Web site & forum improvements

[Siegmund Beimfohr]

After visiting BPL and forums for a number of months as a guest, I just got an online membership and this is my first post. I have two suggestions for improvements, one affecting the entire web site and the other recent forum posts:

1- The “visited links” color used on this site is a dark blue while the normal link color is a lighter, brighter blue. However, the difference on-screen is visually hard to differentiate. I suggest that the “visited links” color be changed to a distinctly different color from the light blue used for normal links (purple seems to be the color most often used on web sites). This will make it much easier to see at a glance what we have already viewed.

2- The “Recent Forum Posts” and “My New” pages need the addition of a thread “name” or “title” since the “subject” supplied by each poster doesn’t always indicate the subject of the thread. I generally go down the list of new recent posts and open them in separate tabs (Firefox) all at once and then read after loading is finished. I skip entries where the subject is obviously the same as a post I’ve already opened. Frequently, I find multiple tabs open with the same thread because the “subject” didn’t identify the thread. If each thread has a determined subject from it’s first post and that thread “Title” is carried forward and displayed as a separate column along with poster-supplied subject, Forum, etc., it will be much easier to see which posts go together and belong to the same thread.

Wonder if any others have same thoughts? Really enjoy this site!

[Siegmund Beimfohr]

Ryan,
I don't feel bad that there were no follow-up comments to my original post, BUT…., please help!
I just purchased a new computer (forced to, since old one crashed) and it has an LCD monitor. The "visited links" color on this site (a slightly darker blue than the normal link color) is even more difficult to distinguish on the LCD monitor than on my good CRT. Firefox can't selectively change link colors by site (unless the site allows it) without abandoning all the formatting (I've done this successfully on other sites).
Can you please change the "visited links" color to a more standard and distinctive purple (or other pretty color of your choice); can't take much time at all and your BPL rank will jump a full point! Thanks.

[Douglas Frick]

I also find the blue/blue contrast to be unacceptably low.

Sam Haraldson wrote:
>BPL is in the process of a total facelift as well as a swapping out of much of it's skeleton. It'll still have the same blood flowing through it so worry not about losing all our precious conversations and such but expect to find an easier navigated layout, new searchability and altogether more functionality.

Sounds good. Please make it possible to search posts from within the View Profile page, limiting the search to that specific user. Either that, or have a "show all" option so I can use my browser's search function on the page.

I'd also like a profile option to have avatars turned OFF everywhere, not just on a page-by-page basis.

Further, I'd like a profile option to have thread display default to "show all" rather than always paged. This is important if you're trying to read hundreds of posts before the 'new posts' thing times out and quits marking posts as new. Much of the time the new posts aren't on the first page…and by the time you get to that thread and page to the end, it won't mark the posts as new.

Hmmm…what else…

[Brett .]

Suggestion for improvement in the forums and reviews. I noticed Amazon allows readers to rate posts as either helpful, or not. Then, subsequent readers can sort reviews "most helpful first".
If BPL did this, newcomers could sort throught the thousands of posts to get a quick start on UL backpacking. It would take a while for a critical mass of votes built up, but making it easy to vote with a click that returns you to the same page and location (not the main menu again!), will speed up the process.
Oh, and of course, dis-allow people from voting on their own posts.
Anyone else want to see this?

[Author]

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