What do you want to know first when you come to the forum?

Day in Pictures is kind of an experiment shoehorned into the existing app. That it works at all is surprising. :) I agree that the commenting flow is suboptimal. I haven't given much thought to it beyond what it is. The border on the individual thumbnails indicates there are comments, not whether or not you've viewed them. The thumbnails on the index page show what's new or has new comments. Agreed, it's not ideal.

Regarding the photo order, in my experience it uploads in the order that I select them in the file dialog. In fact, it does that pretty reliably. In my case I'm using Chrome, and I did the test in Windows. At the end of that day, the ordering is probably set by the operating system or whatever owns the "open" dialog, which is out of my (or Silverlight's) control. But like I said, it uploads for me in the order that I select.

Perhaps I need to do a newsletter e-mail to explain the "newest post" links.

That shortcut is like having a FlashPass except it is free:)

Jeff said:
Perhaps I need to do a newsletter e-mail to explain the "newest post" links.

Can I ask again? (in case you missed it)

Why doesn't clicking on the title of the thread just do the same thing as the "newest post" link?

I'm not sure. Maybe because it's not the expected behavior? Maybe you're right though, and I need to just force people into it.

Just wait and see what I have in mind for paging topics...

Well, if someone comes along and hasn't read a 5 plus page thread, they may want to start at the beginning. Count me in as someone who didn't know that link was there. I always expected some type of arrow or list of page numbers link just below the topic title.

I'd be fine with the title of the thread being the jump to link as long as there was still something in place to indicate which threads I've viewed vs. which ones I haven't.

I'll have to try Chrome with Day in Pictures. I'd be willing to download and install it for that reason alone. I'm on IE8 using Vista and/or XP SP3. It's queues the files and uploads them in the order they are on my PC (alpha numeric). But, once they are done loading and the page comes up to title the thread and comment on the photos, they are in no discernible order. Seemingly completely random. The only other factor I can think of is that I'm letting Silverlight do my resizing. I could try doing my own resize before uploading to see if that would make a difference.

I actually clicked the >> link the other day hoping it was a "newest post" link but that just shows a preview. I always assumed the blue/green icon was just to indicate new posts, and never actually tried clicking it until I read this thread. :) I was actually going to suggest you add a newest-post link to save on bandwidth/unnecessary page loads, but it's been there all this time.

Tekwardo said:
Well, if someone comes along and hasn't read a 5 plus page thread, they may want to start at the beginning.

The 'newest post' link takes you to the first post in the thread that you haven't read yet. That's the key.

If you haven't read a thread yet (regardless of length), you go to page 1, post one. If you're read it previously (still regardless of length) it goes to the first new post since you last looked at the thread.

Seems kinda common sense to me. I honestly didn't realize people surfed through looking for where they left off. What a pain in the ass.

Then again, I never really thought about the idea that I had to click a seperate icon to see the newest post in a thread rather than clicking the thread title before this, so take that for what it's worth. :)

Silverlight isn't doing the resizing... that's happening on the server. That isn't my preference, but unfortunately you have to use an outside library to do it, and there isn't a good one yet that I've found.

I'll have to look deeper and see if I can work around the problem. It's not high priority though, at the moment.

I surf this site almost identically to the way Gonch does. The only thing I really want is a link to the most recent posts near the top of the main page instead of hidden as an afterthought on the bottom of the main page.

Jeff: Really looking forward to seeing what you can do with MVC. I am using it for a few web sites I am working on right now and I love it. Are you doing the full blown TDD with the new site?

Lord Gonchar said:
Seems kinda common sense to me. I honestly didn't realize people surfed through looking for where they left off. What a pain in the ass.

Well, the vast majority of the time the newest post is on the last page of the thread, so I just click the >| button and page down to the bottom. Unless it's a really active topic, usually the newest post is the one at the bottom or a few before it. Not the most elegant method, but it wasn't annoying enough for me to bring it up until the question was asked here. :)

That makes sense.

Lord Gonchar said:
The 'newest post' link takes you to the first post in the thread that you haven't read yet. That's the key.

Occasionally I will begin reading an existing thread that I hadn't previously read. But, since I use the "mark all read" button. This is a case where I would want to possibly start at the beginning. Other times, I'm searching for a previously posted comment in a long running thread. Using the search feature doesn't really help you find an individual post. So in those cases I will often start at the beginning of a topic and search post by post.

I'm not stating these facts as a reason to change or not change something. I'm just siting examples of when you wouldn't necessarily want to go to the most recent unread post.

Kick The Sky said:
Really looking forward to seeing what you can do with MVC. I am using it for a few web sites I am working on right now and I love it. Are you doing the full blown TDD with the new site?

I would call it more "test influenced development," actually. Doing test first makes sense when you need to drive the design of something totally new (for example, a function that calculates how many pages there are for a thread based on the number of replies), but there's really nothing new about most service classes and such with methods called "Get" and "Create" or whatever. The only thing you end up testing is the persistence of values up and down the hierarchy.

Holy crap! Count me in the idiots' camp as well. After catching up on this thread, I went ahead and clicked on the green 'plus'..... It's like magic. :)

Well, you're only an idiot if it's obvious, and it's not, so you're off the hook.

I guess it was only obvious to me since I work with designers and instinctively hover over anything when I see new pages (like when this version of CB came out). Only now do I recognize the suffering others have endured.... ;)

Didn't anyone watch the videos?! ;)

I paid someone to watch for me. I think I overpaid because they took lousy notes.

(raises hand)

I watched them, Carrie, because Jeff asked CoasterBuzz users at on time to. I'm a good boy. Can I have my cookie now?

I have been using the last viewed post feature for a very long tine now.

:)