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

Having now read all the postings (took some time).

Jim
Now that it is "easier" to produce new varients of the skins, I think there is a case here for a bit of darwinian evolution.
Is it possible that you could produce a skin with the tree view on the left as one of the future options.
That way those that like it (me included) can use it, those that don't can use other skins.
It would be interesting after a few months to see how many are using each skin.

One small point, Gargleblaster..

As far as the browsers crashing, that was happening in the current version of Netscape, with the old forums. It happened fairly often for me with 80 megs of RAM allocated to Netscape (on both a G3 and a G4), so it wasn't a matter of upgrading. I'm guessing it might have been a problem with how Netscape dealt with all the tree indenting on a long and convoluted thread, but that's just a guess.

Hi Cyy fancy bumping into you here.

I agree agree agree with everyone ...Shade a man/woman/android after my own heart - all of you - I could weep that we all think the same - how can wars ever have taken place when there is so much consensus about.

Come on now folks though, having the list on the lhs is easier, and it means you can make the rhs wider and get through it quicker, but loading all sections of a forum takes so long, you forget what you went in for in the first place.

But the folding tree of Alabaster - what poetry, combined with practicality of thought. Brilliant. Do it H2G2. Now!

Harry O'Leary, for one, will be pleased if everything can be fixed the way we real people want it.

And as for the thought that a computer programmer ever finishes/complete/perfects a program (I think Mark said something about that) well - that is a contradiction in terms. Reminds me of our favourite drummer joke "Mum, can I be a drummer when I am grown up?.... Well, love, you can't be both!"

Yeah that one about switching the post and preview buttons was soooo subtle I thought I had just not remembered it right and it was always like that. Thanks for confirming I'm sane at least on that point

I mean having the list all under each other, in case you were wondering about my last blithering but one

Stop blithering and start blathering!

I've always wondered what the difference was

Blithering vs blathering. Is there a difference ... but then that should be another posting and the start of another conversation. I've finally skip read to the bottom of all the entries in this one and there seems to be a solution on the horizon.

There seems to be a general consensus that most liked the threads on the left but then there seem to be technical reasons for the simpler chronological list.

I began at my home page, clicked on the posting I had made, which on my home page said "latest posting 1 hour ago". Great I thought lets see where the conversations gone. Blow me down if it doesn't take me to the 20 OLDEST postings, not the latest. I then keep clicking on the same link seeing 20 after 20 listings appear till I see mine. Still not the end so on we click. I then thought I'd better begin reading them all to see what triggered which reply, much harder now without those strings and the indented list. I soon got lost when I clicked on a few "go to posting this replied to" links and lost my place in the list on the left.

I read somewhere that any user of a Web site must be able to find the info they're after within 3 clicks of the mouse or the user gets irritated and then looses interest. I'd long since passed the irritated stage but persevered as there were suggestions that might keep us all happy. Namely a link from the users home page to their posting and 20 that followed AND a link to the most recent posting which would leap straight to the latest entry and the 20 postings before it! This brings me to the suggestion that the chronological list could be optionally reversable, like most lists of information within Windows where clicking on the column title will sort the information in either ascending or descending order, either chronologically or alphabetically. I can't see where alphabetically listing would be of use here unless someone wanted to find all the entries from one researcher i.e themselves. But perhaps you could then begin doing a character profile of each researcher by the type of entries they made and then things could get scarey. We might even get to "know" each other. Spooky! (Or is it spokey - no that's a tool for repairing bicycle wheels.)

Something has to be done to keep the site going as one of continual improvement. At the moment too many look like abandoning it so them upstairs must act quickly. Surely the simplest quick change is the link from home page to your own entry plus those that followed and link from home page to latest entry.

Anyway its way past my bedtime and I'm going letterboxing with llamas tomorrow so I'll just go and get mu cocoa and shuffle off to bed.

The thread view isn't a function of the skin, exactly - you need different information supplied in the XML. At the moment, we only supply the threads in date order. We'd have to code some more information to be able to render the threading properly (not to mention that fact that for threading to work, you *have* to show every post in the thread. This leads to a huge overhead merely processing the information in large threads, and suddenly we're back where we were before, with large threads taking forever to download and crashing browsers.

I'd *like* to be able to provide the threading in some form, but that won't be possible immediately, because of the performance issues involved. It was possible in the old site because we just generated the HTML directly, so the processing was handed off to the browsers. With skins, XML and XSLT we have to generate the information in an intermediate XML tree structure, which is then transformed by the stylesheet, producing the HTML which is then sent to you. Until I can guarantee that the code is efficient enough to cope with the longest threads without putting an undue strain on the web servers (and therefore resulting in long waits for users), I won't be able to put the threading display back. At this stage we're not confident that we can do that, hence the presentation of threads in blocks.

Obviously, as we develop h2g2, the code will get better and more efficient, at which point we'll probably have a viewing option of the whole thread with the indenting.

