 November 18, 2007 - 6:32pm | Currently - the way the site works - that would result in a (10) or whatever showing up like all the time. At the moment, front pages get "updated" each time someone signs up for an account, etc. Some projects (like the 25th anniversary project) have dozens of updates each day! I think it would result in a fairly useless indicator, at least for me with the number of projects I'm a member of. Even on days when only a handful of folks have done anything on the site - there are literally dozens of updates and new content each day. Surely I could code this... maybe make it update every page refresh or even once every minute or so dynamically. I can try it, test it, and see if it's remotely helpful. But as soon as people see 5 new things in "What's New" and click it only to find some new guy joined five projects... I don't know how helpful it'll be :) ? 3. We wear sungoggles during the day. Not because the sun affects our
vision, but when you're cool like us the sun shines all the time. |
 November 18, 2007 - 6:44pm | At the moment, front pages get "updated" each time someone signs up for an account, etc. Some projects (like the 25th anniversary project) have dozens of updates each day! ... That explains all the times there is stuff on the 'new' page, and I can't find any differences in content.... I suppose that you can't turn this off for member adds? What would folks think of not including a list of members on the home page? (there is a 'Members' tab, after all....) A member count might be nice, but not if it results in the home page changing.... And FWIW, I was more thinkin just a '(new)' instead of an actual count of new forums. And if too many, it still is just a single word on the top left that could be ignored by the highly involved folks... |
 November 18, 2007 - 10:24pm | In a related thought... I wish that the front page of a project wasn't counted as being "updated" just because a new person joined. I can already tell that if a project's front page was truly updated, I would probably never know it because I'm already just "marking them as read" instead of actually navigating to them to see who the new member is. It's like the updater is crying-wolf all the time. ;) |
November 18, 2007 - 11:02pm | haha - yes, I agree about the member updates from a casual point of view. If I'm the manager of a project, though, I sincerely want to see an update that someone's joined. There are also others who want that feature. But it's also annoying for some projects where I care about document/download/forum updates but don't care about membership adds... I don't want to start a procedure of complex "notification" options... but that's really where this is headed. There are some folks on this site who ONLY care if a new Digitally Remastered download is available - for example. So the ultimate evolution of this conversation would be some sort of personalized options for your participation in any given project... and that's a bunch of complexity I'm not sure would be very fun to code haha... That explains all the times there is stuff on the 'new' page, and I
can't find any differences in content.... I suppose that you can't turn
this off for member adds? What would folks think of not including a
list of members on the home page? (there is a 'Members' tab, after
all....) A member count might be nice, but not if it results in the
home page changing.... That's not it. The front page is a database entry, a record in a table. The membership list is part of the database for the front page. So the member list is part of that front page. That's why the front page shows updated... not because of the member list appearing there. I could just as easily show a count there - in fact I do that for those who aren't logged in. How about this... I can turn off updating that a member has joined. It's not toooooo hard to do that. Undoubtedly somewhere along the line someone will ask for the ability to know when someone joins their project... but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it :) 3. We wear sungoggles during the day. Not because the sun affects our
vision, but when you're cool like us the sun shines all the time. |
November 19, 2007 - 12:16am | How about this... I can turn off updating that a member has joined. It's not toooooo hard to do that. Undoubtedly somewhere along the line someone will ask for the ability to know when someone joins their project... but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it :) Aye, and you can say that you changed it due to overwhelming user demand.... ;-) ;-) ;-) Thanks. |
 November 19, 2007 - 8:01am | How about the front page updates occurring only for managers, while members never receive an update. Would that minimize the programming needed? Personally, I like being informed when someone joins a project I manage (not so much a project I don't manage). |
November 19, 2007 - 8:42am | Personally, I like being informed when someone joins a project I manage (not so much a project I don't manage). I can understand this. But as you indicate, why would most members care? So we have a feature that targets every member but is largely only of any real interest to a decided minority. And then there is the cry-wolf consequence. As a manager, do you want your members to ignore "real" updates because they've gotten used to ignoring all the "fake" ones? I mention it because I suspect that it will do more harm than good in the long run. So, until there can be a "manager" only setting, I'm all for the option being turned off. Though a manager can always look to see if there are new people, I was thinking that having a variable that tracks the number of members would probably be useful (especially when the member list starts to get really big.) That way managers wouldn't be looking at a list of people to see who's new unless they notice their membership went up and they were really interested in exactly who the new person was. Additionally, it would probably be nice to see a field that posted the # of Members listed on the front page of a project (that linked to an actual member list) rather than to see a big list anyway. Of course this is less of an issue right now, but once you get hundreds (thousands?) of people on one project... I suspect it will make the front page pretty ugly. |
November 19, 2007 - 10:35am | Hey, this discussion is going off the topic of my original suggestion! ;-) ;-) ;-) ;-) ;-) |
November 19, 2007 - 3:58pm | I'll see what I can do 3. We wear sungoggles during the day. Not because the sun affects our
vision, but when you're cool like us the sun shines all the time. |
November 19, 2007 - 5:43pm | Okay - membership additions and cancellations no longer update the front page. I know you want to see updates to your own project, Corjay - so I'll try to add that for the managers only. I want that feature too for the projects I manage. I'll have to figure out how to add that feature now. Once this is done, I'd say that we'll have a more effective list of what's new, and I can make an indicator that the original poster requested. 3. We wear sungoggles during the day. Not because the sun affects our
vision, but when you're cool like us the sun shines all the time. |
