Small usability tweak to direct replies

September 29, 2009 | By Robert Gentel

We’ve made a small tweak to how direct replies to a post are displayed. Previously it would display something like:

Re: Username (Post# 123456)

The problem with this is that we were seeing members use the post# link when trying to link to a specific post, mistaking the link to the post’s parent for the post itself.

We’d considered changing this format to @replies in the past, which some users might be familiar with from twitter, but we backed off because it’s a bit uglier and many of our users weren’t familiar with that convention. However now that more and more sites are using this we’ve switched to displaying the link to a post’s parent as an @reply. This should also help a bit with another usability issue, of using the last post to reply to the thread by making it a bit clearer that direct replies to a post are addressed to a specific user.

So now you will see this displayed like this:

@username,

This can make your post awkward if you are in the habit of starting your post with “username,” as it will then be repeated twice, so we figured we’d give you a quick heads up about the change.

Private Messages

March 7, 2009 | By Robert Gentel

As announced on the forums, we have launched a bare-bones version of private messaging in addition to a number of other updates to our system back end (caching for the geeks who care) in addition to some visual updates (header colors, font sizes).

Private messages are now threaded conversations, with the newest messages at the top. By default you will receive an email notification if you receive a message while logged out, and a on-site notification if you are logged in but you can change your preferences to not send you any email notification of messages.

We will be working on improvements to the feature, including the ability to save friends to a contact list, and we are by no means finished working on it but given the feedback we’ve received we have released them sooner rather than later as many a2kers have indicated that they were sorely missed.

As always, if you see anything wrong or have any suggestions feel free to let us know through the helpdesk. Right now we have plans including: allowing you to restrict who can send you messages and allowing you to delete messages but if you have other suggestions send them our way.

Dev Updates, Last.fm, YouTube, and Flickr on your profile

January 26, 2009 | By Robert Gentel

We’ve been busy recently, and haven’t posted an update on what we’ve done recently, so here are some releases that have been out for a while, but haven’t been announced:

Music, Video and Photos on your profile

Now you can provide your Last.fm, YouTube, or Flickr userids to put music, videos or photos on your profile. For an example of what this looks like see my profile, where I use all three. For more information or if you have any problems there is a topic about these updates here: Photos, Music and Video on your profile

Posting Bugs

There were some bugs we hunted down that were causing a few users a day to see an exception (an error) message when posting. We have fixed what we believe to be the sources of those bugs, and there haven’t been any since. But if you run into any exception messages when posting please save the message and the url and contact us at the help desk to let us know.

Preferences System Overhaul

We needed to overhaul our preferences system, in order to move on to private messaging, so the entire system was reworked in a way that will make it easier to build on and less prone to errors and bugs.

Markup Cleanup

Our HTML had gotten pretty messy, and some pages had over 500 validation errors (we are markup snobs and use strict XHTML) and a general cleanup was performed that brought the underlying code to a much cleaner state. We aren’t finished, and there are still some non-critical validation errors in our markup, but it’s far from the tag soup that it was just weeks ago.

What’s Next

We have also been working on Private Messaging and Friends, our two next features on our list of priorities. Work on this will be done together with smaller bugfixes and the release of some features we’ve had nearly finished for a while. There are two of us, and initially only Nick can work on Private Messaging so if you see us release small fixes and features please don’t think we aren’t working on Private Messages, or that we can be made to go faster if more requests for Private Messages are made. We know that many of you want them ASAP and so do we, as we have our “coming out of BETA” launch planned when we are able to release that feature.

Email updates and RSS feeds

December 19, 2008 | By Robert Gentel

We’ve been testing email updates and RSS feeds on able2know for a while now, and tonight the features are being opened up for everyone so here’s a quick explanation on them both.

Email Updates

On any topic page, near the tags, you will find a link to “Get email updates”. Clicking the link will subscribe you to the topic (and change the link to “Stop email updates” which does what it says when clicked) and you will receive an email if the topic receives a reply when you are logged out. When starting a topic, you’ll have a checkbox that allows you to subscribe to the topic as well.

Email updates are sent with a link to the new post, and no further updates are sent to you until you log back in. That way, you won’t go away to find a flood of emails if the thread gets busy. Email updates also come with a simple link to unsubscribe with one click as well as another link to a page where you can manage all your topic subscriptions.

