Please, Mr Webmaster

The addition of a "go to first new post" button.

The newest post is always the last on the bottom of a thread (unless edited). Is it a "Jump to bottom" button you're asking for?
(Edited)

Yes, there's a "go to top/bottom" botton & the very last post is the newest, but there is nothing in the middle. So, you glanced at a thread in the morning that maybe had 12 responses, and now in evening there's maybe 20 new posts. I'm suggesting a button that takes you to the first of the newest posts since you last opened the thread.

edited at 9:21

Kathy, I think VAP is talking about their last unread post as opposed to the newest post. I agree that would be a nice feature.

Ah, gotcha. Thanks Mardee, and sorry for the confusion, VAP.

Are you willing to pay for the cost of these great additions?

As someone who used to work in technology, I have the following thoughts:

• it's not the webmaster who would do any software work. Presumably Rick
  has an IT team and they are the ones who would consider the cost/value
  and make the implementation. The webmaster is monitoring the forum (there
  may be more than one of them) for content.

• the thing about someone asking for new stuff is that someone else may not
  want it. So one person's (or customer's) request is not always indicative of
  something that is universally good. Not saying that about VAP's inputs, but
  value is in the eye of the beholder.

With a paying customer, the feedback loop on trying to define a new feature
well enough to develop it is well-defined. Much less so for a forum like this.

• there is a cost involved in any new work. From that perspective:

  • #1 is probably fairly easy
    
  • #2 is ambiguous. Are you talking about individual entries within a single post,
    or posts within a subforum. This is an example of something being perfectly clear to the initiator, but not necessarily so to others. As a development item, this one would require some sort of tracking mechanism for every post/topic in every forum that everyone's profile would have to incorporate. The value versus the cost is much less obvious.
    
  • #3 is probably not too difficult, but again, the value to the initiator may be obvious,
    but to me is less so.

Since the forum is free, and development work is not, you have to consider that
any effort expended to do incremental work has to be paid for somehow. So if
you start going down this road, the costs of guidebooks or trips might go up.

Not saying these requests are that large, but I hope you see the concept.

I really appreciate the that that this forum is ad-free, unlike others I visit now and then (Tripadvisor, Fodors, Flyertalk). Yesterday I was on FlyerTalk seeking some information about our upcoming British Airways flights, and was treated to photos of well-endowed blond women who “want to meet men like me” down the right hand side of the page. Do they really think all the Flyertalk forum members are men?????

So I am not in favor of changes that increase the cost to our host of providing this nice ad-free forum.

Amen, Lola. It is SO nice not to be thrown the oodles of annoying photoshopped clickbait and other ads so prevalent on other websites.

As someone who used to work in technology, I have the following thoughts: it's not the webmaster who would do any software work. Presumably Rick has an IT team and they are the ones who would consider the cost/value and make the implementation. The webmaster is monitoring the forum (there may be more than one of them) for content.

shoeflyer, actually there is only one Webmaster for this forum. His name is Andrew and it is my understanding that he supervises the IT team. So this post is addressed to the right person.

VAP, I do know that Andrew has talked about potential changes to the forum that may be implemented in the future, but he has mentioned they're still recovering from Covid and other things, so I doubt these changes would be immediate, although it's nice to hope. He made mention of this on another thread a couple of months ago: https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/general-europe/new-travelers-to-the-forum

It is SO nice not to be thrown the oodles of annoying photoshopped clickbait and other ads so prevalent on other websites.

A thousand times YES to what Kathy says! I am willing to put up with any amount of clunky old stuff and poor search feature here in order to avoid being bombarded by, uh, "insert acceptable word."

This place has a "Craigslist" ambiance. And for me that's a compliment. And if you notice, Craigslist is one of the very few commercial software websites that has survived (and prospered). So yes, numbered posts, because it's easy, the others sound like more work than they should do for "free".

As far a numbering posts, it easy to just refer back to one by time stamp, as in “I like what Shoeflyer said at 6:39 am today”.

I'm guessing the Webmaster has thought of all these things--and more--and that they have their reasons for not implementing them at this time. It is their job, after all.

And, add my name to those enjoying the ad-free nature of this forum.

