Status of new release

Dave, how great that you are including so many features suggested by our Jane Austen community. Thank you. As to this part of your report: ] Things not done yet: ] - Allowing responses to responses from the web (requested here by Amy) ] - Updating the help files and/or admin guide to document the new features ] If there's anything you've suggested that you don't see listed above, ] please mention it again in case I missed it. ] I'm thinking about doing a release within the next couple of days with ] just the things already done, plus hopefully the documentation. Any more ] features/changes would delay the release. I believe that the response-to-response feature is perhaps the one most desired by our group. We would be so happy if you added it to the next release, we might even write you a poem. BTW, where can we see this feature in action? And how does it work in the shell version? Just like usenet? Thanks for everything. Amy

It would be good if this feature were conference specific and not global.

Dave said: Questions/comments? Thanks for asking, Dave - there still are a few. (Possibly some have been taken care of by some items on your list that I did not understand.) It will be great to be able to mark everything seen from the web interface, BUT there is still some kind of bug operating that causes people to have everything re-set to new, and it needs to be exterminated. Also, this is very nice, and would be helpful if it would work from the web interface as well: ] - "fixto" command (currently from Unix only) allows marking all ] responses as read up to a specified date, unlike the current ] "fixseen" which marks entire items (requested by Drizzle) I don't notice this being either added or not added (yapp 1:136): when viewing the topic list in "new" mode, the listing: Topic Resps Subject 33 27 incredibly dumb and stupid questions (terry) in the topic column only the topics with "new" postings are displayed; is there any way that in the "resps" column, instead of showing the total number of responses, it could show the total number of NEW responses? That would be very helpful! The idea here would be to have the number in the "Resps" column represent the number of NEW responses, not the total of all responses in the topic. What about this "forget" bug reported in yapp 15:33? speaking of server errors; every time (x2) I try to forget a topic I get a server error message. When I went back to the topic I found that it had in fact been forgotten, despite the server's anxieties. The message I got went something like "the server could not process your request, please contact webmaster@spring.com and report the fault, the time and anything you may have done to cause the problem"

I did not post the above response twice! (But I may be posting this one twice, since the html editor sent me back to "go"... (If so, it is worth posting twice!) And then there is the BIGGIE under things not done yet: - Allowing responses to responses from the web (requested here by Amy) It is not just Amy who longs for the implementation of this - it is fervently and universally wished for by all of us! If I had time to dig them out I could give you quotes till the cows come home! Please do consider working this in unless there is some very pressing reason for haste.!

There is also one very serious (in the eyes of Austen-ites, at least) bug/problem that did not get mentioned, and I hope it is not too late to fix. We are fond of liberal use of links to other sites relevant to our discussions, but we are unable to make use of such links because each time you do (or also each time anything happens that causes you to leave a screen of current postings) there is no way to get back to where you were. For example, if I am reading Topic X, and there are 7 new postings, including several different links, the first link that I follow ends up marking all of the rest of the postings as seen, even though I have not yet seen them, and any attempt to return to where one was results in a return to the item with no responses displayed and all marked seen, so unleess you happened to take note of the number of the response from which you left, you have no idea exactly how many other responses you have missed. The whole point of the html interface is to allow the user to move fluidly back and forth among different links, which cannot be done unless you are using a non-heml browser that keeps its own buffer. Here are just a few of MANY MANY MANY "complaints" about this problem in Topic 9 of the Austen conference - which we were under the impression was being linked or forwarded to the yapp conference, but eveidently never was. (I reviewed ALL of topics 1 and 15 to be sure.) (There may be other issues in topic 9, as well, but I did not re-read all of it - just searched for the word "cache.") Topic 9 of 105 [austen]: HELP! Response 36 of 154: Henry (churchh) * Wed, Nov 27, 1996 (20:02) This %$#@%$@ software makes it VERY easy to lose a half-composed message, because it seems to be issuing some kind of special "no-cache" directives to the browsers. Whenever you get that "Bad HTML, missing quote in tag" box, one's first instinct is always to press the back-button and re-edit and re-submit the original message -- but if one does this, the preceding page is re-loaded directly from Spring, and the form entries are lost!!! So basically, one has to start over from scratch. Even if one suppresses this natural instinctive reaction, there can still be problems. Over in the "enigmatic messages" thread, I was working on a message when I decided to resize my browser window -- and as a result, the page was re-loaded from Spring, and my half-completed message was lost! Furthermore, this "no-cache thing makes the board slower to use. I have to say that it's actually better to use this site with Lynx than Netscape, since Lynx keeps a cache -- I can reload only when I choose to reload. Furthermore, my message contained a long [IMG] tag, and when this was spread over several lines, the software generated [BR] tags _inseide_ the image tag!! -- [IMG SRC="URL" ALT="This [BR]is an explanatory [BR]message"] (Square brackets for angle brackets here.) These two problems account for my first two attempts to post the http://ccwf.cc.utexas.edu/~churchyh/passione.gif image to the "enigmatic messages" thread turning out to be complete botches Topic 9 of 105 [austen]: HELP! Response 71 of 154: The Mysterious H.C.(churchh) * Wed, Dec 4,1996(16:40) Here's the "no-cache" error message that you often get when you relaod (someitmes inadvertently) or try to "go back" -- Is this generated by the browser or the server?? [TITLE]Missing Post reply data[/TITLE] [H1]Data Missing[/H1] This document resulted from a POST operation and has expired from the cache. If you wish you can repost the form data to recreate the document by pressing the [b]reload[/b] button. Of course, pressing ``reload'' never works if you're reading new messages... Topic 9 of 105 [austen]: HELP! Response 79 of 154: Henry (churchh) * Thu, Dec 5, 1996 (10:35) Myretta, can you follow a link in a posting, or post a followup, and then "go back" to the original display of messages, which you may not have finished reading?? Most users of Netscape apparently CAN'T do this, due to the excessive use of no-cache directives. Topic 9 of 105 [austen]: HELP! Response 80 of 154: Myretta (mrobens) * Thu, Dec 5, 1996 (14:46) No, Henry. I can't do that. But I don't get an error message, just a screen with no posts. Topic 9 of 105 [austen]: HELP! Response 81 of 154: The Mysterious H.C. (churchh) * Thu, Dec 5, 1996 (18:33) Well, don't you think it's annoying that one is not able to do that, then? (I only get the error message sometimes -- not as often as Joan, apparently...) Topic 9 of 105 [austen]: HELP! Response 82 of 154: Myretta (mrobens) * Fri, Dec 6, 1996 (09:53) Absolutely, it's damned annoying and frequently makes me long for Amy's board.

