Thoughts on Showing Active Threads on the Site?

**kirupa** · April 11th, 2012, 02:51 AM

Hi everyone,
What is everyone's thoughts on showing the five most recent updated threads on the site. I was thinking it would look something like this:

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Here is a version without any background colors on the posts:

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What do you all think?

Cheers,
Kirupa

**Krilnon** · April 11th, 2012, 03:04 AM

I like the idea. It'd be cool if there were a pre-supplied, better metric for interesting new threads than activity, but nothing jumps to mind immediately and it'd probably be hard to implement anyway.

Regarding the design: I've always liked the pastel/rainbow accents used around the site in recent years. The mockup looks a little crude, but I assume that that's because it was done in an image editor an not in a browser.

**kirupa** · April 11th, 2012, 03:11 AM

The mockup was indeed done in Fireworks and not a browser. Regarding your idea of interesting threads, I had the exact thought a few seconds ago. We could show a static list of interesting threads that get rotated every week. We could even create our own discussion topics for the sole purpose of highlighting it on the site.

Below that, we can show three or four recently active threads.

**kirupa** · April 11th, 2012, 03:34 AM

Below is a mockup showing both active threads as well as "curated" threads that will change weekly:

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**TheCanadian** · April 11th, 2012, 03:40 AM

Originally Posted by kirupa

The mockup was indeed done in Fireworks and not a browser. Regarding your idea of interesting threads, I had the exact thought a few seconds ago. We could show a static list of interesting threads that get rotated every week. We could even create our own discussion topics for the sole purpose of highlighting it on the site.

Below that, we can show three or four recently active threads.

I like that idea. It would be nice to catalogue a lot of the interesting threads

**kirupa** · April 11th, 2012, 05:20 PM

Yeah - we can surface new content periodically as soon as someone points them out to me

**kirupa** · April 12th, 2012, 03:08 AM

...and, the changes are live!

Tomorrow, I will have the Tutorials link go to a landing page that contains a list to all of the tutorial sections.

**kirupa** · April 12th, 2012, 03:29 AM

Originally Posted by santino6250

thanks dear this is great i like it..

Are you spammer?

**tbo** · April 13th, 2012, 10:00 PM

i like it. what about the existing list of threads on the right side? How are they determined?

**tbo** · April 13th, 2012, 10:07 PM

oh man there i am in the list! im feeling rather famous right now

**TheCanadian** · April 14th, 2012, 01:32 AM

Maybe next you should figure out how to show syntax highlighting within AS tags

**kirupa** · April 14th, 2012, 03:12 PM

Originally Posted by tbo

i like it. what about the existing list of threads on the right side? How are they determined?

Just on last post date. Every 10 minutes or so, those threads get updated. It's a slower version of the same feature that shows up on the site. I'll work on making those the same in the future.

Originally Posted by tbo

oh man there i am in the list! im feeling rather famous right now

Originally Posted by TheCanadian

Maybe next you should figure out how to show syntax highlighting within AS tags

I'm regretting having bet the forums on vBulletin so many years ago. I look into this periodically every year, and the syntax highlighting solutions for vBulletin just don't work. The ones that do have major flaws like disallowing you from editing your code after you've posted