Happy 7th Birthday, altdotlife!

Posted by admin in alt.life, articles | 2 comments

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Today is altdotlife’s SEVENTH birthday. Happy birthday, all! Continuing the tradition of rolling out new features on our birthday, I added a couple of feature enhancements late last night.
Context Sensitive Search for Smartphones
If you frequently browse altdotlife on your smart phone, you may have noticed what a PAIN in the ass it has been to search. Go to the bottom of the screen. Click Forum Tools. Click Search. Go to a search page. Enter your search term. Forget about searching inside a particular thread. It’s been driving me mad! So I updated the mobile interface to support context-sensitive search, just like the standard view you access on your computer.

Just scroll down to the bottom of the screen and type your search term in the search box. If you’re on a topic page, you’ll be searching that topic. If you’re on a board index, you’ll be searching that board. If you’re anywhere else, it will search the whole forum. YAY!

Improved subscription (bookmarks) and ignoring topics
Last year, we added the ability to ignore or subscribe to many topics at one time. Which was good. When all of the cohort threads rolled on the first of the month, you could ignore the ones you weren’t in, and subscribe to those you WERE in in just two quick clicks!

Except… the interface was clunky, and I’m not sure many people understood how to use the feature. It used a dropdown box instead of text buttons, which was a little confusing. And it was only available available from the Unread Topics pages. Bummer.

So this year, subscribe and ignore have been revamped to be available in more pages, and to work more intuitively. Yay!

Unread Topics View

Look right above the list of unread topics. You will see a link to Subscribe Selected and Ignore Selected. To subscribe to a lot of topics at once, check the checkbox at the right of each topic, then click Subscribe Selected.

To ignore a lot of topics at once, check the checkbox and click Ignore Selected. Once you ignore a topic, it will no longer show up in your Unread Topics, bookmarks/subscriptions (My Topics), or Replies. It’s still visible in the index of the board, but is grayed out.

Board View

From the index of any board, you can Subscribe or Ignore a group of topics, just as you do in the Unread Topics page described above.

Once you ignore a topic, it will no longer show up in your Unread Topics, bookmarks/subscriptions (My Topics), or Replies. It’s still visible in the index of the board, but is grayed out.

New: Previously, you could only unignore a topic from within the topic page itself. Now, you can Unignore several topics at once from the board index.

My Topics View
You could always unsubscribe multiple topics from the My Topics page, but now you can also ignore multiple topics. (This might be useful, say, if you were previously subscribed to a set of pregnancy topics, suffered a miscarriage, and needed to ignore them rather than just unsubscribe.)
Mobile View
The streamlined Ignore/Unignore/Subscribe links are available in the mobile/smartphone interface at the bottom of the topic list (in the same place as the existing text buttons have always been), so you will have full access to this feature on your phone as well as your computer.