Boy, ticalc just gets better and better, I love it. First comment :)

Yep, Although now they have to add to basically all pages, under the screenshot, description, and animated screenshot, the description of what it means for the calculator challenged.

Yeah, the new features are cool. My only gripe is that authors still get screwed if they change their e-mail address or some other detail. Authors should somehow be able to edit their information at any time, so their files won't get separated.

Authors can email me (filearchive@ticalc.org) and ask me to change their author info. This I can do very easily :)
--
Phil

I like pie.


Interpret it as you wish.

Great, this gives people a whole new reason to whine at ticalc.org. Prepare for a whole slew of "Why didn't my TI-81 BASIC Guessing game get a 'featured program'?!?!?!"

Good: "Why didn't this person's program become featured? I tried it out the other day and I really liked it."
Bad: "Why didn't my program get featured? I spent hours on it! YOU SUCK!"
Worse: "YOU SUCK!"

--BlueCalx

"YOU SUCK!"

--Racko

hrmmm i think paint pro should be featured :) but i'd rather wait until i release the grayscale version :) which should be out pretty soon..it's already working :)

I have a suggestion for another update: on news items with over 100 comments on them, there shoulc be a few pages for comments with about 50 comments per page, so that the page doesn't take forever to load, especialy for people who just want to read the entire news item.

Of course, this would break up the threaded discussions if there was a limit of posts per page. Maybe a JavaScript expandable box could work, where all posts start out as subject headers or the first line of a post, and users could expand the box if they wanted to see or read more. Also, if people have slow internet connections, is it possible to make a text-only version that doesn't rely on tables, just indentations? That would drastically speed up the loading time.

~ferich

Other than that, if you do change it, don't change it to one of those message boards with Next Thread Previous Thread Next Post Previous Post types in which you can only view one post or one thread at a time. Those take so long to read, and with the number of posts made on this site per day, I certainly wouldn't take the time to read even all of one topic's posts. The format right now is good, but I did pass on reading the 400 posts news item because when it was only 200 something it took forever to load. (400 posts x 2k per post avg = 800k ~= 1 megabyte AGGGGGGH!). I think a script that divided it into pages between threads would be the best idea.

That's my 25¢ (oh, did I take too much?)

Nick Chaves

That is what I was thinking: divide pages between threads.

Good idea! I had been thinking about this problem for awhile, but hadn't given any thought to a solution.

For people with slow internet connections, (namely, moi) that post with four hundred some comments from a few days ago takes two or three minutes to load. :/

I have a very slow connection (a shared 56k that connects at 21600), and the post with over 400 comments took at least 5 minutes to load, and then it was blank where the posts were supposed to be! Before that, when I got to see the posts, it took forever just to scroll a little on the page (when there were less than 300 comments), probably becasue I have only 32 MB of RAM (pc100), as my computer has a decent speed (350 mHz)

Yeah, it's definitely messy when an article gets so many comments. However, only 17 of about 350 articles (i.e. 5%) that have been posted since we opened commenting actually have 100 or more comments.

We're looking into some possible changes, though, and assuming we keep commenting at all, a very likely change would be a Slashdot-like rating system to let you display only comments above a certain threshold. This would keep pages smaller since "demoted" comments (a significant percentage, I predict) would be hidden by default, and this might avoid the size problem in most cases. Then again, maybe not.

Doing multiple pages is tricky since, in theory, there could be a hundred replies to a single comment, and splitting it up would interrupt the flow of discussion. If we just displayed subjects it would be easier, but most people don't bother to type a subject.

Still, if you've got some ideas for this, please send us some mail. But please keep in mind that we won't make any changes until after the unmoderated period is over, and even then coding and testing will take some time.

Chris

What about the surveys? They all have over 100 comments on them.

Yee haw... Moderation!

I don't know if this will work, only time will tell. I still think the POTM should be the same as before but with a basic and asm slot for each calculator. If you keep a list of what programs have won for what calculator it will be so very easy to remove past winners...

Kind of off-topic: update the awards page. It was last updated June/July...

Probably because I created the awards page and then everyone forgot about it...

The featured programs/POTM integration was my idea. So if you hate it, blame me. But I think that it will work really really well (assuming that they are able to spot good programs without testing them).

Yay Kirk!