Test time stamp

I'm pretty sure that time stamps are shown in each reader's timezone. I'll confirm my memory in a second here.

ETA: confirmed, my post is showing as past 11pm in my current local time. Each person will see the time stamps relative to their timezone.

I’d like to start out by thanking Rick Steves and his staff for doing this for free. It’s a thankless job made worse by the spammers and the people who know they should be doing the job differently.

CW Social, that does not confirm that the time stamp is in the poster’s own time zone. You are in PDT (California) and so is the Rick Steves store/office (Edmonds, Washington).

The posts are in chronological order in Pacific Time regardless of the poster’s location. Notice that many posts from forum members in England, for example, are stamped in very early morning (in Pacific Time). Or they are posting later in the evening in the UK, in which case they are stamped with an early afternoon time.

Edit: OK, now I see that Laura has explained how it works—-everyone sees all the posts converted to the local time where they are currently located. So I am seeing different times than someone sitting in Europe.

CW Social, that does not confirm that the time stamp is in the poster’s own time zone. You are in PDT (California) and so is the Rick Steves store/office (Edmonds, Washington).

The timestamp on the post is likely stored in a format based on UTC which is the way time is generally stored in database systems.

The time displayed is based on the time zone settings on your local machine. For example, I am on EDT and that is the time I see. If it is 3pm PDT, the user in Seattle sees 3pm and the user in Washington, DC sees 6pm.

Good thing is that if someone edits their post it doesn’t change the posting time, but it does move it up ion position on the webpage.

Think about it. If the time shown is the local time where the person is, it would be chaos, not in logical order of the conversation. Someone in Italy posting at noon there (3 am on the west coast) would have their post end up way down the page, after all the US morning posts that were actually made later.

I have no real complaints or problems with using the site as is. But if we are creating hypothetical wishlists, I think mine would be the addition of a section for each European country. There are a number of countries that have no “home”.

Ok, so each person sees all the time stamps in the local time zone where they are? How does that work? They are always in order of the time posted, so one’s location must determine all the time stamps on every post?

CW Social’s post says 1:29 pm to me, in Seattle. But what they see is after 11 pm (11:29 pm?) because they are in Europe?

It would be nice to have an upvote button. Also, I now have the tune, "Please Mr. Postman" in my head. The Beatles' version in this case.

Sasha,

Ok, so each person sees all the time stamps in the local time zone where they are?

This is correct.

How does that work?

No idea but it feels like magic to me.

one’s location must determine all the time stamps on every post

This is also correct. On my device, the timestamps will change depending upon whether I am in England (or wherever) or in Texas.

Ok, so each person sees all the time stamps in the local time zone where they are? How does that work?

Well, the time stamp is determined by your device, and how it's set. For example with my mobile and tablet I can select the time zone I want, or allow the use of the time zone provided by the network.

Sitting here in Virginia I can change my time zone to the UK time zone and forum time stamps change according to and align with the new time zone I just set to. I can change it again to Pacific time, and displayed time stamps re-align to the new time zone.

No idea but it feels like magic to me.

As a former software developer, this is my favorite reply.

Yes I am in Europe right now. All the posts display for me in my current timezone.

The system stores them with their chronological order time stamp, modifying the display to match the timezone on each user's device.

Perhaps we could have a new category: "Change requests", where people could suggest changes and discuss pros and cons. This would give the webmaster a better feel for what was really wanted by the forum members.

Someone explained UTC way up the thread.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time

If anyone's interested in running their their own travel forum with as many features as they desire, I suggest learning phpbb.

https://www.phpbb.com/

That would allow features to be implemented to one's heart's content. There's a plethora of phpbb plugins already written and released as open source for all manner of cool things. It would also require managing and patching to keep up with security exploits as they arise, to prevent all and sundry from getting root. Easy! Go for it!

edit for tone: Seriously though. It's a real pain in the rear (I can't say arse here, right? Even if I'm British?) to make changes here. Try to find contentment with the resource we have here as best you can is my advice.

There's a reason we can't have nice things around here. You kids...

Huh? I didn't see any post indicating VAP could not make a request like this, aside from a single comment about paying for the changes. We've all posted stuff like this from time to time. In fact, I posted a wish list a couple of years ago, and others have as well over time.

