Other Systems & Languages
I've tried to find answers for the following items with no success - I hope someone here may be able to help.
Summarizing I need help with three issues:
1. Reliable marking / viewing each read thread in forums
2. Use Strikethrough font to indicate which messages have been read
3. Extending the time or removing timeout when using mouse over forum threads to view snippets
Gory details below:
Issues surrounding Forums such as Vbulletin powered sites
IE7 appears to work to some degree - Limited but it does work - FOCK2/FF3 does not
Marking Messages read in Forums & Strikethrough font
Normal action of the user when viewing a list of messages in a Forum usually means clicking the mouse button on each message of interest, reading the content and then returning to the original message list. The return function can occur in one of two ways that I'm familiar with.
1: Using a mouse gesture
2: Selecting the back button within the browser
The issue at hand is when you return to the list. One would expect the last message read and all previous read messages to have a unique identification. For example, color change, font change, something to instantly indicate to the user you've been there and done that before.
Someone suggested:
Reloading a WEB page via the 'Reload' button is way over the top and not a reasonable solution.
If someone comes into a forum and only looks at couple of messages then this is not a big deal. Those of us who care to appreciate a bit more from the forum would certainly expect a reasonable user experience i.e. properly marking individual messages as read in an interactive way without using a sledge hammer approach of manually requesting a web page reload each time an individual message is read.
Due to poor color recognition the ability to set READ forum threads to Strikethrough font would be great if I could find out how to and have the transition actually work after each message is read.
Lengthen the time that thread snippets are viewable on the screen would be helpful - some browsers keep the snippet on screen as long as the mouse cursor hovers over the thread while others appear to timeout quickly - either being able to lengthen the time or no time out would be ideal.
I really appreciate any help whether it can be done via Flock natively or via some add-on???
Ren
Daryl L. L. Houston
I believe what you're up against here is the browser cache. When you hit the back button, you're just navigating back to a page that's either still in memory or in the browser cache.
It occurs to me that one thing you could do is write a greasemonkey script that would keep a list of links clicked and would then apply in-line styling to any references to such links. So from the forum listing page, on click, you store the link in an array, and even if you go back in the browser cache, the gm script would read the document, compare the links to the array, and strikethrough any applicable links. This would probably become a performance leak in a hurry, though.
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Flock Web Guy
Ren
Thanks Daryl for your input on this issue.
The point you've made regarding cache sounds logical - Any method in Flock to update cache upon 'back button' for a specific site? Also can strikethru font be set inside of Flock for visited links?
IE seems to be the only browser that recognizes visited links when I return to msg lists with the 'back button' and shows a slight visible difference in the displayed threads. However, I've not found any method to set strikethru font in IE and secondly Flock overall works better then IE. I don't want to go back to IE.
A friend of mine mentioned greasemonkey - Looks like I will need to spend some time with the app and come up to speed.
Regards
Ren