New format is excellent

[Phong]

Tom,

Thanks much for all the efforts to accommodate so many different tastes and styles. And yes, I much prefer a more minimal look.

- Phong

P.S. Mobile Alabama sounds like a cute name for a streamlined option. Reference to the mobile hand devices, I suppose ?

[jnantz]

this site is great!

thanks so much for the "facelift".
i can only imagine the hard work it took
to do all this.

- john

[Tom Westbrook]

Phong: Yes it was for PDA use and was pretty bare bones, tho was pretty awful once you got down to message level--still have all the relpy/quote buttons and things.

John: Thanks! it wasn't too horrible, but i wouldn't want to do it every day.

[Huw Evans]

I'd better add my thanks. I'm generally a bit of a curmudgeon about forum software, preferring things as simple and as much text-based as possible - a hangover from days when bandwidth was in pretty short supply and Usenet was all there was - but this new format seems to have kept things still reasonably minimalistic, and there are even a few options for switching off unnecessary stuff. So all in all I'm much happier than I expected to be. Having checked a few other similar forums it appears the pages of this one are still loading with a lot less kB than most.

So, well done and thanks to everyone concerned. :-)

[Emmanuel BIGLER]

Congratulations for all the work done updating the LF forum software.

There are far too many features in the new software, most of them I'll never use, however there is one which is absolutely superb, it is the ability to correct your own posts !!
If I understand well, an author can also delete one of his posts if he find it inappropriate after thinking twice about it !!

I also like the ability to display a simple listing of all groups like in the previous software. So you can continue like before and take benefit gradually of new features !! superb !
I also appreciate the job done to store and sort previous posts in the archive ! that was certainly a major task !!

[Tom Westbrook]

Thanks for the comments everyone!

Emmanuel: I'm glad you brought this editing feature up.

Yes you can edit your own posts & Thread titles. There is a 60 minute time limit imposed. I believe that also applies to deletes, too. A deleted post still leaves a place-holder and the moderators can look at the previous contents and permanently delete it if they see fit.

We may change the timeout if it seems needed. Edit's are experimental, and if we see much abuse of it going on we'll have to reevaluate.

The archive import was a requirement before we even thought about moving. Luckily the software has am import facility I managed to customize to our needs. It worked pretty well.

[Sanders McNew]

Tom, I second Phong's observations. The new site is impressive but I found the old one much easier and faster to browse. Sanders.