NOTICE: Minor changes to forum appearance

Greetings, all:

I'm making some minor changes to the appearance of the forum.

Specifically, the date a thread was initiated has been added to the

end of the subject line. The intent is to make it easier to search

for an old thread.

Other changes will probably go unnoticed by most folks. I'm working

on categorizing uncategorized or miscategorized threads and, in a very

few cases, assigning expiration dates or interest levels where

appropriate.

Please let me know in this thread or via e-mail if this causes any

significant problems for anyone, particularly browser errors.

This thread itself will expire in 30 days.

I think it would be useful to order the threads in the listing by the date of the last contribution, not the date of the original question.

This would seem to be even more useful now that you have the annotation of the original questions.<p>

Recent or continued interest in a thread in the form of followups should warrant its position near the top. Otherwise people don't know to look at older threads for the new contributions. The threads that get no further follows fade away naturally as it should.

<p>

Just a thought,

The server error problem is site wide and beyond my control. Photo.net administrators are working on that problem.<p>

Essentially the one significant change I made - adding a date to the thread line - simply made the "B&W Photo - Film & Processing" forum consistent with the other b&w forums.<p>

I would tend to agree with the suggestion to prioritize threads by latest-response-first. However the software does not give me that option. The default is latest-<i>inititated thread</i>-first.<p>

My usual method for reading the forums is to click on the new threads first, then click on the "New Answers" option at the top of the page. That, in effect, accomplishes what Tonghang suggests.<p>

Unfortunately that also means that threads we've already read may well pop up again in the queue, making for less efficient scanning of forum activity.<p>

I'm hoping to eventually suggest some forum-specific changes to Brian but I know his hands are full right now. Some of these forums that receive low traffic but for which many, if not most, threads are valuable to the archives could be organized better for easier searching if I had better tools with which to work.<p>