gotta be honest -- I never could figure out how to bold or italicize in the previous life of MOL. I am hoping when it comes back it easier to figure out!:smile:
Thanks Joan, I thought I must have missed something with the most recent old board. I wasn't around five years ago. I'm really glad the new board has spell check! I sure know I'll be using it!
What I like best about the new system, more or less in order:
1) RSS feeds 2) Front page with a list of all the active topics - so you don't need to drill down into Virtual Cafe, Soapbox, or whatever 3) You can see how many new posts are on a topic since you last read. I like that a lot. 4) I also like that you get automatically jumped to the last post you saw on a thread. 5) HTML editing (never could get used to the other system and almost always had to use the buttons to format). Plus HTML allows you to do stuff that was never easy or even possible before. I doubt I'll ever use it, but I like to see what other people can do. 6) Great range of smiley icons (though I miss the "beer" one) 7) Education topic is a single area again - hope it stays that way 8) spell check
What I'm not sure about:
1) whispering - I don't really understand how this works yet. If somebody whispers to me, will I see a "private" post or will I get an e-mail? I'd prefer the e-mail actually. Or at least if possible, allow people to send e-mail to a user. 2) waiting to see if the old material can somehow be resuscitated. I think it would be a real shame to lose so much local history - and in some cases deep, personal history - but OTOH I have some concept of the complexity of migrating the old data into the new format, and I feel for D&J. 3) Obviously, the return of search will be helpful. I know it will be here eventually.
What I know I don't like:
1) I agree with nan (on a different thread) that something about this font is hard on my eyes. I'm online constantly - at least 12 hrs/day - and I've never had a problem with feeling that the text was blurry or causing me eyestrain. This font seems blurry and is giving me eyestrain. Maybe that's a good thing as it might reduce the amount of time I spend here.
So I'd say that for now, the pluses outweigh the minuses and not-sures by a pretty substantial margin.
The old MOL didn't require you to press the buttons to format text. I never pushed the buttons, once I learned what codes the buttons generated. But never mind that, because it's in the past.
The old MOL didn't require me to enter my name and password. I was always logged on, even after closing and reopening my browser. I wonder why you had to enter them every time you posted. But again, it's in the past.
I think it depended on your profile ... and possibly also your browser version and/or settings. On my computer, I only had to enter my username and password the first time I searched (or logged on, but I never did that) and then it was always there for the rest of the session. However, that was not the case on other computers I sometimes use. I never bothered to try to figure out what setting caused this. (Probably related to the fact that my computer always presents me with drop-downs for fill-in fields (usernames, address, phone number, etc.) and they always seem to be right. I.e. it presents me phone numbers for phone number fields and zip codes for zip code fields, etc. I never consciously recall invoking an option for this, though. It just seems to be how it was configured from the start. But it doesn't happen on my spouse's computer.)
mwoodwalk