Poll: Do you use the NazNet Quick Menu?

[G R 'Scott' Cundiff]

An older feature of NazNet is the Quick Menu. On many pages, if you double click away from a link you get a popup menu with navigation around the website. I wonder how many people actually use the NazNet Quick Menu to get around the site. The vast majority of our users never leave the forum pages and there are plenty of links in the forum for NazNet Navigation.

So, do you use the NazNet Quick Menu these days?

The poll will be open a couple of weeks.

[Dana Grant]

An older feature of NazNet is the Quick Menu. On many pages, if you double click away from a link you get a popup menu with navigation around the website. I wonder how many people actually use the NazNet Quick Menu to get around the site. The vast majority of our users never leave the forum pages and there are plenty of links in the forum for NazNet Navigation.

So, do you use the NazNet Quick Menu these days?

The poll will be open a couple of weeks.


I use it every time I come to NazNet -- so I use it actually more often than a little bit!!!

[Marsha Lynn]

The Quick Menu popped up last night when I double-clicked while trying to do something else. I had forgotten all about it.

I mainly use the "Quick Links" item from the menu bar to get to "today's posts". I miss the "Who's Online" feature. It was useful to get a list of posts that currently were attracting the attention of various people. I often found threads by that method that I had missed entirely during the time they spent on the "today's posts" list. I suppose that going around looking over people's shoulders to see what they are reading is an obnoxious practice that deserves to be prohibited, but it was interesting.

In considering the Quick Menu idea, I'm not sure I would ever use it the way it is. However, if it would give me a simpler way to get into specific forums under the "General Discussion" heading, I would find it useful. Currently, if I want to, say, check the theology forum, the quickest way I know to do it is to scroll to the bottom of the page I'm already on and select it from the forum list. Any other method (other than a direct bookmark) seems to involve loading an intermediate page, not something that appeals to us dial-up people.

The other thing I notice about the Quick Menu is that, at least in Netscape, it's at the top of the page rather than floating. If I pulled it up right now, I would have to scroll back up the page to actually see it. And, as I just discovered, to my great grief, if I were to then choose an option from it, all these carefully constructed words would be swept into a pile of 1's and 0's and tossed back into the bit bucket and I would have to start from scratch on my post. Oh, the sorrow of words lost. Replacement words never give quite the same sense of satisfaction. Making a followed link on the Quick Menu open in a new tab/window might be a nice feature. Maybe. Or I could learn not to use it in the middle of posting, as I already have learned not to use the "back" feature on the browser to go back and check the post to which I'm replying.

So did you want comments or just votes?

:fav13

Marsha

An older feature of NazNet is the Quick Menu. On many pages, if you double click away from a link you get a popup menu with navigation around the website. I wonder how many people actually use the NazNet Quick Menu to get around the site. The vast majority of our users never leave the forum pages and there are plenty of links in the forum for NazNet Navigation.

So, do you use the NazNet Quick Menu these days?

The poll will be open a couple of weeks.

[G R 'Scott' Cundiff]

I use it every time I come to NazNet -- so I use it actually more often than a little bit!!!

I don't think it is used as much as it once was, but I am glad it is still getting some use.

However, if it would give me a simpler way to get into specific forums under the "General Discussion" heading, I would find it useful. Currently, if I want to, say, check the theology forum, the quickest way I know to do it is to scroll to the bottom of the page I'm already on and select it from the forum list. Any other method (other than a direct bookmark) seems to involve loading an intermediate page, not something that appeals to us dial-up people.

I will think about ways to make it easier to hop around the various forums. One of the things on my mind is that when I, say add a new forum to NazNet Community everything throughout the site is automatically changed in the proper places to reflect that. That is, everything but that quick menu. I have to update it in a completely separate process. It isn't a big deal, but if no one is using it, I would rethink whether it is worth doing or not.


The other thing I notice about the Quick Menu is that, at least in Netscape, it's at the top of the page rather than floating.

That kind of stuff is the bane of web programmers -- you design something that works perfectly in one browser only to have it not work at all, or at least not the same in another.

So did you want comments or just votes?

Hey, this is NazNet - there are always comments! Yeah, they are welcome.

[Jeremy D. Scott]

The other thing I notice about the Quick Menu is that, at least in Netscape, it's at the top of the page rather than floating. If I pulled it up right now, I would have to scroll back up the page to actually see it.

It's the same with Firefox.

[G R 'Scott' Cundiff]

It's the same with Firefox.

Okay, you folks got me interested, and since it is a rainy day off for me, I fooled around with it and got it to scrolling in Firefox. However, I may have broken something else -- if I did, I will have to put it back. I won't tell what I think I may have broke -- but will wait for any reported problems. Otherwise, I will leave it as it is.

[Marsha Lynn]

Okay, you folks got me interested, and since it is a rainy day off for me, I fooled around with it and got it to scrolling in Firefox.

Works for Netscape, too. Thanks.

I will think about ways to make it easier to hop around the various forums.

Actually, I got to thinking about it and realized that when I'm looking at 'today's posts' all the forums that they come from are on the right-hand side of the list. I should practice remembering to use the current posts' location link to get to the various forums when I want to zero in on one.

What I really want is "My NazNet" so that I can choose which forums are included on my "today's posts" list and ignore the others when I just pop in to see what's happening. That would also allow the men to voluntarily opt out of having the W2W forum included on their "new posts" or "today's posts" list.

Since you're so good at granting wishes, Scott, I figure I may as well share mine.

:basic05

Marsha

[G R 'Scott' Cundiff]

What I really want is "My NazNet" so that I can choose which forums are included on my "today's posts" list and ignore the others when I just pop in to see what's happening. That would also allow the men to voluntarily opt out of having the W2W forum included on their "new posts" or "today's posts" list.

Since you're so good at granting wishes, Scott, I figure I may as well share mine.
Marsha

The ability to ignore specific forums is do-able to some extent, at least via a work-a-round I know of. The problem is that I have to create a specific "group" people can join for every combination of "want to see+don't want to see" that everyone might want. If you look at the list of forums and then imagine all the various combinations people would come up with you can guess what a huge job it could become.

So, a better thing to point out is that this is a very common Vbulletin request. Hopefully, it will be coded into a future release.

Meanwhile, I did listen to one thing you asked about. I reworked the quick menu to allow you to use it to jump directly to the forum of choice. That, in itself took over an hour. However, it is my day off and it has been raining all day (2-3 inches so far), so it was a good day to toy with the computer.

[Jeremy D. Scott]

Wow! The new menu is pleasing to the eye! Maybe I'll use it more often now. :fav18

[Gina Stevenson]

'Looks OK, however, just a wee bit too much "messin' with" it, Scott! There's not one place where one can get to the FRONT PAGE; there's a list of all the forums that one has to choose from. THEN you backtrack from the "general discussion" or whichever one chooses, after peeking at old w2w, with it probably recording that you've already visited that forum, when you did not mean to.

Need something back on it, PLEASE, that takes one straight to the "NN Community" page where *all* forums are listed, so one can find there, also, the "NEW POSTS" that are not listed on any one single forum. Use it EVERYDAY, sometimes more than once/day, to get to the "NEW POSTS" list. :(

Will be hopefully watching for a link added for the main page (not NN "welcome" page, which also isn't MAIN PAGE). Thanks!! ;)

Wow! The new menu is pleasing to the eye! Maybe I'll use it more often now. :fav18

[G R 'Scott' Cundiff]

I added it.


'Looks OK, however, just a wee bit too much "messin' with" it, Scott!