h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

When someone posts a new message with a blank subject/title (or one which is nearly blank, eg whitespace) this is not treated consistently. Ideally it should be prevented but at the moment it shows up as various sorts of "no subject" or an unusable blank link. If it is too hard to prevent this then the thread could have something to identify it from all the other blank ones when displayed. In particular I suggest using the thread number since that is information which is already available (used in making the links).

There is already a suggestion on the <,/>development-features</.> page to prevent blank titles in postings.

Blank Posting Titles - Prevent people from creating Postings with blank titles.

Which covers your points. I'm sure that you'll tell me if I'm wrong. In fact, I'm sure you'll tell me all sorts of things. But I'm happy to be helpful, regardless of the reaction.

Oh well, buggered up the link. Never mind.

There was meant to be more to this suggestion which is why the first bit was raised again, but it looks like I never made that next post. I'm back to not being able to post much in one go. I think I was probably trying to decide whether to put the things together or raise them separately but ended up doing something completely different instead. Now I'm here again I might as well put them together.

The conversation thread pages (ie with posts in) could do with the T-number visible somewhere and the forum pages an F-number like the article pages usually display an A-number. This would help the digibox users when: creating guest books, specifying threads to other users (and even making shortcut links to those threads) and specifying a yikesing location.

The other reason for doing or not doing this soonish depends on decisions about other matters elsewhere.

The conversation thread pages (ie with posts in) could do with the T-number visible somewhere and the forum pages an F-number like the article pages usually display an A-number. This would help the digibox users when: creating guest books, specifying threads to other users (and even making shortcut links to those threads) and specifying a yikesing location.

The other reason for doing or not doing this soonish depends on decisions about other matters elsewhere.

No that's a new spooky aspect to this bug which wasn't occurring before! I definitely didn't double post but the browser sat there for ages thinking about it and may have involved some invisible retries.

Maybe the description on <./>Development-Features</.> could be expanded to include posts which weren't created with totally blank (ie, zero-length) titles, but which show up in MP-listings without a title? As far as I know, the only way for this to happen is the way that SEF found recently - for the title of the post to be entirely whitespace.

Rho (slightly annoyed that at least one of the DNA servers has crashed, but glad that the new system of load balancing is in place, minimising the disruption)

SEF, I don't think the problem's your connection - my last post took about three minutes to appear on site.

The site or the entire internet may indeed have its own problems. But it is officially the case that the problem which had repeatedly occurred before and prevents me from posting long messages or editing pages with anything much in has returned. The previous fix seems to have broken down entirely - resulting in the loss of the whole internet while it tries to connect to the wrong place.

[oops - back on-topic ish!]

I often find that the features, or problems I've encountered which generate them, span multiple areas and need to be set up with some background stuff. It makes it extra difficult when that background stuff is elsewhere though.