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Unmanned Spaceflight.com _ Forum Maintenance _ "Today's Active Topics" link

Posted by: Tom Tamlyn Aug 7 2017, 10:41 AM

The link for "Today's Active Topics" doesn't work for me right now, I assume because there have not been any posts in the last 24 hours.

The error message states " Try again and broaden your search criteria."

When active topics are displayed, there's a drop down menu that permits changing the search criteria to the previous week or month, but couldn't figure out any way of bringing up a list of all the past week's or month's active topics within the search system, until I discovered that performing a successful search on any text string would produce a screen with the active topics drop-down menu.

There's nothing hard about this, but at a sleepy hour of the morning it took me a couple of tries to figure out. In any event it's an extra step couple of steps.

If it's not unreasonably difficult, is there something that could be done to have the portal display a list of active topics under these circumstances? Perhaps a separate link for "This Week's Active Topics"? Or perhaps a routine that would silently perform the weekly search if the daily search failed would present a cleaner interface.

Thanks.

Posted by: Floyd Aug 7 2017, 01:01 PM

I had the same issue yesterday. It seems it is mostly resolved. You can see all the past topics if you click past two weeks. Monday mornings the week disappears--as the week = Monday through Sunday if I understand it correctly. It does look like the "Today's active topics" has lost 8/6 and 8/7

Posted by: tanjent Aug 7 2017, 04:59 PM

I'm less concerned about what happens when there are no recent posts to report than I am about the causes of the apparent slowdown.

Maybe it's related to solar conjunction or the dog days of midsummer (northern hemisphere), or possibly the emergence of a handful of superstar contributors has the rest of us a bit intimidated. If the latter, I hasten to add that I appreciate all the beautiful work that is being done, and download it enthusiastically. But I equally enjoy the commentary, interpretation, and technical insight that often come from members who are unable to produce such magnificent images of there own. I see no point in naming names, but more than half of my personal "hall of fame" contributors here hardly ever post an image.

Of course the number of active missions at any given time must also influence the overall frequency of posting. The remedy for that, unfortunately, lies a bit beyond our control.

Posted by: nprev Aug 8 2017, 01:09 AM

Ebb and flow. We do see a lot more posting activity during new missions & significant events, of course. It's also vacation season in most places in the Northern Hemisphere, so presumably a lot of people are spending their time doing something other than staring at screens.

OTOH, I've noticed that we seem to have considerably more visitors to the Forum on a daily basis, apparently lurking and reading, than we have in past years. That's a good thing. There's a whole lot of information here, and it's great that people are reading it.

Posted by: stevesliva Aug 8 2017, 02:23 PM

I have always used "View new posts" which adjusts for your last visit. You get used to the occasional nothing new, especially on weekends.