AskWoody Improvements

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EDITORIAL By Will Fastie, Editor We continue to make changes to AskWoody, to make it easier and faster for you to use. Susan Bradley and I have been s
[See the full post at: AskWoody Improvements]

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lmacri, doriel, SueW, jburk07

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As a subscriber for many years, from Windows Secrets XP SP3  to Windows 10, I would like to thank all the contributors, past and present, for their outstanding work, which has assisted me in many ways solving my problems in the the “IT Jungle”. The revised format looks good !

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Steve, Will Fastie

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Here is a suggestion for an improvement:

Place the link(s) for “older entries” and “newer entries” on top of each page as well as at the bottom of each page. I almost always read the posts oldest to newest–especially if I have not visited the site for a day or two or more. If read that way, then upon reaching the newest post on a page one must return to the bottom of the page to switch to newer entries. With the links at both the top and bottom of each page, there would be no extra step involved in switching pages, whichever way one chooses to read entries on the site.

I suggested this change to Woody quite a while ago and he thought it is an excellent idea.

So far all changes look great!

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KWGuy, jburk07, Will Fastie

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MikeyD215 wrote:

Place the link(s) for “older entries” and “newer entries” on top of each page as well as at the bottom of each page. I almost always read the posts oldest to newest–especially if I have not visited the site for a day or two or more. If read that way, then upon reaching the newest post on a page one must return to the bottom of the page to switch to newer entries. With the links at both the top and bottom of each page, there would be no extra step involved in switching pages, whichever way one chooses to read entries on the site.

I have never seen such links here, how am I missing this ?

Just because you don't know where you are going doesn't mean any road will get you there.

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You never read to the bottom of the blog page?

And never looked for older blog entries (before blog search was available)?

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rc primak, wavy

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Blog? Oh I thought we were talking about the forum where such feature has been absent and IMHO much needed (sorry to flog that poor dead horse again).
Currently the search on “rt n” hack is needed to scan for unread forum posts. I would be in favor of temporally linear posts, find the last you have not read and start reading. (oh that poor horse)

On the other hand this has always been an annoyance.

Previously, the feedback link took the reader to the article’s blog post, where another click was required to get to the forum. Now the feedback link is nonstop — directly to the article’s associated forum topic in the Lounge. No delay in getting that opinion off your chest!

Keep up the good work and improvements!

Just because you don't know where you are going doesn't mean any road will get you there.

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rc primak, Will Fastie

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How about a floating top of page and bottom of page “button” site-wide?

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I am a long-time subscriber, having started with the Langa list many years ago. About 10 years ago I switched from windows to Mac, but I continue find articles in this newsletter that are quite helpful. Are usually read my email on my phone, but I find it quite difficult to do so with the newsletter unless I switch to landscape mode. I’m not sure why the font is so small or even if there’s anything you can do about that, but it’s pretty hard to decipher on my iPhone 12. Since you are in the midst of making some visual changes, I thought I would pass that along.

Keep up the good work!

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Thanks for the direct link to the forum page (which I used to get here)! Going to the blurb was always a minor annoyance and extra step that brought up the question “Why?” every single time.

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doriel, Steve, rc primak, Will Fastie, wavy

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We continue to make changes to AskWoody, to make it easier and faster for you to use.

Speaking of making it faster, is there any way to speed up searching?  Quite often I’ll want to search the Forum for info on a KB article (e.g., “4535680”).  So I’ll enter the KB number into the “Search Forums” field and hit Enter.  But then it takes what seems like forever to return any results.

(Ok, I’m exaggerating.  “forever” = around 20 seconds or so.  But it sure feels like forever when I’m trying to get info on several different KB numbers, one after the other; and I keep watching the bouncing ball on the browser tab for nearly half a minute with each search.)

Is there anything that can be done to speed up the forum search engine?

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I’ll reach out to Milan and ask.

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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Steve, rc primak, Tom-R

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Tom-R wrote:

I’m exaggerating.  “forever” = around 20 seconds or so

20 seconds is pretty good for a straight text search – the KB number could be anywhere. The site is very snappy these days, you need to be more patient. 

cheers, Paul

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wavy, SueW, rc primak

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[rc primak]

Something else seems to have changed. For the first time ever, I got blacklisted from the Lounge tonight, apparently for making too many posts in too short a period of time. This I believe is changed behavior by the filters used for the Lounge. I need to get unblocked!

And if this is indeed a change, I will try to remember to combine posts per thread, per day, to minimize the chance of this happening again.

I post infrequently, but often have several things to post in one thread.

(And now I’m back. What???)

-- rc primak

• This reply was modified 4 years, 1 month ago by rc primak.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 1 month ago by rc primak.

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doriel

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It’s not a recent change, it’s the CleanTalk plug in that reacted to your quick posting in succession behavior.

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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I would hope that people signed in legitimately (especially MVPs) could be exempted from that. Anonymous posts OK, if signed in users must be blocked does not this imply you have a user authentication problem ?

Just because you don't know where you are going doesn't mean any road will get you there.

