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

Firstly like the photo. Such sweet dimpled cheeks - and that's just you with the beard shaved off!! He looks cute. You look much friendlier without the beard. Or maybe it's just because you were at 'home' not TDV. Anyway - the reason I came here was to say can you make it so that I can see around 20 previous threads. Its really hard to keep up with things with just five. Maybe I shouldn't talk as much but ..... I know you are doing radical fixes so if you can't no probs. Just thought I'd ask.......

I presume you mean the five threads at the bottom of an article? You've always got the 'Entire conversation' link which takes you to the forum, which always lists the conversations most recently replied to first.

After all, if you check out one thread, you'll always see the rest of them in the left hand frame. Would it help *much* more if we increased the number of threads actually on the page?

Not that it's actually difficult to do - five, ten, ten thousand is just as easy - but why would ten be better than five, for example? Most forums aren't that busy.

I'd prefer to wait until we get different ways of viewing forums working, so that you'd be able to say how the forum list should be displayed on a page. We could offer thread lists similar to the ones on Douglasadams.com as an alternative way of viewing conversations.

Okay gone and had a good look at this. The left hand column bit only works well for you. Because we all come to 'the tower' and post questions. It works for me if someone has commented on one of my pages, or on my journal, but in the majority of cases I am in someone else's pages. So as a prolific and early joiner I have to use recent conversations more heavily and as time/input goes on it gets worse. To get to a fairly recent post I have to click... my home>older posts>possibly older posts>post>see what I have posted (which I already said I didn't really need to do) > my home again...... it is a three or four click process for each post... which is a pain. If you are fixing it another way then fine, but this gets worse the more time goes past/the more you post to. One, maybe easier way for you, would be to let things that I posted to two weeks ago, expire. If I haven't commented in that time I am probably not going to. The effect of being notified everytime someone comments on tea is akin to junk mail, I have to wade through it to find a recent conversation. I have been away for a couple of days and have to go to ....my home>back older post>older post>older post.... to find stuff I commented on two days ago. So five doesn't work at all, I don't now how many articles/pages I have commented on (do you?) but if you looked you would see the problem. Hope this helps, this is feedback fellow reasearchers... I am not having a go at Jim...and if you don't have the problem, you haven't posted as much as me.....

There's a joke begging to be made about Petabytes - but I'm not going to make it.
No sireeeee Bob!

;^)#

I can easily filter out threads where the gap between your last post and the most recent post is greater than (say) 7 days. This will probably end up as another configurable setting when we allow you to customise your home page.

okey dokey....

That's a good idea, Jim. I've had one thread continually in my top five because I contributed to it about 8 weeks ago, and it's still being added to so it still appears!

So many conversations, so little time...

*brutally hijacks thread* Seeing Star Wars tonight at Odeon Leicester Square! Gibber! Foam!

I hope there won't be quite so many lightsabres in the audience as there were when I saw it. And no bozos taking flash photographs of the screen.

When we went to see Jurassic Park on opening night at the Empire Leicester Square, there was a moron near the front who would take a flash photo of the screen *every* time there was a CGI dinosaur on screen.

I so wished I could have seen his face when he got the results back from bonusprint and saw 36 pictures of a completely blank movie screen.

Like the people who take flash photos at pop concerts of stage 200m away......

Mind you, flashguns were *nothing* compared to the utterly dismal sound! I was expecting to be blown out of my seat by the opening trumpet blast. I get better sound than that in my living room.

Still, the mirrors in the toilets in Odeon Leicester Sq are excellent, and that's what really matters, I suppose.

Yes, but do you have any flash photos of those mirrors???

;^)#

People taking flash photos of fireworks displays has long been my favourite.

;^)#

Don't forget the faux-leopardskin seat covers. Classy!

Sorry - you talking about Sean's front room, Jim?

My living room's a study in scarlet - though not right now. It's more of a building site, pending excavation of the inglenook fireplace. Mind you, the late-fifties/early-sixties gas fire that I've ripped out wouldn't look out of place with OLS's classy upholstery.

yes, what she said...

I'm with you on the sound - it was crap. Almost sounded like mono. They should have put it in The Empire, which is exceptionally loud and surroundy.

Jim - I was there at the JP opening night! I remember the guy! Sheesh.

BTW, I absolutely loved TPM and sat through the lot with a big grin and open eyes! Going again tomorrow. It's tempting (as a grown up) to try and criticise some aspects of it, but what's the point? I loved it.

There's one cinema up here equipped (properly) with the new EX but it's on the wrong side of town. The local place is supposed to have the next best thing but sounds mono-esque and hasn't even had the decency to put up posters. Still, i was bouncing about in my seat when I saw the trailers there so it'll probably do.

In the meantime, before configurable settings, multi-parameter index tagging and whatnot become available, what can we do with our pages to prepare them for this? Should we put in meta tags for name, street, town, country, review type and so forth? Is that CLIP thing in the gunk going to appear? Seeing as there are still people asking about markup for making paragraphs, would it be worth putting basic information on the registration email or at the side of the edit page? What would you rather we didn't do by way of HTML shenanigans?

At the moment, we'd rather you didn't do anything in the way of META tags, since they will almost certainly be wrong.

We're changing the page editing to allow you to use plain text (just like forum posts, with the same smiley expansion etc.), HTML (which will just pass through and we won't process at all, meaning it should be displayed properly) or XML, which means you can use the extra XML tags we're defining (like the LINK tag that's so divided people) and also some content tagging. The first ones will probably be things like a location tag, which will allow you to specify the location associated with your article. We can then process these tags, and let people search for articles applicable to where they are. This is the kind of thing that's going to be invaluable when h2g2 becomes the real, hand-held device from Douglas' books.

Part of the revamp we're working on is to vastly increase the amount of information new users have when the join. At the moment, they would be forgiven for being a little lost. XML or HTML markup would be one of the things we'd include.

"...when h2g2 becomes the real, hand-held device from
Douglas' books. "

mebbe Mr. Adams could persuade, wheedle, cajole, beg, grovel, at Apple and have them revive the Newton. They could pretend that it had been a secret prototype for the hand-held Guide in it's prior incarnation...

an' they could put that new AirPort thingie on it and it really would be the handheld Guide

and I do believe in Santa and the Tooth Fairy and the 'inherent goodness of men' -wimmen too-

and soon I am going to OZ
I just have to learn to ignore that little man behind the curtain

oh, look, they are coming with my medicine now...