ET Forum Features
- Thread starter MarkBrown
- Start date
Baron
ET Founder
Good people are what makes a good message board, not features. The reason why people don't know what features they want is because there are actually very few features that people actually need beyond the basics. Basic messaging capabilities and a clean, easy-to-understand layout are really all that people need in order to form a solid community.
I like ET's simple nature. It's not cluttered with millions of options, blinking lights, animations, etc.
One gripe I have is with the "new post" icon feature, however. Often times I see the "new post" icon beside a thread so I click on it, only to find out that there has been no new posts. Or conversely, the "new post" icon will disappear even though I have not clicked on that thread. Does anyone else find this?
Barron - perhaps you can explain the inner workings of this feature? It is not significant for my ET experience but I am curious as to why it does this.
One gripe I have is with the "new post" icon feature, however. Often times I see the "new post" icon beside a thread so I click on it, only to find out that there has been no new posts. Or conversely, the "new post" icon will disappear even though I have not clicked on that thread. Does anyone else find this?
Barron - perhaps you can explain the inner workings of this feature? It is not significant for my ET experience but I am curious as to why it does this.
Baron
ET Founder
The new post icon is not real-time. It basically updates once every twenty minutes. So because of that, there is a possibility that certain situations can cause that icon to not be accurate. For example, if a user submits a new post but then that post is deleted for whatever reason within a few minutes, the new post icon may show that a new post exists, but in reality that new post has been removed before the new post icon updates again at the next 20 minute interval.
Obviously the solution would be for the new post icon to be completely real time, but the database load is simply too high to keep track of every post in every thread for every user simultaneously.
This goes back to the 20-minute delay. The feature keeps track of threads that have new posts since your last visit. So on your next visit to ET, you will see many threads that have a new post icon. You have 20 minutes to visit those threads. After that, all of the new post icons will only reflect what happened over the past 20 minutes.