Viewing topic: New Layout

Work on the student side of the site has begun in earnest - if you find any problems (bugs, pages not loading etc.) please help us by reporting them!

The site is undergoing a light rearrangement to welcome our new student users and make everything more integrated. As usual, all comments and suggestions are welcomed!

Where are the students? I haven't seen any on here yet. Hope we're not scaring them off!

Good question There're some here, and they're actually starting to sign up, but yes - they seem a bit scared of us and are totally reluctant to go near the forum!

Jim Brantley had the idea of a chat area on the site, and I'm starting on that... if/when I get it working hopefully we'll have some students to talk to

Igonre me talking to myself while I post test messages to the forum

bobs12 wrote:

Good question There're some here, and they're actually starting to sign up, but yes - they seem a bit scared of us and are totally reluctant to go near the forum!

Jim Brantley had the idea of a chat area on the site, and I'm starting on that... if/when I get it working hopefully we'll have some students to talk to

typo... iGNOre me, I meant

Still talking to myself... pay no attention...

bobs12 wrote:

typo... iGNOre me, I meant

АБВГДЖЗЕ

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One other thing that I would like to see is when you go to the General Forums listings, the date of the last post stamped there.

PS: Мне больше нравится синий чем жёлтый!

Синий намного лучше

Yep. That's something I'll put on the 'to do' list for September.

I'm taking some time out right now to look after the site a little and will look into upgrading the forum to a more 'user friendly' style.

That means ripping apart VBullettin, phpBB and others to see how they do their stuff - and then mercilessly copying it This will take time, though. But eventually you should also be able to get a list of posts made since your last visit, see a list of posts by a specific member, search the forum, etc. etc.

A little foray into the field of AJAX has resulted in a neat little trick that simultaneously keeps you logged in permanently and lets you see when new private messages arrive without refreshing the screen, all without using cookies

When you log in, you'll find that the private messages link appears in a little white box in the top-right corner of the screen. If you watch it really closely, you'll see that every 60 seconds three dots '...' appear briefly. This is the page checking for new messages on the server.

It also means that you remain logged in on the site for as long as your internet connection stays open, so never again should you see the nasty 'you are not logged in' screen after pounding out a huge long forum post

I might try and do the same for forum alerts at some point, although I'm not sure that it's as useful as being able to see when messages arrive.

I've taken away the old chat - it might be replaced by a less clunky version in the near future that will be properly integrated into the site.

Using a similar technique to the message checker, it will allow people to invite you to a chat and you'll get a popup message instantly, no matter what page of the site you're on.

Just adding some spammy reciprocal links to spammy directories

Artoo Links - SEO Friendly Directory Droid

Almost done! Should soon be able to see the date/time of the last post