cumbersome navigation within/between forum(s)

[Stephen Jenkins]

Kit Baum referred to "cumbersome navigation" in a post on another topic yesterday (automatic signon). I'd like to support his desire for improvements in navigation, both within threads, and between Forums. Re the latter, are there alternatives to heading back to the top of the page and clicking on the relevant "Home > Forums > ..." links? E.g. can the software cope with something like an intelligent sidebar which provides more helpful links? I wish for this sort of thing the more that I am immersed in a thread with many posts (I am well down the 'page' and so navigation tools are out of sight).

[Roberto Ferrer]

Stephen,

My petition was much simpler and in retrospect should be interpreted as a minimum (http://www.statalist.org/forums/foru...um-s-home-page). Your point is much general and I support it.

Navigability and monitoring of the forum are so far my big complaints. The mailing list was much more effective on this ground. Very simple, but it just worked if the email app could accumulate entries in threads, which is common. Until now, I haven't been able to reproduce the previous experience using RSS feeds. Not to mention the burden of having to navigate through a series of pages in locations where Internet access is limited.

[KitBaum]

I agree totally with Stephen's point: it seems terribly clumsy to have to be clicking on the Forum link to get back to the listing of topics, and then manually select the next one! Why isn't there a "next/previous" capability always accessible? Even in the Harvard listing of postings by date, one could get to the next posting or previous posting in a fraction of the time required here. That was what I was referring to as cumbersome navigation in yesterday's post. As Roberto says, the RSS approach does not emulate the simple listing we have enjoyed with Statalist-Digest, which even in its unthreaded form is a much more efficient way of keeping up with postings.

[Stephen Jenkins]

Re Kit's remarks about what we got in Statalist-Digest (RIP): I find that clicking on the "Latest Activity" tab at the top rather than "Posts" (the default) produces a within-forum listing of posts, temporally-ordered with most recent first. It's not quite the same thing as Kit means, however!

[KitBaum]

Agreed, this is not really useful, requiring dozens of additional clicks to see the posts. A great leap backward.

[Steve Samuels]

I try to minimize navigation problems by taking advantage of my web browser.

1. Bookmark the views I want to start with

After seeing Stephen's suggestion of sorting by Recent Activity, I set up that view for the General Forum, then created a bookmark to it in my web browser. I've done the same for the other forums. (There would be one less bookmark to click if the Mata forum were folded into the General Forum, as I hope it will be. ) The result: I avoid the Home and Forums pages altogether.

2. Open in-discussion links in new browser tabs, so switch back to the previous view.