Everyone realises, of course, that it's always the company's decision in the long run, but it's fun to post what we would like. Plus you find out handy bits of information, like UTC. :-)

I'm a big fan of the Status Quo

https://youtu.be/Yw_sJifUYgM?si=4XJXrcUvjW0YzRCm

You know when I used to go to this sub shop, I'd get this ticket that they'd punch each time I bought a sub. And after I bought 10 subs, I could return the ticket for a free sub. You think maybe they could do something like that with this forum? After each 10 comments, you get a free something-- like, oh, I dunno, a free RS tour of Italy or something?

Just an idea.

I agree with those who like the deceptively "low tech" feel of the Forum and am grateful that RS and his org put money into it as it is. I also prefer to keep it ad-free.

Amen, Lola. It is SO nice not to be thrown the oodles of annoying photoshopped clickbait and other ads so prevalent on other websites.

Just install a free adblocker and you'll never see another advert again. It also speeds up the loading of a page so you'll encounter a faster, smoother browsing experience.

Hey, sorry I didn't see this thread until yesterday. Thanks for writing up your preferred quality-of-life updates, VAP. My comments...

To start with clarifying some other posts, yes, I'm the only Webmaster. I suppose someone else can step into the moniker someday, but I've held it since 2008. I am the right person to send this sort of request to as I'm responsible for the front end of ricksteves.com. I do work closely with IT staff to produce changes for the forum and other parts of the website. To Mardee's point, we used to have a sprint every year or two to add features in the forum. The pandemic has backed up work with our IT crew, so I don't expect to have their time soon. We did get some new features this year to combat spam. That's not flashy for you all, but it has been very important this year... an invisible quality-of-life improvement.

1. Posts can pretty easily be numbered, but it won't be that simple. We'd need to figure out a number of details around what happens when a post in the middle is deleted. Renumbering posts wouldn't work (imagine if someone refers to post 10, but 10 is now someone else's post), so we'd need to work through any UX issues caused by visual gaps in the numeric order. E.g. does it confuse people to see numbers skipping around? Does this lead to 100 people per month sending me emails about how something is wrong in the forum? I know some forum systems show something to indicate a post was removed, but I don't love making moderation - or a user's personal decision - publicly visible. Yes, transparency around a post's removal can help explain inconsistencies in a discussion. Pros and cons. Anyway, we'd want to think this through and come up with something that is clear and easy to understand.

2. I've seen variations on this in other forums, such as using background colors to show what has already been viewed, helping you track what you've seen and haven't seen. The trouble is how to mark something as "seen" on the back end. Is it any time something has loaded? Do you require a click/tap from the user to indicate you've seen it? Do we need something that tracks if your screen scrolled past X post? There are other complications too. I like the idea, but I think making the UX clean and functional in the context of this forum could be a real challenge.

3. We could probably do that fairly easily. The data for that is already in place in the back end.

Others have asked for some form of upvote/like/best answer feature over the years. I'm more inclined to do something like showing "best answer" on a post if X people vote for it. Complications include how that applies when not all of the forum is Q&A format. My biggest concern is what happens if it's abused and not used as intended. I could write several pages on that. I'd like to have a "best answer" system, but I won't do it unless we can design the functionality to ensure it would be used as intended.

Don't worry, we're not adding 3rd-party advertising to the forum. I'm glad you all appreciate that. I do too. We do intend to do more with the forum to suggest related content on our website someday. That's probably a few years off.

Keep the ideas coming. I'm listening (ok, reading). Feel free to report this post to get my attention when it's time for me to take another look. Cheers!

So, what, no new free tours with every X many posts? Huh? I really thought I was on to something too....

I enjoy this Forum, and I also learned at an early age not to look a gift horse in the mouth. BUT...I wish there was a way to block posters. I'm sure there are folks who would love to block me, and I'm okay with that.

David, I tried to tell you.

Haha, Big Mike!

Thanks, Andrew, for the information! We all appreciate what you and the tech staff do here!

Andrew--Yes, thank you! It is nice to know that we can toss out ideas to you and you don't just shut people down.

"So, what, no new free tours with every X many posts?" I might shut that one down. ;)

Webmaster--LOL! Fair enough;)