Themed Threads

Richard

Themed Threads is a new sub-forum in the Challenges category for open threads. Please read the guidelines in the forum sticky before posting.

The old open threads in Other Cool Shots will show a red "Closed" label for a while, but if you click on them, you will be redirected to the new location of the thread.

As a reminder, if you are not interested in following a specific forum you can use the settings widget at the forum level to mute that forum. The forum will remain visible in Categories but new posts will not show for you in Discussions.

torags

Good idea Richard

black mamba

Terrific move on the moderator's part.

Allen

I can not find the "settings" widget?
All of a sudden I have things showing in "Discussions" that I had muted.

Richard

The mute function seems to have vanished in the most recent version of the forum software. We'll follow up with Vanilla to see what the problem is.
Edit: According to Vanilla, they are in the process of changing the way the mute functionality works, essentially reversing it so that you choose which categories you follow. Unfortunately, I don't have an ETA of when the rollout of the change will be complete, but I'm hoping it doesn't take too long. Stay tuned.

Allen

Thanks Richard. Does sound more efficient picking what to see.

Allen

Looks like they added a "follow" selection so only followed categories will appear in "Recent Discussions".
Click the little gear behind each category on home page to select.

Richard

Yeah, the new scheme is opt-in rather than opt-out. Also new is a View dropdown box on both the Categories and Discussions pages. You can toggle between All and Following. Unfortunately, it looks like Vanilla was unable to carry over our old mute settings, so you have to set it all up from scratch. It's tedious, but it only took me about 10 minutes.

To start, go to the Categories page and set the view to All. Then, one by one, click on the gear icon and select Follow for those categories you want to appear on your Discussions page. Note that sub-categories must also be selected one by one. Once you have set all the categories you're interested in to Follow, go to the Discussions page and set the View to Following. It will now behave like it used to.

Note that the Category and Discussion views are independent of one another and that if you select the following view on the categories page, the headings and groupings are lost. I suppose if you are only following a few categories this is OK, but I suspect most people will want to leave the Category view set at All.

Also, note that there is one small improvement in this scheme: you can now follow a sub-category without following its parent, which was impossible with the old muting scheme. So if all you're really interested in is naked people, you can follow Go Figure without following People.

Allen

Looks like the Categories and Home pages are the same as they have the same View: option that applies to both.

Richard

They can be set independently. I'm using All for categories and Following for Discussions.

Allen

Same here by default, but on Discussions page you can now toggle Following/All there.

INKI

I agree, it's a good idea