Right this may sound cheeky but heres what i think Since this forum is like the worlds best for computing solutions, dont you think its time it had a make over. I Mean White and Black Color Scheme, Times New Roman Font? How about some CSS effects etc Anyway its just a thought, dont mean to sound cheeky because this sites ok as it is, but based in its popularity... Regards, Jamie McCoy

Hello, Thanks for the suggestion. However, I'm not all that interested in changing the site design. I don't really like change for the sake of change. One thing I was considering might be a new way of listing the forums on the left side of the page. The list is getting kind of long. I like the way IBM does it here: http://www-136.ibm.com/developerworks/. The only problem is backward compatibility. Justin

"The only problem is backward compatibility" I presume you refer to old links on every page. A redirection configuration at the server would be a good solution to old URL's. You could also replace links which contain the computing.net domain with a generic URL to a new forum index or similar page. A poor solution, but functional. A script could accomplish all this in under 24 hours. A better idea would be to create a redirection script to handle redirection the new site. This new, possibly Perl, script would serve the function of taking redirection values from older pages. The redirection (or the script's return) would lead to the new page. First, you would need a one-time script to convert all the old pages over to a more functional system. Basically, this conversion script would grep and replace all links in the archives with a new redirection URL. For example, take the Web Development forum. It's current URL is: http://www.computing.net/webdevel/wwwboard/wwwboard.html Searching for anchor tags, the script would find this string. There are several ways to extract the "webdevel" sub-string, which is all you want (even if-else statements would do since you only need do this once). The new URL would be a GET variable pass to the redirection script. Example: [domain.tld]redirect.pl?q=webdevel Optionally, individual thread ID's could be appended: [domain.tld]redirect.pl?q=webdevel+[ID] To be more practical, you wouldn't even need to clean up the URL's. All old URLs could be used as input to redirect.pl. You could pass the old link as a variable and perform the most convenient action from there. Of course, there are other details to consider, but there are manageable options. Also, I agree a non-white background for the links would be a good idea. A change in font, incidentally, is easily overridden clientside with a user preference stylesheet. Both Mozilla and IE support such configurations. Color and other CSS options are simiarly configurable (though the changes are global for all windows). There must be a way to bind a new javascript object to change just one particular site's display (allowing drastic changes that don't have any impact on all site's visited).

Hello, I actually don't believe server-side client identification is necessary. IBM seems to have used this program: http://www.sothink.com/webtools/dhtmlmenu/index.htm by SoThink to create the tables. It appears as though the program creates a NOSCRIPT section for legacy browsers. I will look into using it. I don't know if I will, but it is an interesting idea. Justin