Newroad wrote:Firstly, it's a great site! However, in trying to use it well, I'm unsure
(1) How to order within the main sections, e.g. Lemon Lounge, Investors' Roundtable, Sectors and General Share Dealing, Managing Your Finances etc so that they are in "Last Post" order. Ideally, one could also
(2) Limit the sub sections (e.g. Comfort-Cafe within Lemon-Aid) view as you can do for topics, e.g. so the only ones listed are, say, have been active in the last 7 days) and/or
(3) Permanently delete sub sections that you judge you will never have interest in?
Are any of these possible and I've missed it - just want to be able to less slowly ascertain get to the subject matter I'm interested in?
As far as I'm aware, none of those are possible for the
site home page. However, it's possible to do the following, which I think would achieve all or most of what you want:
* Go to each of the subsections ("forums" in phpBB-speak, more commonly called "boards" around here) you're interested in and click on the "Subscribe forum" link in the pale blue bar near the bottom of the page you get. (Ignore the "ticked box" just to the left of that link, apparently indicating that you're already subscribed to it - the tick is always there and meaningless as far as I can tell.) Also, go to each of the individual discussions ("topics" in phpBB-speak, more commonly known as "threads" around here) in those boards that you're interested in following, and click on its "Bookmark topic" link (available from the menu brought up from the 'spanner' button, in the row of buttons started by "Post Reply" just before the list of posts and again just after it). On boards with many existing threads, you'll probably want to limit how far you go back through the list of discussions - they're sorted by the date/time of their most recent post, latest first.
* Go to your User Control Panel (in the menu headed by your user name at the top right of any page), choose the "Board preferences" tab and then the
"Edit notification options" option from the list on the left of the page. Enable the "Someone creates a topic in a forum to which you are subscribed" notification. Also enable or disable other notifications according to your personal preferences - mine are for most of them to be disabled, to avoid receiving so many notifications that I get 'swamped' by them and possibly miss topic creations I'm interested in among them, but your mileage may differ.
* Use the
"Manage bookmarks" option on the "Overview" tab of your User Control Panel as your entry point to the boards. It will give you the threads you're interested in, sorted by the date/time of their most recent post, latest first.
* Whenever you receive a "New topic" notification, either click on the tick mark that appears if you 'hover' on it if you can tell from the title alone that you're not interested in it, or click on the title to go to that thread. Once there, decide whether you're interested in following it. If so, click on its "Bookmark topic" link; if not, just move on to whatever you want to do next.
* If you lose interest in following a thread, you can remove it from the list of bookmarked threads either by clicking on its "Remove from bookmarks" link (same place as the "Bookmark topic" link) or by using the tick boxes to the right of the list of bookmarked threads and the "Remove marked bookmarks" button below those boxes.
I believe it's possible to do something similar using "Subscribe topic" / "Unsubscribe thread" and the "Manage subscriptions" option in place of "Bookmark topic" / "Remove from bookmarks" and the "Manage bookmarks" option, but I've never investigated exactly how similar it ends up being. I used bookmarks myself because it's clear that there are no unexpected interactions between subscribed boards (those that
might contain stuff of interest) and bookmarked threads (those that
are being followed). Just what interactions there are between subscribed boards and subscribed threads was less clear to me - I could have worked it out by experimenting, but avoiding the issue by using bookmarks was quicker and easier!
Gengulphus
