Yuku free message boards

I've had a look at Naval Help and it seems OK, although there appear to be a couple of eccentricities that I've not seen elsewhere in other threaded forums.

The principle argument for threads is to allow a conversation to stream into two or three different sub-topics or related areas without derailing the entire discussion, which the current sequential, blog-comment style format does.

The secondary advantage is that it allows readers who are contributing to or just watching the discussion to spot the new additions at a glance as they can see the title of each new message in the thread.

The way in which yaku have implemented it is a little strange. You get the thread over-view, which is fine (although I hope there's an option to collapse the thread when viewing the whole message board as a long thread will very quickly eat the entire first page of the board!) You get the ability to enter a new title for a message within that thread and have that title appear in the thread - thus indicating a change of topic, which is fine.

The eccentricities are in the slightly odd layout of the thing. For instance, when viewing the first message in a thread, the replies are actually located below all the formating and reply controls at the bottom of the screen. I didn't initially spot them, but I suspect this won't really be a problem. It's not quite like most other forums and so there will be a learning curve, but overall, I think it's the way to go.

Cheers, Theodore. Thanks for bringing this to the attention of the board.

(when you are logged in: at the top of the page, click "account," then "settings," "preferences," and "use my settings)

This didn't work, but I suspect it's because whilst I'm telling it to 'use my settings' I haven't found where to define the settings that it's supposed to use! There isn't a settings control panel somewhere with 'threaded messages' to enable or disable. So it seems that 'use my settings' is pretty useless, as I have no choice but to use the settings as configured by the admin, anyway!

Cheers

No problem, Theodore. I think I'm bringing my work home with me! I'm currently doing a lot of software development and as a result, am becoming used to writing detailed feedback.

There's an unrelated problem that I've spotted. People seem to be ignoring new posts to the sticky threads because the only way to tell there's a new post is by spotting that a new page has appeared, or the name of the last author has changed. The red glowing EZ icons next to the thread title that denote a "hot topic" are like a repeated fire drill. Practice too often and eventually people learn to ignore the real thing! Is there any way to disable it so that it is only activated when a new post is added to a sticky thread, rather than just perpetually glowing all the time?

Cheers