Cpnhelp.org

Hi Patricia, thank you for your post.

1.  Recent content now only shows posts in order of create

2.  Forum posts now display author and time

3.  Nested comments are now honoured

4. Messaging is now working.  Yes, the messages are still messages but they are grouped inside conversations

5. We are trying our best to get the various views similar to what they were before.  Users can change their own theme appearance.  See my signature.

6.   I have started a new post here

Thank you so much, Kent!

Kent, I was pleasantly surprised to see something actually happening this afternoon, but you haven't quite got there yet.  You maybe don't know what Pat means by 'nested comments' but the ones on this site are certainly not 'sorted.'

Private messages are very important to many people on his site, whereas the word 'conversations' is a thing of the moment, here today, gone the next., like mini phones a few years ago.  Many sites  use private messaging, and 'private means 'private' so please try to get a module for it.

I wasn't terribly happy to see that you had gone into my account and changed my theme to Mayo, which I was using at first for a few days.  I do think that non-serif text reds better on a monitor, though, whereas serifs look better on a typewritten page, so no complaints there.

Sarah, can you check.   I think you'll find that comments are now correctly nested/threaded.

I've renamed Conversations to Messages. You will still need to start a conversation so that your messages do not end up being mixed up, but are grouped within the people you are messaging.

I've set the default font to sans serif.

Please help, I can't find the "search" section. It is such an important tool and it saves me starting a whole new thread on something that has already been discussed. Today I wanted to look up "Taurine" as I'm worried I'm having a bad reaction to it. I wanted to see if other people use it and how helpful it is. I don't want to ask if there is already a thread about it. Thank you for this wonderful website, I hope the "search" section is somewhere, please let me know.

Thanks again!

I will say again that these are all things which should have been checked before the site was made live. Don't  expect ill people to do the work for you.

Kent, call them 'nested' or 'threaded' but they are all over the place, datewise.  The newest comment/answer on any forum should be right at the top, immediately under the original question.

Sarah, you had the old site set up differently for you than I did, if I remember correctly: you chose a flat list of replies, whereas I preferred threaded.  I guess you also had them in the reverse order; that meant that you could just look at the top for the new content, whereas I had to scan through a threaded conversation for the little red tags saying "new".  I can't do that any more: the tags aren't there.  The URL right now for me ends with "#new", and I think that is supposed to start me at the first new post, as happened on the old site, but the "new" tag doesn't exist, so I just start at the top of the page.

Anyway, that's one feature of the old site I don't miss: the way that people could configure flat versus threaded views, so that different people were looking at different views of the conversation.  Your flat view didn't tell you who was responding to whom, yet other people would see replies indented directly under the posts being responded to, and would assume that everybody knew that, say, person A's short retort was a response to B and not to C.  It's better for this sort of thing if the website chooses, so that everybody sees the same version of the conversation.  (And while I chose "threaded", it did make it a bit of a pain to find new replies, and the current broken "new" stuff is of course even worse.)

The old site had newer comments appearing after older comments.  Was there a way to configure it so that some people could view the newer comments first?

I'll certainly look into the NEW links.  They  should take you to at least one of the new comments.

In recent content, new posts on a thread are not bringing that thread up above old threads.

Are we limited to just 10 threads in recent content? A few days ago, there were loads, over 9 pages, but that disappeared again. As I think a lot of us tend to use recent content as our homepage on the site, more than just the 10 threads would be good. If you missed looking on the site for a couple of weeks, you could miss some posts altogether.

The old site had a choice box at the end of each forum post which allowed you to choose between flat and threaded views, and I believe also the order.  The choice applied globally, so I just set it once and forgot about it.  (Except that maybe it didn't apply to "blogs", or maybe it didn't and then later it was changed so that it did?  I forget the details.)  Anyway, I'll defer to Sarah's preferences; she and DW are Royalty here

https://www.flamewarriorsguide.com/warriorshtm/royals.htm

and either flat or threaded is fine with me; I just want it to be the same for everybody, whichever it is.

There's only one piece of discussion software that I've heard of that both (1) shows you who was replying to whom, and (2) puts all the new replies in the same place so as to make finding them easier, and that's Discourse (https://www.discourse.org/).  It also has the right sort of programmers behind it, so it's a newer, tighter piece of code, and it does have a Drupal import module, though I don't know how well that works.  It's probably a bit late to suggest migration now, but perhaps for the next big upgrade.

Kent, apart from the fact that the site says I am unauthorized to start a new blog, the place for new members to join seems to have vanished, just after I told someone who is waiting that the site seemed to be recovering.

I learnt long ago not to write directly to cpn help webpages but to draught my text on a notepad and then paste it in when completed. When I try to do this just now it said my browser was not configured to paste.

Another one to sort out.

I do everything on my mobile phone these days. Do you realise that everything ends up in a narrow column on the right hand side of the page and as the threads get longer the columns get narrower. Very irksome to have to read. The other thing that occurs is that the right half of the page can be dark brown.

G.

The complaint about threads which were several years old appearing was because it was happening randomly and not because a recent post had been added to the thread. It is quite common in our site that someone which ask a question in an old thread and it's never caused us any problem when that post leaps to the top.

Is it just me that finds it so inconvenient when a thread with a recent post added doesn't then leap to the top? 

The 'new' which now appears to show a new post is great - but would be even better if clicking on that took you straight to the new post, as used to be the case, instead of to the first post in a thread.

Personally, I'd prefer recent content to be as it was on the old site - I think there were about 20 showing, as Norman has mentioned above, and then you could select next page to keep going.

As things are now, we would never know if someone replied to a post a few months old, as we just wouldn't see it.

I'd love to know if others are happy with the way recent posts are being displayed, and it's just me that's finding it inconvenient, or whether others have given up!

Good to see the search function back. Thank you! Is it limited to 10 results though? I've just done a few searches and get far more results when I search the site through Google. The resource which past posts give us on this site is immense, so being able to search through everything has always been very important. Many thanks.