Keep threads in active status longer

[Sunspot Baby]

We are getting so much traffic that threads shown on the Home Page Portal are often only a couple of hours old.

If you hit the forum only once or twice a day, you have to search through the discussion boards to find items you wanted to follow or any new ones you might have missed.

I know we get an email that someone has posted on a thread in which we have participated but that is not always a handy way to do things.

Could we have extra pages to keep threads open for say 24 hrs, so you can just browse through and see them?

The way it is now, you could completely miss a new thread if there had been no activity in a couple of hours.

George

[SeaKing]

I agree George, this is a very popular spot for either single or multi hullers. The threads can slip by quickly. 24 hours may be too short of a window, especially when we go sailing on the weekends.

Chester

[Alan Wheeler]

I assume you guy's are entering via the "home page portal". If you click on "discussion board", you will see the entire forum. Any new post that you have missed is higlighted by a Golden Anchor. After you have read all the posts, the anchor will turn blue. If you have read all you want to, you click on the tab at the bottom of the page to clear all forums and all Anchors reset to blue reading and waiting top turn gold when a new post comes in again. That is how keep up with all that is going on.
However, I understand what you are asking. I will ask if the homepage can have more pages.

[Pblais]

From the beginning of April to now we have had a 10% increase in pages viewed. It means traffic is up. Over time we generally have slower period off season than during the sailing season in the northern hemisphere (more people and a large US component). We are going into the sailing season now and traffic is up from that as well as a general growth. So we really are growing fast since Andy has kicked things up a few notches technology wise. We actually have not declined at any point just the rate of growth.

There is a practical limit to the portal page since it is by definition a single page view. Making it a bit bigger really won't get to what you want. A chronological view might be more what you want but as you note you need to dig into the sections to see more detail.

You can set the number of threads to see per page and I think this may help you even though it seems to indicate it's only messages per thread page. I just changed mine and it went up.

Number of posts per page can be set to 40 and the thread cutoff age setting to all will show more threads on the portal page if you don't already have these settings. More than that and it is getting into a large download for the first web page and we really have to watch that limit too. We really don't want a huge portal.

It does not do a few things I would like to see and that is use page activity and other factors to decide what gets portal page billing. Right now it's all pages based on the last x number of messages. A thread can not be in more than one slot but each hit raises it up to the top where it starts to fall.

Try some of these settings to see if you like them better. A few of the options are relatively new since you have been a member a while you may not have noticed them.
From the control panel edit your settings. You can see the above items may be defaulted to something else. If you have a fast connection then having everything on wide open is fine, but if you want to be more selective to use less bandwidth you may want to try them out.

[knottybuoyz]

There's always the "New Posts" in the toolbar on the portal and discussion board pages as well as under "Quick Links" you can select "Today's Posts"

[Andy R]

Yes, the New Posts and Today's Posts are probably the best solution for now. We will have a pretty major software upgrade soon and when that happens I will look at other solutions to see if I can come up with some more interfaces for you all.

[Boracay]

When I first log on I hit the "new posts" button.

When I have finished I hit the "Discussion Board" button, scroll down and click on "Mark Forums Read".

There are just too many posts now to read them all.

[Ex-Calif]

When I enter the forum I hit "Quick Links -> Subscribed threads" first.

This gives me a list of any thread I have subscribed to or posted in. Those with new posts are bolded in black.

Then I hit "New Posts" to see if there is anything new I want to jump in on.

I used to try and keep up with everything but with the increase in traffic and members it's impossible.