Feature Requests and Suggestions Thread

The "who's online" box will be moving to the top of the page in the Christmas release.Placing the forum header section in a separate frame is definitely a personal preference type of thing. It's on my list to add as a feature that a user can enable through his preferences. This would be included when a user enables frames.--Percy

Improved behavior for the reply buttons is often suggested. I agree improvements are desirable, but identifying the specific set of features and how they would interact is complicated. All I've noted on my list is that improvements are needed.In the Christmas release, the big reply button has been renamed "Gen Reply", and the hover text is, "Do not use this button unless making a general reply. Instead use the small reply button beneath each message."--Percy

The color scheme will remain unchanged. The most noticeable changes are the heading layout and the buttons. For the most part things remain the same, the biggest changes are in the underlying software.One improvement I'll mention now is that the "Show last n topics" dropdown menu goes away. Through your user preferences you will select how many topics or messages you want to list per page (if you don't set them in your preferences you'll pick up the board defaults, which I think are 40 topics and 15 messages). At the top and bottom of each page are links to all the other pages. The page links are already present on the message pages, but now they'll be present on all pages.Another enhancement I'll mention is that you'll be able to choose, again through your preferences, your own timezone, date format and time format. Those outside the Eastern US and Canada will no longer be a slave to US Eastern Time. Europeans and others who don't adhere to the US format will be able to have dates displayed with the days and months in the correct order, or can choose one of the unambiguous formats (e.g., December 12, 2004). I'm curious to see if this feature will cause any confusion, e.g., "I posted the message at 11:15 PM on 8-12-2004", which may be correct for the eastern US, but to someone in Germany who has set their preferences to the European style the message would display as 5:15 AM on 12-9-2004. Board administrators have have control over whether users can set these preferences.One of the enhancements on my list is to allow members to choose their own appearance, including colors, fonts, font sizes, etc.--Percy

Yes, it's very easy and will be done. All names currently link to their message list.--Percy

Add IM is a priority, but the complexity of the task is unknown at this time, so it has no schedule.--Percy

I feel this is an important and desirable feature, and it's been on my list for quite some time. I spent some time researching implementation in Javascript earlier this year. The only difficult issue is figuring out where the cursor was in the message box after you've gone off and selected text in the box for the message you're replying to. I didn't figure out the answer to this one, but I came away feeling a solution must exist. In fact, maybe I'll get lucky and someone reading this has already solved this problem! --Percy

Grammar checking, probably not. Spell checking, definitely, but I'm not sure when. The board used to have a spell checker, but then the company providing the service decided to start charging for it. When I reimplement spell checking it will be as an inherent feature of the board and not a service from another site.--Percy

Creating tables of information in messages has always been difficult. You can use HTML, but you had better not include any line breaks or your table's appearance will be very strange. But without linebreaks it's easy to become lost while composing your table. So many just give up and present their table like this: This Christmas holiday I will be releasing the world's first (as far as I know) [table] code for bulletin boards!You'll use the new [table] code as shown in this example. It's freeform, so formatting is unimportant, the result will be the same. The "table=80%" portion means the table is 80% the width of the message itself: This will be rendered in your message like this: [indent]

[b]Sample	[b]Size	[b]Color	[b]Weight
Bogwan Dam	24	Red	126
York	13	Orange	132
South Orange Center	21	Raw Umber	159