[crossfire] Account based login musings/thoughts/ideas

[Mark Wedel]

On 03/22/10 02:00 PM, Robert Brockway wrote:
> On Sun, 21 Mar 2010, Mark Wedel wrote:
<snip>
>> Format of news file: Currently, it is listed as oldest first, with
>> newest at the bottom.  It seems to me that the reverse (newest at top)
>> is better - just like the Changelog - you start reading, and once you
>> get to an entry you have seen before, you stop - this is more relevant
>
> The 'news' command on *nix is nice.  By default it only displays news
> items that you haven't seen before.   Presumable it keeps each news item
> as a separate file and compares the timestamps of the news files to the
> last login to determine what items the user should see.
>
> Users could be free to read all the news again via a command.

  I think there are actually commands that do so.

  The client could certain remember what news it has seen and hasn't seen - it 
doesn't have time stamps, but it could just save that information to a file and 
display what is new.  That said, if someone fixed typos, that would confuse that 
logic.

  Requiring dates in the format could be done, and then server could easily 
remember.  But that would require admin to enter correct date info, which may 
not be universal.

>
>> for the interface I'm providing since if the news file is many entries
>> long, a scrollbar will be needed to display all the information, at it
>> is more natural to keep the scrollbar at the top and then have the user
>> scroll down then position the scrollbar at the bottom and have the user
>> need to keep scrolling up to find relevant entries.
>
> It could display each item one at a time with the user having to click a
> 'next' button (or skipping).  I don't think this will be terribly onerous
> as I expect multiple news items would be the exception rather than the
> rule (based on personal experience of similar situations).

  One thought I had was basically expanders - I'm not sure how hard that is - 
but basically similar to how something like thunderbird can expand/collapse a 
group of messages.

  The client could just display the title of each news item, and user clicks 
expander and it then displays the news to go with it.  With that, user can 
easily see all the titles - and if the server admins do put in some date, makes 
it even easier for the user.