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OscarCP, Alex5723

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Coment blocked from posting in red angry letters: It happened to me, first time ever, very recently, and I resolved it myself by guessing what might be objected to by the not-very-clever “Clean Talk” plug-in robot and changed that replacing it with something more or less equivalent. Clicked “submit” and it got posted OK. What was objected was a long link I had put in the blocked version of the same comment. (There never was “unclean” language or lude/rude/personally offensive/religious/political sentences or paragraphs in any of this, by the way; just a link that the robot “thought” might be spam, it seems.)

From what I am seeing happening to others and now, once, to me as well, all of this very recently, I must respectfully disagree with our Patch Lady here, and state that the plug in might have been around before in the AskWoody system, but this blocking is something I’ve never noticed before, in my three plus years as a donor/paying member in good standing of AskWoody, but is now something people have been mentioning and not exactly happy about it, all very recently, both here and also in private email correspondence, by the way. So it is happening and it is new.

So it looks to me that some (probably light) fine tuning of that robot might be one more way to improve this site and cut down on possible and possibly unnecessary grumbling.

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV

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I would like to see with every ‘Recent Topics’ and ‘Recent Replies’ posts an header with the related topic so I wont open a new/replied post for a topic that I am not interested with.

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They already do, in the side bar or via the forum page.
Where are you not seeing this?

cheers, Paul

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I want to see the topic detailed with every line listed on the right.

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wavy

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That was the point. Because it is.

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b wrote:

That was the point. Because it is.

What point ?
Only after opening a post I am aware the topic it relates to. I want to know beforehand.

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Every link that you click on under Recent Replies or Recent Topics is the Topic Title.

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I mean the topic/forum (W7, Office, MacOS, W10, Productivity, Hardware..)

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[b]

Aaah, the Forum.

It was confusing because you said the Topic three times.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 1 month ago by b.

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Alex5723

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One thing I just noticed is working much better, but might not have been mentioned yet:

When looking in “Search for Topics/New Posts: Last n days”, for example, sometimes I find a new comment in a thread I am interested in, listed on the column along the right side of the page. Until recently, clicking on the time when it was posted, just above the name of the author, I would be taken to the very top of that thread, and from there, unless it was a very short thread, I would would often be unable to find the new comment before running out of time and being forced to give up the search.

Today I was doing that and: voilá! I landed directly on the new comment in question!

Just to make sure I was not being delusional, I repeated that same action with other new posts chosen randomly. The result of this experiment being that it is true, this is working now!

This is what I call an improvement.

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV

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I don’t remember when it wasn’t like that. The whole point of that list is to be able to view the recent post.

cheers, Paul

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It was like that, then it wasn’t, now it is again.

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV

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When?

cheers, Paul

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In my experience: First never, until a month or two ago this year; then all the time; not now, so it seems it is back to the past. That’s all I can say. Now, back to improving this site.

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV

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[doriel]

Apart of problems when posting several consecutive replies or modyfying “too quickly” (I get blocked as “spammer” then), improvements seems to be nice. Functionality remains, aslo new features are included and subjectively I would say that site is “more responsive” now – understand quicker.

Thank you very much for your effort!

But Id like to ask a question, maybe whole new topic could be appropriate – If I post some part of source code, where there are several repetitive lines, I get blocked as spammer too.
I mean if you put four IF sententces into post, it wont let me post that source code.
But in the source code, you must do repetitive tasks. Cant it evaluate, that in the code section, there can be sentence repeated several times? I always use Text editor, never visual.

Dell Latitude 3420, Intel Core i7 @ 2.8 GHz, 16GB RAM, W10 22H2 Enterprise

HAL3000, AMD Athlon 200GE @ 3,4 GHz, 8GB RAM, Fedora 29

PRUSA i3 MK3S+

• This reply was modified 4 years, 1 month ago by doriel. Reason: oh grammar

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[NaNoNyMouse]

doriel wrote:

(I get blocked as “spammer” then)

I would suggest (as if I have done before) that registered, named users, who have already had a certain number of posts accepted, should not subsequently have their posts checked for spam

Only anonymous users’ posts should get checked for spam. Trusted users may still have their posts manually removed for site TOS violations, of course, but they should not be subjected to the indignity of being labelled as spammers

(Perhaps the forum software doesn’t accommodate such a simple requirement though?)

• This reply was modified 4 years, 1 month ago by NaNoNyMouse. Reason: speling mitsake

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Moonshine, Charlie, doriel, OscarCP, wavy

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That seems like good improvement to make! Im not the only one, Look at this topic https://www.askwoody.com/forums/topic/calculate-string-expression-word2003-vba/, post 2352722.

It happens even to registered users sometimes.

Dell Latitude 3420, Intel Core i7 @ 2.8 GHz, 16GB RAM, W10 22H2 Enterprise

HAL3000, AMD Athlon 200GE @ 3,4 GHz, 8GB RAM, Fedora 29

PRUSA i3 MK3S+

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Moonshine

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