I'd like to see a button in the web based version that was a combined submit and next topic button. It would save you a keystroke. Perhaps this is possible with the current version. I'd like to see an html version of the administrators manual or at least a straight text version.

I am a member of the Austen conference here to lend support to Amy's plea for the ability to have new message responses linked to the posts they are responding to. Everything is so linear, that sometimes, if the respondant i s not adept or simply forgets to copy and paste pertinent text it is hard to grasp what is being discussed. This may be a peculiar problem to our group, because we do tend to leap willy-nilly from thought to thought! Secondly, Joan's comment about following links is well taken. I know that I have been hesitant to follow a link because it can be such a pain to get back where I was.

I do not "get" the color coding of the topic list. Yesterday I read all new responses and had nothing left that was listed as a new message. Today my "new" listing shows the following topics with new responses, however most of them are displayed in blue (unread) text, but those having asterisks are displayed in purple (already seen) text. Since all of these topics apparently containg new postings, why are some of them displayed in blue and others in purple? What is the meaning of the difference betwee the use of blue and purple text? I have been unable to figure this out. If this were a display of ALL topics I would expect to see those with no new responses in blue and those with new ones in purple, but theses are all supposedly new, so why any difference at all? Topic Resps Subject 4 157 A thread for Darcy/Firth drooling and PG innuendo (Amy) * 5 85 Irony and morality (Amy) * 16 30 Darcy's Appearance (Anna) 44 42 Rules of propriety: Regency vs Victorian (Amy) 54 13 Outer garments (Linda409) * 64 78 Favorite non-Austen movies (Zimei) * 70 57 Who else to play D'Arcy (JohanneD) 88 23 The Mysterious H.C. unveiled -- see photos on the Web! (churchh) 91 43 Guilty Pleasures: Romance in P&P (amy2) 92 24 The adaptation (Amy) * 95 19 Austen Heroines (Kali) 101 29 Ask Miss Bingley... (panache)

My main thing would be to have a button that posted a response and took you to the next topic. And clicking on the final response would take you back to the the list of topics. Another great feature to have would be to be able to click on a users name and get a profile about them in the upper half of the screen with an email sendto and their webpage on the lower half of the screen. I would like to see the questionaire ask more questions, such as up to five of the users favorite web pages, their home page, their address, and have it be easily customized to ask whatever questions I want. And I'd like the results to be store in a tab text file. And I'd to see some of these results woven into the above mentioned profile and web page screen. I'd like an easily customized 'new' program on the telnet side and something to parallel the above. And perhaps incoporate the menus that I've started to build on the telnet side of things.

It would be "way cool" to be able to get a list of who was logged in at any given time and to be able to initiate a chat session with them. Much like you do with the 'w' and the 'talk' commands in the shell.

I saw a pretty good webchat today at: http://www.centrum.is/cgi-bin/vefspjallid This might be userful on this site. It may be something that bibbi with Centrum put up (TransSoft Mail Control).