Response to Redbeard:

Netscape is all I use to view H2G2, and I've never had this problem of crashing my browser. The version I use at home is 4.5, and the version I use at work is the absolute newest, 4.7. I declined to upgrade to 4.7 after receiving feedback from friends that it crashes on certain Java scripts, and, while I have seen this on my computer at work, I have not seen it while navigating H2G2. Memory isn't the answer, either, because until my recent upgrade, I only had 32MB of memory available on my home computer, and that was usually divided up between several programs at once.

Additional Response to Redbeard

Due to abject laziness, I use Meglasoft Internet Controller on my Powerbook G3. It was came installed as the default browser. It is running in 16mb. I didn't experience any problems with the old style forums. This would indicate an h2g2/Netscape compatability problem.

I would confidently guess that h2g2 isn't tested on MACs before release.

(-:

From Distant Shores

>I would confidently guess that h2g2 isn't tested on MACs before release

I have it on reasonable authority that most of the h2g2 staff (editorial especially) use Macs at work

;^)#

Hi Peta & Mark.

I really appreciate all the hard work that must have gone into revamping h2g2, as in the past, it has been impossibly slow at times. The new skin is great, but the classic goo was more fun to look at! But then again, I am an old stick in the mud and will soon get used to the new skin!

However, I do agree with the need to have an option to invert displayed posts, so the most recent can be displayed first.

Sorry! I have to moan as it's genetic. According to my hubby, I'm just like my mother...

Please, please, please hurry with your next "edition" of h2g2 because I don't get much time to have a "play" on h2g2 due to my sprogs, and winding my way down to the end of a thread seems to take ages...

*Wanders off to shut her sprogs in a soundproof cupboard*

Okay, so we've eliminated Mac as the problem, and we've eliminated Netscape. Sounds like your computer or ISP is doing weird things, or else you've got a setting in Netscape tweaked somewhere.

This thread seems to be repeating itself so to summarise (and possibly tinted with personal opinion!):

Good-
~
~Netscape not crashing for those users who had that problem
~Chronological forums which display the most recent posting at the end where you can find it!

Improvements Requested-
~Being automatically transferred to your last post in a conversation (or the beginning if you haven't posted to it) with the option of a single click to take you to the most recent (chronological) posting

'Backwards' Improvements Requested-
~Being able to start a 'new conversation' from someone's homepage
~Option of viewing tree structure for those who want to and can cope with it!

Other Comments-
~People caught out by 'preview' and 'post' swapping places on forum replies (but not for Guide Entries - why?) Simply a case of getting used to the more logical placing!
~Various comments regarding the new skin, fairly evenly divided, but with a sway towards 'stick in the mud'!

~A~ (I just can't help myself!)

Oh, what the heck, we might as well keep this thread going

Thanks, Pegasus, for the summary

Gargleblaster... I don't even pretend to understand all the browser/platform compatibility issues. When I do html for my own sites, all I can do is try my pages out on various browsers on both Macs and PC to make sure they work. All I know is... for some reason, when certain threads became long, Netscape would crash. When that happened, It was 100% certain that that thread would, from then on, crash each time I tried to open it, whether at home or work. It wasn't necessarily the length of the thread (some longer threads wouldn't crash), and it wasn't all that many threads, which is why I think it was somehow related to the tree structure. From then on, in order to read that particular thread, I had to open IE for that purpose, until a new thread was established for that forum.

I never reported the problem to h2g2, because I realized that they were already aware of the issue, and I wanted to wait to see what the upgrade brought.

Besides, Netscape crashing was only one of the reasons for the change, as was spelled out earlier.

Personally, I never used the tree much (usually couldn't see it), and I prefer a conversational style of thread.

All that is still needed for me is the jump to the end or whatever, that is being worked on and will be added. Some of the stuff Jim talked about for that sounds great! In the meantime, here's a recap of a couple temporary workarounds that I've seen: (they're just workarounds, not solutions)

- the end of the thread address is a form of &skip=20&show=20. Change show to 999 and you'll get up to the first 999 messages, or change skip to avoid the first 100 if you know you're already past that. Saves a few clicks.

- If you're in an active forum and want to refresh regularly to see new posts, use 'new window with this frame' for the right window at the end of the thread and then refresh that. You'll remain right there at the end.

When're they gonna switch the Preview and Post buttons back?

Just as soon as everyone gets used to the way they are now

;^)#

Lil, one problem I have specifically with the new thread structure is with some games I participate in, i.e. "Limericks" and "Cheddar Gorge", where the playability is greatly reduced by the inability to see a whole thread in one go. Specifically, with "Cheddar Gorge", each player puts down one word to extend a sentence, and you have to be able to "buzz in" if the sentence no longer makes sense, or is completed. In the "good old days", you could "select all" in a forum and paste it into "Notepad", then remove all the comments between to reform the sentence as it currently stood. The new system makes this incerdibly tortuous. This may be a rather specialised complaint, but I just mention it to remind everyone of the fact that in a "free-form" community such as H2G2, activities will form around the structure of the facilities available, and therefore any radical change of such facilities a year on will obviously be of great concern to the regular, "loyal" users.

And the loading speed bit is completely useless if one of the posts contains a phrase repeated 1024 times.

...

Yes, I've done that.