The Lemon Fool

Clariman wrote:That's good to know. I was concerned that company boards would mean the creation of 100s of boards that would cause a great deal of clutter - and probably sporadic use.

If people do want some sort of place to discuss an individual company and nothing else, I think the way to go would be something like an "Individual companies" group of forums containing forums for companies that start with A, B, C, ..., Z, plus one more for companies that start with a number or other non-letter, and then do the companies as topics within those forums. People could then bookmark the topics for the companies they were interested in. It wouldn't be entirely satisfactory only having one "thread" per company, but I think it would be just about workable and wouldn't involve too much clutter.

That said, I'm not pushing for that to be done - I made very little use of company boards on TMF and don't see that general lack of interest in them changing. I'm just recording the thought while I have it, in case it ever proves useful.

One other comment is that if Lemon Fool ever expands to anything like the scale of the TMF UK boards, even without the company boards, I think the issue of clutter is going to be a very real one. In particular, a noticeable feature of what I've seen so far is that there's a general assumption in the user interface that the user wants to see stuff about all the boards, which even without the company boards would have been a daunting prospect - see http://www.fool.co.uk/help/community/boards-a-to-z/ . That assumption can be worked around - but the results are a bit clunky and it's less than obvious how it should be done, so I do expect clutter to become an issue...

Gengulphus

Gengulphus wrote:...a noticeable feature of what I've seen so far is that there's a general assumption in the user interface that the user wants to see stuff about all the boards ... That assumption can be worked around - but the results are a bit clunky and it's less than obvious how it should be done, so I do expect clutter to become an issue...

Forums can have sub-forums (and presumably sub-sub-forums too). That could be one way to declutter...

Clariman wrote:That's good to know. I was concerned that company boards would mean the creation of 100s of boards that would cause a great deal of clutter - and probably sporadic use.

Clariman

No, I think that's the right solution.

Of course some will disagree but much easier to have sector boards and then let people start threads as and when they need to on different companies.

Great site by the way. Very fast work.

Gengulphus wrote:

Clariman wrote:That's good to know. I was concerned that company boards would mean the creation of 100s of boards that would cause a great deal of clutter - and probably sporadic use.

If people do want some sort of place to discuss an individual company and nothing else, I think the way to go would be something like an "Individual companies" group of forums containing forums for companies that start with A, B, C, ..., Z, plus one more for companies that start with a number or other non-letter, and then do the companies as topics within those forums. People could then bookmark the topics for the companies they were interested in. It wouldn't be entirely satisfactory only having one "thread" per company, but I think it would be just about workable and wouldn't involve too much clutter.

That said, I'm not pushing for that to be done - I made very little use of company boards on TMF and don't see that general lack of interest in them changing. I'm just recording the thought while I have it, in case it ever proves useful.

One other comment is that if Lemon Fool ever expands to anything like the scale of the TMF UK boards, even without the company boards, I think the issue of clutter is going to be a very real one. In particular, a noticeable feature of what I've seen so far is that there's a general assumption in the user interface that the user wants to see stuff about all the boards, which even without the company boards would have been a daunting prospect - see http://www.fool.co.uk/help/community/boards-a-to-z/ . That assumption can be worked around - but the results are a bit clunky and it's less than obvious how it should be done, so I do expect clutter to become an issue...

Gengulphus

Surely preferable to do it by sector - don't see any additional value in a A-Z method.

nigelpm wrote:Surely preferable to do it by sector - don't see any additional value in a A-Z method.

That would be my thought, especially if people could be in the habit of prefixing a new topic with the name of the company (suspect that will be hard)

--kiloran

nigelpm wrote:Surely preferable to do it by sector - don't see any additional value in a A-Z method.

The additional value is that the category will be pretty clear to users who know which company they're interested in - the same is not always true of sectors! But certainly forums for individual sectors make more sense to me than ones for individual companies - my thinking there was very much contingency planning for the possibility that the latter do turn out to be wanted - which I think unlikely but not impossible.

Gengulphus

I'm obviously doing something wrong but I can't seem to filter read and unread posts. None of the circular icons are red and if I hover the cursor over the icon or the Topic title I get a message saying "No unread posts" even on Topics which I haven't visited.

Oh dear - ignore my previous post. You have to be logged in for the feature to work (Doh, stupid me).

How can posts saved in draft be retrieved?

Mike88 wrote:How can posts saved in draft be retrieved?

To save a draft just click the Save Draft button at the bottom of the editor.

