).
What does work fairly well is using Google Reader the RSS feeds with a third party reader. You copy/ paste the RSS feed into google reader and it sort of book marks it for you forever. It's also very nice because if folks add posts to threads you know it.
Because this will eventually get overwhelmed. I've probably posted in roughly four thousand threads. I need a robust search function to find my material - not a catalog.
Well it would have to be well organized. Dropdown menu type thing where it starts out with all the forums you have posted in, drop that down and it goes into individual threads for the forum you picked, drop that down and it goes into individual posts for the thread you picked. And there would probably have to be some kind of feature to allow you to clean out your own post history, an ability to tell your archive you don’t want this post anymore.
The big thing I would like to see is a favorite thread feature (or watch thread or bookmark... whatever).
Yeah, this would be really nice too because there are some threads I wouldn’t mind keeping track of but I haven’t posted in yet.
What does work fairly well is using Google Reader the RSS feeds with a third party reader. You copy/ paste the RSS feed into Google reader and it sort of book marks it for you forever. It's also very nice because if folks add posts to threads you know it.
Could you post a link in here to Google reader? I’m not familiar with that. What is RSS? Is that when you hit the button that says subscribe to . . .?
The RSS feeds are the little orange broadcast icons in the upper right. You right click on the orange icon and hit copy link location, then open google reader "add subscription". The thread will come up in google reader and as new items are added to it they appear at the top. The existing thread is always kept.
You probably need a google account to get that to work though. There are also other RSS/ atom readers out there but I have little experience with other readers.
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Heck, Firefox has had "live bookmarks" for years now (i.e. bookmarks that display as menus with the contents based on RSS feeds). If you're still using IE, you should upgrade. ;)
Personally, I miss have Konqueror/Kontact/Kmail/Aggregator/Kopete/Kalendar as an integrated tool since moving to OSX. :( I can get the source for them of course, but I'd have to build the entire KDE subsystem as well and while doable it's just not practical. :-/
Chief Technical Officer
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A few notes:
RSS feeds are a good way to track things. Both threads and posters have RSS feeds.
Search is not where we want it to be. Ripping it out and replacing it with a faster, more flexible and more powerful solution is moderately high on the to-do list.
You can sort threads on any board by name (alphabetically), by number of posts, or by date of last post. Just click the corresponding header at the top of the page.
@ Dennis da Ogre: Thanks for the link and the quick rundown of how to use it.
@ Vic Wertz: Thank you for pointing out how to sort the threads, I had not discovered that, it should make it easier for me to find most of the threads that I am looking for.
However, there is still that one thread that I can’t find with the search or in the archives. When I put a new post in the thread it popped back to the RQ forum but even the search couldn’t pick it up.
Good luck on your quest to provide a more robust search feature.
Hey while you guys are working on improving the forums is there a way you could adjust it so that it doesn't time me out after a certain amount of time. I guess I can see why you wouldn't want to leave people logged in indefinitely, but I post some pretty long posts sometimes and a lot of times I do the corrections and formatting in Word because it is easier to see it all, then preview it in the post window, and then when everything is the way I want it I hit submit and I find that many times my account has timed out and I have to sign back in, get back to the thread I was in, and redo the post (thankfully I have started copying my posts before I hit Submit so if it does this it is just a matter of getting back to the thread and hitting Ctrl+V instead of rewriting the whole thing). I am not sure if anyone else has this problem as well or if I am doing something wrong somehow, but it seems to happen a lot and sometimes it takes me quite a while to get signed back in and navigate back to the thread.
Alright, thank you.
Alright, thank you.
There is a firefox plugin called lazarus that will rescue your lost posts. As long as you have it installed it watches the forms you fill out and can salvage your entries. It's a real post saver ;)
Alright, thank you.There is a firefox plugin called lazarus that will rescue your lost posts. As long as you have it installed it watches the forms you fill out and can salvage your entries. It's a real post saver ;)
Cool - I just installed it and hopefully it will save me the next time I type a 3 page essay on the the philosophy of Kobolds and their place in 2nd edition and forget to copy it.
Alright, thank you.There is a firefox plugin called lazarus that will rescue your lost posts. As long as you have it installed it watches the forms you fill out and can salvage your entries. It's a real post saver ;)
That will be extremely helpful when I use my personal computer. I have to use IE on this computer, but on my personal one I always use FF. Thanks again.
@ Dennis da Ogre
I have been using Google Reader for the past few days and throwing all the threads I like to keep track of in there. I think I have most of the basics figured out and can already tell it is going to be very helpful. Thanks a lot for passing that info.