Sidebar now shows updated threads, not posts

[Jameson]

Hi everyone,

The yellow sidebar on the right side of our homepage was set to display all new posts so we could all easily catch new posts without leaving the homepage, but lately it seems that the space is filled up with one or two threads which happen to have a lot of posts in them. The result is that too much information about one thread is displayed and not enough is displayed about others.

I just changed the settings for this space to now show which threads have been updated most recently. Now if a thread has 10 posts in 1 hour it won't take up the entire space - it will just display once, allowing other threads to be visible as well. Lastly, no content from any posts is shown anymore on our homepage but that is probably overall a good thing.

This change fixes a few issues at once and is way more logical in terms of displaying information efficiently, so I hope there are no objections, but as always feel free to leave your feedback below.

Jameson

 

[MarkFL]

I like that much better than the way it was before. I agree it is far more efficient, as it gives more information about what has recently been going on, and encourages the reviewing of the topics last updated, and is a handy alternative to New Posts which I use quite a bit.

 

[anemone]

The new look of MHB's sidebar is nothing short of brilliant and remarkable! Bravo, Jameson for this job well done!

 

[Bacterius]

Very nice, this is much more useful than the old version. Just one thing, though, I think those links should point to the last page of the thread instead of the first, since that's generally where the latest posts are Perhaps the icon should also be the avatar of the last poster instead of the thread maker, but I can see how this would be arguable, perhaps a user-specific option?

Great job nonetheless, the yellow sidebar conveys information better now.

 

[Jameson]

Good observations, Bacterius. Unfortunately this is a preset function that I can only turn on and off so I'll have to try some custom coding. It shouldn't be hard though. I already found some PHP code that will do something similar.

 

[ZaidAlyafey]

I would prefer that threads from the chat forum don't appear on the latest threads sidebar. I would rather see the maximum number of math topics .
I also encourage all MHB members to use a descriptive topic to explicitly explain the content of a certain thread as I sometime cannot deduce the content from the topic .

 

[Jameson]

Ok I fixed the link issue. They should now go to the last post in the thread instead of the first page. I've tried editing the template for the side block we're using now with some code from the previous template to try to change the avatar display to depend on the last post, not the original post, but can't get it to work. Shouldn't be that difficult to ask about though from somebody so I'll post back soon hopefully when this is fixed as well.

 

[ZaidAlyafey]

Ok I fixed the link issue. They should now go to the last post in the thread instead of the first page. I've tried editing the template for the side block we're using now with some code from the previous template to try to change the avatar display to depend on the last post, not the original post, but can't get it to work. Shouldn't be that difficult to ask about though from somebody so I'll post back soon hopefully when this is fixed as well.

I was already thinking about posting about that , I was more than once cheated by the avatar and thought there is a new post .