To use the saved draft, go to your User Control Panel (click on your username, top right, to find it). There you'll find 'Manage drafts' where you can reopen and edit your drafts with 'View/edit', or get them back into the reply editor with 'Load draft' in order to 'Submit' them to the board.

Sometimes links and adverts open in a new tab and on other occasions in the same one. Obviously the former is preferable. Is this something I can resolve myself, please? I'm using a Chromebook at the moment.

Don't forget you can bookmark favourite boards and threads in the browser.

Um, how do the Unread Messages work? I know it's probably obvious but my list increases and I don't know what exactly how the software knows what I have read and what I haven't.

RC

Um, how do the Unread Messages work? I know it's probably obvious but my list increases and I don't know what exactly how the software knows what I have read and what I haven't.

If you login, the system then seems to keep track of what you have seen/visited. If you do nothing for a while, it seems to log you out automatically, so you have to login again. Your status is shown by your name appearing in the top right corner, rather than the reminder for login.

Tramrider

tramrider wrote:If you login, the system then seems to keep track of what you have seen/visited. If you do nothing for a while, it seems to log you out automatically, so you have to login again. Your status is shown by your name appearing in the top right corner, rather than the reminder for login.

Tramrider

Hmmm, that's not my experience. I've logged in just once and everytime I fire up my laptop and go to Lemon Fool, I'm already logged in. Chrome/Windows-7. I don't allow my browser to remember passwords, so I guess there's a cookie or something.

--kiloran

kiloran wrote:

tramrider wrote:If you login, the system then seems to keep track of what you have seen/visited. If you do nothing for a while, it seems to log you out automatically, so you have to login again. Your status is shown by your name appearing in the top right corner, rather than the reminder for login.

Hmmm, that's not my experience. I've logged in just once and everytime I fire up my laptop and go to Lemon Fool, I'm already logged in. Chrome/Windows-7. I don't allow my browser to remember passwords, so I guess there's a cookie or something.

My guess is that the difference is due to the "Remember me" tick box on the log-in form, with tramrider logging in without it being ticked and kiloran with it being ticked.

Gengulphus

kiloran wrote:

tramrider wrote:If you login, the system then seems to keep track of what you have seen/visited. If you do nothing for a while, it seems to log you out automatically, so you have to login again. Your status is shown by your name appearing in the top right corner, rather than the reminder for login.

Hmmm, that's not my experience. I've logged in just once and everytime I fire up my laptop and go to Lemon Fool, I'm already logged in. Chrome/Windows-7. I don't allow my browser to remember passwords, so I guess there's a cookie or something.

My guess is that the difference is due to the "Remember me" tick box on the log-in form, with tramrider logging in without it being ticked and kiloran with it being ticked.

Gengulphus

ReformedCharacter wrote:Um, how do the Unread Messages work? I know it's probably obvious but my list increases and I don't know what exactly how the software knows what I have read and what I haven't.

RC

I don't know how it works, but for what its worth, what I do after a session scanning through the unread posts, and reading those of interest, I make sure I click on "Mark all read" at the top of the list of unread posts.

Then next time I come to the site, and click on Unread posts, only those made since my last visit appear in the list.

And just to add, when the list of unread posts comes up, and I find a thread I'm following and want to read further, I click the red circle which takes me to the first post I've not read.

I actually now prefer this site to TMF (never thought I'd say that!) as I'm finding stuff I never would have on TMF because apart from my favourite boards and the odd gem found through Best of Boards, much of the rest just passed me by.

Staffordian

ReformedCharacter wrote:Um, how do the Unread Messages work? I know it's probably obvious but my list increases and I don't know what exactly how the software knows what I have read and what I haven't.

In case it needs to be said, the system considers a message to be read by you if it's on a page that has been sent to your browser.

i.e. even if you don't scroll all the way down the page to physically read them, all the messages are marked as read.

Scott.

staffordian wrote:
I don't know how it works, but for what its worth, what I do after a session scanning through the unread posts, and reading those of interest, I make sure I click on "Mark all read" at the top of the list of unread posts.

Then next time I come to the site, and click on Unread posts, only those made since my last visit appear in the list.

And just to add, when the list of unread posts comes up, and I find a thread I'm following and want to read further, I click the red circle which takes me to the first post I've not read.

I actually now prefer this site to TMF (never thought I'd say that!) as I'm finding stuff I never would have on TMF because apart from my favourite boards and the odd gem found through Best of Boards, much of the rest just passed me by.



Staffordian

Me too! On TMF I had my list of Favourites and until now didn't realise just how many interesting posts I was missing. I soon had the Lemonfool figured out and started to use the method you have detailed above. It works very well.

Tricia