ATS Board Viewing Idea...

I think ATS should have a feature where when you put your cursor over the title of the thread, the text in the yellow box that comes up will show a brief sample of what the thread contains. Like a preview of what it is, so people can get a glimpse of what the thread is about by just putting their cursor over the title. If you're unsure of what I'm talking about, check this site out, and hover your cursor over a thread title.....

www.topendmotorsports.com...

Let me know what you think!

I'm no programmer so I have no idea how difficult it is to implement. When I have used programs with that feature they have tended to be slow and sporadic in operation. What have the rest of you experienced with such features?

With the tinkering that the admins. have had to do lately to keep things running, I don't know if this would be feasable. Besides, you always have the Forum up top to let you know. Politics, Board Questions, etc..

I know, the Forum title will let you know what it is about. But what I meant was that when you hover your cursor above the title of the thread, a little box will come up and display a paragraph or so from the thread the person wrote. But not all of the thread since it would slow the site down. But yeah, check out that site link I put on here and let me know what you think. If it can't be done, then thats okay too, cause it was just an idear.

I think this has been discussed before.

The reason why we don't have it is because of bandwidth constraints. Even if we only have a few snippets of each thread available for preview on a page, the bandwidth really adds up, and so does the cost.

A good idea, but not worth it.

[Edited on 2-15-04 by Saucerat]

The google ads on the right don't even come up unless you open the thread. What you describe (I imagine) would severely limit "views" and have a potential impact on ad click throughs. Not a good idea if you want ATS to continue as "free". I could be wrong, but that's what I see as a main reason against doing such.

Bandwidth "cost" isn't an issue at this point, it's user functionality. As it is, our home page is 68k and our today's posts is 69k (HTML only), and both have a great deal of information (home page - 32 forums and a lot of other info, today's posts - 75 threads). That link you provided only shows 20 threads, yet is 52k of HTML. The roll-over programming isn't hard, but it adds "weight" to each thread, forum or post, which increases the download time for our users. For example, we used to have some code that brightened the background color of the table cells on the today's posts page, because of the number of posts, just removing that simple piece of code saved 20k. Smaller forums with much less content can get away with such tricks since it doesn't add that much to a page of 20 posts. Our board is gigantic, we're less than two months away from reaching half a million posts, and very often the first 75 threads in the today page represent less than 4 hours of activity. Adding nice-to-have cosmetic code like that would end up slowing down the page for everyone.

well broadband users that wouldnt be a problem wouldnt it? and if someone has dial up they could purchase the low-bandwidth thing in the store.

True true. Good points by everyone...

That would drive me absolutely insane.

By the way, can anyone tell me how to stop WinXP from creating a damn tooltip for everything I put my mouse over?

DeltaChaos

I hate windowsXp. There is a way to disable that thing, remove the tooltip program or whatever it is.(obvious)