You shouldn’t be apologetic, Rob. I really appreciate getting all this brainstorming on the design of forum software from people who’ve been using the genre daily for over a decade.

Tom’s got it right about why subject line highlighting went away. And you’re right that highlighting subject lines is a much better way to show you what’s new/where you’ve been than a list of recent posts (except that the list can be made site-wide, so it still might be useful for auxilliary navigation).

Not only that, this software supports online courses in its day job, an environment in which it’s important to track which “modules” (aka topics) the student has viewed. This is not only for the student’s convenience to pick up where he left off, but so that the course can “gate” the student’s progress to make sure requirements are met before moving on.

So it’s not really surprising that when I showed the latest software on the Zone to the university client this afternoon, and we talked about the problem of losing the browser’s link tracking, he told me to find a way to bring back tracking.

I have some ideas about that, so I’ll get ‘er done. The Zone will once again have post subject lines that change color.

But wait, there’s more. The reason that you have to use paragraph tags to fake a title on a comment is because WordPress treats comments as a separate type of thing than the root post; comments are “lightweight”, where posts have all the bells and whistles and a WYSIWYG editor. But there is a way to make the software use posts as comments too…that is, you’ll get the post bells and whistles…and you get a real subject line.

That’s on the list too. We’ll get it someday.

Instructions? A user’s manual? Help? What a novel concept. You’re not the only one who’s asked, and I’d say everybody needs it. That’s on the list too. Sooner than fancy comments, after subject line highlight tracking.

That wasn’t so hard, was it?

When I had to clear my history for one reason or another, all the posts suddenly became “unread.” Bleh.

When the URL display gimmick went away, so did this.