"RobP, regardless of the nature of the IT glitch that is causing truncated thread titles, they should simply be checked before being posted, or corrected ASAP after posting. That should be simple, surely."

Ludwig, I agree that is best. I noticed that on one occasion, a couple of slightly inappropriate words I put in an opening post in the General forum were quietly excised - so someone is definitely reading them and editing the posts.

But, maybe the software is written in a way that doesn't allow the moderator to change the title. You would have to ask the OLO site administrator about that. It would also be a good thing to have exclusive privilege, as the author of a post, to change any errors in it, including the title. However, this may be a difficult feature to add in to the existing program - it all depends on how the computer code is written and structured. I imagine that if it was an easy fix, it would have been done by now.

I make my fair share of cut-and-paste errors too - reworking the construction of a sentence and leaving behind words that don't belong there any more. Wouldn't happen if it wasn't for computers...

Oh fwuaaaarrrk! No matter how hard you try, you can’t stop really sh!tty little errors inserting themselves into your posts….

“But we could expect the staff to proof-read and correct every post!” should read….

‘But we could NOT expect the staff to proof-read and correct every post’

Unfrigginbelievable! Pissbumpoocrapshitfuckcuntballs!! !!

How does this stuff happen…when I SO CAReFuLLY AnD THoROuGhLY read every post before posting !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !!

*The title is appearing as 'populate oF perish', not 'populate oR perish', so actually it still hasn't been fully corrected.*

Bronwyn, my actual title was "Populate or perish" - think again
George Pell.

Next it appeared as Popeulate of perish. It looked more like
Wendy's spelling to me lol, so I asked for it to be changed
to Populate or perish. At least they changed the popeulate.

I think that Graham must have just had a late night, or a bad
hair day that day :)

To me it just looks crappy, if the title is wrongly spelt.

The present OLO Articles index page, and the present OLO General Discussion index page are each presented in a sequential chronological listing in order of the time of first posting of the article, or opening post, respectively. How many articles or topics are displayed, and for how far back in time, is up to the OLO user. I find no fault with this indexing format.

There is an alternative way in which a topic listing can display.

That alternative is to display in order of recency of posting, with the most recent post being at the top of what may be only loosely called an index page. The article or topic title to which the post relates is shown, together with the userID of the poster. The time at which the post was made is typically expressed in terms of "x minutes (or hours, or days, or weeks) ago", although I don't see why the actual date and time of posting (as is present OLO practice) could not also be shown.

An example of forums that operate on this "recency of posting" display is the Ubuntu Linux Forums. See this link to the Ubuntu Community Cafe sub-forum for a demonstration of this method of indexing: http://ubuntuforums.org/forumdisplay.php?s=&daysprune=&f=11

I grant that the ability to locate a particular topic under a "recency of posting" display is made more difficult. You have to be familiar with the site search tools (and those tools have to work well, too) in order to find particular topics, especially ones that may not have had any recent posts made to them.

This difficulty could be overcome, and perhaps OLO could benefit in the process, by having BOTH indexing systems -sequential and "recency of post"- in operation, with the user being able to chose which display format best suits their current requirements. Perhaps such an option, software feasibility permitting, could be first trialled in the General Discussion area of OLO in order to see whether discussion is stimulated and/or facilitated.

Discoveribility of any such option would be important.

Forrest Gumpp: "That alternative is to display in order of recency of posting"

You can already do this. Just click on the heading "Last Post".

You can also display the discussions with most posts first by clicking on the "Posts" heading.

The "General Discussion Index" page is the most flexible here on OLO. I can only think of small improvements - like making its flexibility more obvious by saying changing the column heading buttons so you might be tempted to try then out. It would also be nice if it remembered your preferred layout.

rstuart,

Thanks for the tip re the different display orders fot the index page contents.

In all the time I have been viewing and posting on OLO I have never happened to mouse-over either of these two column headings on the General Discussions index page, and thus reveal them as clickable links or options.

I guess that makes all but the last sentence of my previous post a whole lot of egg-sucking rot, doesn't it? Ain't it always the way! If you want information or help as to how to use a site, just reveal your iggorance! Someone will set you right in double-quick time!

For some reason I always thought that the column heading 'posts' was, well, the number of posts; and there were the numbers of posts to each topic displayed in their respective little cells. Seemed fully descriptive enough to me. Too Easy!

Likewise, the column heading 'last post' fully described the display of the relative recency of the last post to that topic, with the added little self-evident bonus of the red script for posts having been made less than two hours before your loading of the index page. (But see: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=967&page=0 for a discussion of apparent aberration from this standard. I do not know whether the reasons for these aberrations were ever revealed.) Overall, clear as a bell!

It seems we all need the Little Rodent more than some of us realise! Just to be pedantic, the column headings are clickable on the Articles index page too. Wow!

Viewers and users could benefit from OLO having a Page page: a button (like a help button) on every Forum page that would bring up a page in which all of the features and options available to a user on that particular page are described, with, perhaps, a brief explanation of the potential usefulness of the feature to a user.

The age of the dinosaurs still continues!

Remember the website design dictum: "if it ain't obvious, it ain't obvious!".