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

Now I'm sure all this downtime is doing wonders for the site design, but who's bright idea was it to re-name the 'submit posting' button, and is the Society for Good English chasing them yet? What's wrong with just 'Post'?

B

I hadn't noticed that. But I see your point, although it does kind of fit with the 'Preview Posting' button....

But 'Submit Posting' was perfectly adequate. 'Post Posting' just makes me grimace .

B

I would think that 'Submit' implies that something needs to go for approval, whereas 'Post' is a freer kind of verb... also, it's more indicative of what's actually going on and so clearer to new users. It just sounds a bit odd... I use "Post Reply" on the forum system I'm writing, and so do a few other systems I've seen.

Of course, I know that postings do have to be passed by the Moderators, but it is post-Moderation, not pre-Moderation, so 'submit' is still the wrong word.

It doesn't look good. (What do I know, I'm not English)
But 'Post Reply' will be wrong every time you start a conversation!

In my experience, all non-English people speak better English than we do (with the obvious exception of Americans).

Perhaps 'Post Submission' would be better. Might need a larger button, though...

B

There's a reason behind this! We've recently genericised a lot of the message files which contain the text of buttons and so on, so (for example) we've been replacing sentences like this:

My Recent Edited Entries List

with:

My Recent List

in the XSLT files. This means that we've set up a variable called m_editedentries that we've set to 'Edited Entries', so if we launch another DNA site that uses different terminology, all we need to do is change the variable for that site, and their terminology changes. We've done this for things like 'Researchers' (some sites want 'Users', some 'Members' etc), 'Guide Entries' and so on.

When going through the files, I changed the entry called 'Post Message' to 'Post ', which then translated to 'Post Posting'. Jim spotted this, as did I, and I changed it back to 'Post Message' (which is what it said before the genericisation). Obviously the code deployed didn't include this change - not sure why, but there you go.

Another one to go weird is the missing space on <./>Info</.>, for similar reasons.

The upshot is that it should say 'Post Message', and I'll try to get it fixed. So you're right, and we've already fixed it... sort of.

And you should now find that it is fixed, along with the space problem in Info. Magic, eh!

No it's not!

You sure? Try this:

<./>AddThread?inreplyto=2062572</.>

It says 'Post Message' for me...

Still says Post Posting to me. And I've just emptied my cache to make sure that's not the reason. Something about the database having to update? It should have had time for that now...

Also it still says "4099Edited Entries" at the Infopage

Aha! I think I know the reason - I only uploaded the changes to one server. Doh! Give me a coupla seconds...

There, done on all four web servers. How is it now?

Now it says 'Post Message>'

Tut tut. And this is the one in charge? Dearie me.

Typotastic.

It does? I can't get it to show that... but I'll re-upload the files and see if it fixes it. Is it still there?

If it is still there, can you let me know your browsers? I've just tried it in IE 5.5, Netscape 4.71 and Opera 6.0, and it looks fine...

Just had a thought - are you both Goo users? Might provide a clue...

I am using goo, on WinNT IE 5.5 and the ">" has just vanished.

yup. netscrape 6.0