With the recent increased traffic on the BBS, I thought I would share some of my techniques for ripping through the posts quickly. These can be used either on a broadband connection or a dial-up connection. In fact, if you have a dial-up connection, this helps optimize your time because it lets you read posts on the screen while other posts are loading up in the background. You spend less time waiting for posts to load.

- Use Internet Explorer instead of Netscape. IE can render completed tables faster than Netscape, and will allow you to start reading and scrolling the page sooner. The two browsers are about equal in total downloading and rendering time, but IE will complete the table-drawing first, at least on my system.

- Set your screen to the highest resolution you can stand it. For my viewing distance on my 17" monitor, that happens to be 1152x864.

- In your user profile, set the following settings:

Defult display mode: Flat.
Default view: Collapsed threads.
Total parent posts to show per page: 99
Total posts to show on one page when viewing a post in flat mode: 99
Post Format: side.
It makes little difference if you view user's pictures and signatures, so I leave those on.

- Close all Internet Explorer windows on your screen except for one. "Restore" that window so that it doesn't take up the entire screen. Size it to be about 1/3 or 1/4 the size of the screen. Move the window to the right half of the screen. Now close it. You have just set the "default" size of the IE window.

- Okay, open your link to the BBS and leave the window that size. Move that window to the left side of the screen.

- Open a forum with lots of messages in it.

- For each thread with new posts:
Right click on the thread title.
Select "Open in New Window".
Do not wait for this new window to open. Re-focus the first window with alt-tab, or with a mouse click in an unused area of the window.
Right click on the next thread and select "Open in New Window". Repeat until you've got many new windows, each simultaneously loading up a thread.

- As you do this, you might have to occasionally move the original window around the screen so that it doesn't get completely covered up by the new windows that are appearing.

- If you like keyboard macros and you have a way of doing them (such as a Windows utility or one of those annoying AnyKey keyboards), you can speed most of this up even faster with keyboard shortcuts. Remember, in Internet Explorer, the TAB key selects the next link and Shift-F10 opens the shortcut menu for the selected link. So it's TAB, TAB, Shift-F10, N, Alt-TAB. This will also let you do all of this with full-screen windows if you want because you don't have to mouse-click on the original window.

- Once you have gotten all the threads open in new windows, read each one (starting with the second icon in the taskbar and working right) and then close the window. Read, close, read, close, read, close.

- When you're back at the original first window, hit "index" and go on to another forum.

That's the basic technique I use to rip through the posts without wasting a lot of time. If I do my best to just skim the threads instead of reading each one, and if I do my best not to reply unless I have something important (or funny) to say, then I can get through all the new posts pretty quickly. I'm finding that the recent increase in traffic has made me less likely to read threads carefully, or to post things, than I would have in the past.

Does anyone have any other speed-reading tips they'd like to share?

As an alternative to having all of these windows open, you could use the Tab feature of the latest Mozilla builds. Mozilla seems to be slower than IE, but the tabs can keep all of your new browsers inside one window. (That's not really a good description, but when you see, you'll understand.) There's also a hack for IE that allows for the same type of tabbing. When I come up with what it's called, I'll edit this post.

Edit: It's called NetCaptor.

Yeah,

I've been using Opera for a while now and I really like some of the productivity features. One in particular is very handy called "mouse gestures".. basically, its a long click while moving the mouse either left (to go back one page), right (to go foward) or up (for a new blank browser window). It is very convienent and now when I use IE I forget how to use the back button. haha. Opera also allows the option of keeping all your web page browsers in one windows.. makes it easy to tab back and forth I think.


-Tom

Is this in the FAQ? Seems like it should be

The technique I use for crusing the current onslaught is a IE link button which does a search for the past 24 hrs of msgs. Just reading backward through them until the last thread I read will keep me fairly current.

Granted I won't catch everything there, but if the title or author catches my eye, I'll look further. I do wish that I could set up the board to default by showing me the selected message and all replies in Flat mode when they are selected from the Search results. The Flat setting seems to only apply to messages read out of the standard forum selections...

I will look into your settings and see where they get me. Thanks again Tony for yet another pertinent post!

I have a problem with the new tabs interface in Mozilla, it sometimes closes the wrong tab when you ask it to close a tab.

One further speed refinement could be made by substituting a shifted left-click for the right click step used to open a thread in a new window.

Yikes I forgot about that one. Good tip!

- As you do this, you might have to occasionally move the original window around the screen so that it doesn't get completely covered up by the new windows that are appearing.

Alt-Tab is easier and faster.

One final point -- after you have all the windows open (one for each thread) you will be left with the original Forum view showing the list of threads. Minimize this window before you start reading all the other windows, otherwise you end up with the thread list on top of the heap each time you close one of the other windows.

tanstaafl.

I've already honed my skills through years of slashdot

Shift-Click, Alt-Tab, Shift-Click, Alt-Tab, repeats...

I find alt-tab slower coz i have my head resting on that hand at the time. With opera gestures, you just get so used to not having to move the mouse around; the scroll wheel sped things up, so do gestures.

I've run into something that I think might be either an IE bug or a WWWThreads bug...

If I use shift-click to open each of these windows, the BBS will not scroll down to the unread messages. If I use rightclick followed by Open In New Window, then it works. Also, if I open all the windows up too quickly, even with the rightclick, then some of them aren't scrolled to the new messages.

What mechanism is it using to do the scroll?

What mechanism is it using to do the scroll?

Post numbering and A NAME tags in the HTML source
[a name="Post54227" yadda yadda...
and this at the end of the URL "#Post54227"

So if the windows opens with that URL - and I see no reason to why that should differ on normal click or shift-click...

/Michael

So if the windows opens with that URL - and I see no reason to why that should differ on normal click or shift-click...

But it does differ. That's why I said I think it's a bug.

But it does differ. That's why I said I think it's a bug.

FWIW I got the same problem on my machine (IE6 on Win2000.) Very odd considering it's just an HTML anchor, no complex JavaScript or anything. But that's what you get with Windows. Non-standard behavior in what should be standard conditions.

Yep, if you've used Opera once, the mouse gestures become very intuitive and then you find yourself doing awful things when you go back to IE or netscape. Ugh.

Calvin

... or you could buy yourself a copy of Opera 6.0....

Hmm, thanks..

Got a funny feeling as i read that cause it's almost exactly what i do now, except on unix the middle mouse button is open in new window which saves a bit of finger stress from all the right clicks

There's gotta be a quicker way though, "1) open mail client, 2) goto empeg folder, 3)press next, 4) read, 5) repeat steps 3 and 4 until there are no new messages left" just seems an order of magnitude quicker.

Actually, just changed it to collapsed threads. That makes helps allot cause now it automatically jumps to the first new message

Or you could just use my technique --- lose your job due to 'corporate restructuring' and then the BBS is the only thing that keeps you busy all day, so you like to pour over it and read every word.