RSS Feeds

RSS is a way to read lot of sites in one place. For a quick primer see this thread about RSS that I posted a while ago. Able2know now has RSS feeds for every topic grid we display. So you can get a general feed of, say, the popular topics or you can get a specific feed for a particular tag, or even for topics you have tagged a particular tag.

Each page listing topics has an RSS feed icon (see here:  ) that takes you to the feed for that particular page. This way you can do things like subscribe to your “My Posts” page and get RSS updates when replies are made to topics you’ve posted in or syndicate a specific tag’s topics on your blog or site.

If you have any questions or you’d like to give feedback about these new features please see this thread I created for this purpose: http://able2know.org/topic/126927-1

New BBCode for mp3 files

December 18, 2008 | By Robert Gentel

We made a quick mp3 BBCode that will display a small mp3 player and allow you to listen to a linked mp3. To post an mp3 file, just wrap the url to the mp3 file in “mp3″ bbcode. Like this:

[mp3]http://exampledomain.com/example.mp3[/mp3]

For an example of what it displays see here:

http://able2know.org/topic/124541-2#post-3508894

Jump to specific page in long threads

December 9, 2008 | By Robert Gentel

On the old software we received a lot of requests for a way to jump to specific pages in long threads, and this weekend we built a quick feature to do this that was released tonight. Now if you see the ellipses (…) on a long topic, you can click them and you’ll see an alert (IE users will have an annoying nag about allowing scripted windows) allowing you to input a page number and go right to it.

We are only displaying it in this subtle way, and only on long threads where the pagination truncates to avoid clutter and confusion on the pagination interface, but we may make it more prominent in the future.

If you want to test it out, try this huge thread about Obama.

12/3/08 Update: Home Page, CSS Fixes, Pingback and more

December 3, 2008 | By Robert Gentel

We released some code tonight that we’d been working on this weekend that should fix a number of CSS display bugs in specific browsers. Because these browsers like to interpret the same code a number of ways, this means we may have created other bugs while fixing the previous ones, and though we tested for them we may have missed a few. If you run into a bug, please let us know through the contact us link in the footer.

We also released a rough home page widget for logged in members, to display the account and preferences more prominently and to include the latest blog post, so that you don’t have to check the blog as often.

And lastly, we released some code that performs pingbacks and trackbacks on linked blogs, meaning that when you comment on a site on able2know, it will ping the site using those protocols. If you are a blog owner and notice anything funky in our implementation please let us know.

Featured Topics

November 25, 2008 | By Robert Gentel

Another quick release of code we already had lying around almost ready: featured topics. On several grids we are now displaying a list of featured topics in the grid sidebar. The topics are selected by tags and votes, so if you want to promote a topic up vote it or tag it and as always let us know what you think.

Next/Previous links on posts

November 23, 2008 | By Robert Gentel

We had some code lying around to put links on each post to jump to the next or previous post. It wasn’t live because it still needs some work, namely it needs to skip over collapsed posts. But while using a trackball without a scroll wheel today I quickly dusted it off and pushed it live to make it easier to peruse the topic pages.

It still really needs to be able to skip collapsed posts to work well, but is something I found useful enough as is to push live. Give it a try.

Tags on profile page

November 22, 2008 | By Robert Gentel

Tags are user-created forums, and as with anything open to all users some will abuse the feature. While tagging is intended to serve as a way to categorize and recommend content it’s also sometimes used to rate the content and criticize it.

This is expected, and with enough good user activity it will be overridden but we can also do more to highlight its intent and perhaps convince some of the pranksters to use the feature more constructively. Tags are supposed to be forums, not anonymous comments, and are tagged threads are supposed to be the ones you recommend, not the ones you think are lame.

So with that in mind, there are a lot of ways tags are going to be used to highlight user recommendations. There was already a tags page in the user profile, that lists 100 of the users most used tags and the threads they tagged with them but we will be doing more to emphasize the use of tags as a way to categorize, save, and promote content instead of comment on it.

One of the first changes we are making is to also list a tag cloud on the user’s profile. This way, if a user gets his kicks by leaving vulgar words on other people’s threads they will also be front and center on the user’s profile.

We will also be doing more to make tags a socially useful feature, like listing what users tagged a tread on the thread itself, and by featuring the user’s tagged content in more locations.

Tags can be very useful, and we are going to continue to respond to the less useful tags by emphasising the ways they are useful and by giving the community more insight into who is using the tags in malicious ways.