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

Hi, Jim. Nice Guide...

The technical questions - is there any way you guys can stop the forums from flashing up a large white box before the screen draws in blue? It's really irritating. (Makes my monitor wobble and whistle - it does it both in IE5 and Netscape 4.61)
Also, how about a "button in the goo" to allow the forum content to be displayed the full width of the screen (i.e. toggle the tree on and off) to facilitate printouts of interesting threads?

The suggestion - I just came across "Project Galactic Guide", which seems to have been working along the same lines as you, running from late 1991 to September 1998 - they claim to have over 700 user-submitted guide entries. Check them out at www.megadodo.com, with a possible view to contacting the original organiser and co-opting their entries database into the "official" guide...

Thanks for listening, and may your towel remain soft and fluffy indefinitely.

1: If you change the default background colour of your browser then you won't get the flash. However, this will mean that most other pages will flash blue before they redraw white, which might not be a good idea.

2: We'll be introducing new ways of viewing forums, including a single page view.

3: We know all about PGG, and we'd be delighted if the writers would like to submit their articles to h2g2 where appropriate. We've told them this, so it's really their decision.

Hello again.

Would it be possible to set up a forum which only showed the last (say) 25 or 30 postings? The idea I had was to place a forum link on the front page entitled "Desperately Seeking Traffic", where people who thought their threads deserved more publicity could post a link and a short description. If the length of the forum was self-limiting, it would require no further administration...

As an example, I am taking part in several games based on the BBC radio 4 show "I'm sorry, I haven't a clue". They would be of interest to anyone who listens to the show, but there's no current way of publicising them short of "Spamming" forums - an action which I abhor. The games are fun, but are becoming predictable because only half-a-dozen people know about them...

Hope you can make this happen, and trust your towel remains fluffy
Peet

We've already got the five most popular forums, but that doesn't really work for forums which aren't getting the traffic they deserve. Why don't you go and talk to Yoz at http://www.h2g2.com/U47 and tell him some interesting conversations. He might get them put on the frontpage.

While I'm here...

1. The goos' lovely. But in 800x600, it makes the actual content quite small. Don't get rid of the goo, but you could make it slightly smaller (both the "don't panic" top bit and the "my home" left bit). Or you could always make the text size=2 and not the standard size=3. That would be better, actually.

2. Is there a "log-in" on the front page? I use H2G2 sometimes from a shared computer, and logging in appears to be a two-page thing (typing name into "register", then typing in the password). Should I be doing it differently?

3. The site's a lovely, lovely thing.

1. We'll be looking at the overall design of the site soon, and so we will probably address the problems with the goo taking up so much space. I can't say how long this is likely to take, because we always argue for ages about graphics.

2. There's no direct login from the frontpage, but if you click the 'register' button you're taken to a page with both an email address and password field. We deliberately didn't put a password field on the front page because that would be immensely confusing to new visitors.

3. Thank you.

Hello again, Jim.

I just used "show all forum postings" to find something I posted two days ago. I had to go through three screens of entries, each supposedly "older" before finding it. It was supposedly "older" than stuff I entered two months ago - what criteria are you using to sort the dates?

Hi Jim - baby come yet?

One more question (just when you didn't need all this hassle) - is there a way to put a border round pullquotes to more clearly separate it from the main text?

Pip

The script that shows all your forum posts shows threads with replies first, then threads without replies, which is why the order looks odd. I keep forgetting to change it to sort always by the most recent post, like the ten posts on the user page.

OK, fixed that. Now it'll always show in order of the most recent posts.

I love stored procedures.

No baby yet. I'll be updating my home page regularly, and the news will be there as soon as I can get online. (hmmm. *thinks* I wonder if I can rig up some kind of auto-page update to a telephone so I can update the news from the hospital? Must ask Sean.)

And no, the Pullquote tag can't put a border round it, although it's a nice idea, and we might add that as an enhancement to the GuideML.

Thanx, jim

Since Jim seems to be reading this one, I'll post it here, too...

Cybes http://www.h2g2.com/U91847 has graciously drawn up some more smilies and is offering them up for forum entries if you're interested.

Hi Peet,

Someone from Project Galactic Guide here. While it looked
like the flame of PGG withered back in 1998, we're still going
strong - stronger than ever now that we've switched to a new
site (www.galactic-guide.com) and awakened all the editors from
their cryogenic cubes. (The bottom line is: PGG is way COOL)

About the entries that we have: we can't all submit them to
H2G2 as the authors retain their copyright at all times, and
we only have permission to publish them for PGG. Lots of the
authors aren't contactable anymore, so you see our problem.

Other than that, we enjoy ourselves doing PGG, which pays more
attention to the author-editor interaction, and thus requires
everyone to put a little more effort into things. So, go ahead
and submit an article to us as well!

Hope to see you,
Roel (PGG editor 8)

- If you can't find it in Project Galactic Guide,
it's probably important... -

...me again...

In the "home page" list of recent forums, would it be possible to make the words "most recent posting" at the end of each entry actually link to the most recent posting directly? (As if you had clicked on its link in the left-hand pane...?)