The Song Fight Bulletin Board

ok. the boards got updated, and I, as a slightly dumber than average user, don't notice much difference. Except that there is now a button on the board index page that says "skip to content". All it seems to do is scroll the page down a bit. Is it just me, or is this the stupidest addition to an update ever?

You don't have to use it.

(and yeah phpBB is dumb)

It might actually be useful on screen readers. Who knows. I noticed at least one additional change from the update, anyway.

Now that I look around the UI, I see these things which I didn't see before:

"View unanswered posts" -- was that there before? It shows all topics with 0 responses.
Subscribe topic -- dunno exactly what this does. it's not feed, although supposedly in this version there are ATOM feeds for threads available somewhere
Bookmark topic -- guess you can save a topic
Print view -- view the thread sans-theme
E-mail friend
On the right between "Previous" and "Next" you will often see "First unread post" which will hop your screen down to the first reply in the thread that you haven't seen before. I dunno how it's keeping track.

Dunno why "View active topics" is coming up empty. But I only ever use "View new posts" and that seems to be working fine.

Most of those have always been there. "View unanswered posts" has been there since the 2.x days, and "Subscribe topic" (which lets you get email notifications for a topic that you haven't posted on) has as well, although it's much more prominent in 3.x (but hasn't changed at all with this latest update).

"View active topics" is handy when you want to find that thread that was active recently but no longer shows up in "View new posts". I used it a lot and am truly heartbroken that it is broken.

OK, since there seems to be multiple people missing it, I've looked up the fix for view active topics and implemented it. (Easy since it just meant 15 minutes of going through each forum and turning on the feature after the upgrade turned it off. WTF, no universal setting? Aggravating.)

I also turned on some other stuff. Like there should be a quick reply box at the bottom of pages or something.

Oh and there's a theme with a Meebo chat sidebox now, so that's pretty cool.

"No universal setting" is what sums up what I hate most about phpBB 3. Everything's so explicit, fiddly, and low-level.

Oh hey are "post icons" new?

yeah they're new.

Just noticed the Quick Reply box. Testting... testing...

Neat.

And it seems faster, now. It's a good day in America!

It's definitely much faster. I swear, though, that these post icons have been here forever. Are you sure they're new?