YES!
posted by pasofol on November 1st, 2008 at 3:45PM

NT

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posted by dennisn on October 20th, 2008 at 12:52PM

How is it confusing? There are just two main layout elements -- the main body, and the menus to the right.

If you mean the comment trees, I dunno. Comments have left-borders that clearly show the nesting structure, no?

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posted by dennisn on October 19th, 2008 at 12:05PM

There's no /absolute/ way to tell what's unread, but I think it's a reasonable tradeoff. It's a pain in the ass to program, since it involves (number of users) * (number of posts) extra variables, and only to cover extreme cases.

I've decided to make this cms more of a blog. History has clearly tended towards this pattern of usage--rarely, if ever, has anyone resurrected an old discussion in an old post. Pretty much 99.9% of the time, people only debated in the most recent stories (listed at the top of the front page) for a few days. MF has always tended to be a "recent local news" aggregator.

So, in the event that you are an infrequent reader (not the target audience of the site), you can be reasonably assured that simply paging through the stories until you hit one you remember reading, you'll have read all the unread content.

As for the logging-out problem--I'm not sure what's causing it. (I haven't been able to reproduce it yet.) I suspect it's something to do with apache's multiple-threads thingy, which I remember us having a problem with before--but don't remember the details of. For single-user testing, it does work--cookies are created and set to expire a long time from now, and only deleted during logout (which I don't think the old CMS was doing.)

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