Next In Thread Button

Guest Discussion
1

Folks,

By popular demand, I’ve added a “Prev in Thread” and “Next in Thread” button. It was actually requested some time ago, and I got it partially working then. The additional demand in the last couple days spurred me to complete the modification.

Now if you view a message in “Threaded” view, you will be able to navigate up and down through the thread by clicking the “Prev in Thread” and/or “Next in Thread” buttons.

The “Previous” and “Next” buttons still work, as before, to move to the next different thread and previous different thread.

This change is NOT supported in the forum software. For those with previous programming/sysadmin experience, this change was implemented as a “messy Perl hack”. For those of you without programming experience, that means that it may be unreliable and/or broken (but I hope not).

If things get really weird, you can always view the messages in “Flat mode” (as I did not modify that portion of the software).

But if you do notice any strange or broken behavior, please let me know ASAP!

Steve

2

Thankyou! A good step forward!

Timm Preusser

3

Steve, thanks for the hack, it helps.

But, I admit being confused by the sequencing. There is an odd reverse-chronological order to the threads. Perhaps this is common in discussion groups, but I find it confusing my sensibilities of what “next in thread” will mean when I click on the button.

The “Flat” sequencing makes sense to me because the messages appear to be in time sequence by reply.

The “Thread” sequencing seems to be in “newest first” reply (reverse chronological order) although if everyone replies to the replies, it appears in chronological order.

If I have confused you too, then perhaps someone else can explain what to expect for the best reading order.

Cheers
Rick

p.s. Simply stated, what I want to know is “what have I missed since the last time I read this thread?”

4

If I have confused you too, then perhaps someone else can explain what to expect for the best reading order.

Rick,

The entire topic is confusing! :slight_smile: Though I hate to go into a bunch of non-Cirrus details on the board, I might as well explain the difficulty of the prev-in-thread and next-in-thread buttons.

Let’s say you have a post called A, and replies B, C, D, E, and F that were posted in that chronological order (i.e. post A, then post B, then post C, etc.):

However, say that hierarchically, they look like this:

A Original Post
B Reply to A
C Reply to B
E Reply to B
D Reply to A

Note that the order here is shown as they would appear on the forum software; that is, the “hierarchical” order takes precedence over the “chronological” order. The prev-in-thread/next-in-thread follows the hierarchical order, to simulate, as much as possible, reading a “conversation”.

That is, you’ll read msg A, then the reply to that msg (B). Then the replies to msg B.

If you went through them in chronological order, you’d see A, then B, then a reply to B, then a reply to A, finally another reply to B. Kinda out-of-order in one respect.

You mentioned that you wanted to know “what’s new in this thread since my last visit”. Really the only way to know this is to look at the green icons next to the posts and replies; those are the ones new since your last visit.

Hope this helps (though maybe it’s even more confusing) and sorry for the long off-topic post!

Steve