I wouldn't exactly call it "better". Reading bottom to top is unintuitive and has zero advantages. There's a reason conversations aren't written like this:

Player A: Too bad, you're getting chicken.
Fizban: Damn, I wanted lobster.
Player A: Chicken.
Fizban: What's for dinner?

I won't lie. My defense of it was simply because I like the way it is, currently, and find that it works well.

[rant]
I doubt the type of person that is so confused by this setup is the type of people we want to attract anyway. I mean, generally this community is full of literate, (mostly) intelligent, creative people capable of coding their imagination into reality. Surely they could figure out, and deal with, this slight inverse of order?

Also, I doubt a few curse words will scare away the masses. Sure it might offend a few but they will certainly be a minority. There will also be a minority that will be attracted by this colorful use of language. Admittedly, they might not be of the caliber we want - but at least the display will weed out the dumb ones. :P

EDIT:
How western centric you are! The Chinese read from right to left, would you say they were incorrect?
[/rant]

EDIT2: I would like to add that while I do enjoy the current display, my defense is in jest. :biggrin:

Good enough reason to advocate it.



I am not concerned about confusion. And it is awful, awful early in your participation here and
there to be pulling the "do we need their type" card.

The wrong-order thing is something I find annoying and I'm expressing it. It's not the
end of the world either way, but the current way is backward, annoying, and
unnecessary, and I wish it weren't. Whether newbies find it confusing is not my point.



This is not a good argument. Scaring away people who could otherwise be positive
participants is the issue. Masses, you'll note, are not who are of most value. Participants
with thoughtful/helpful/informative/constructive/etc posts are of most value. And of
that group, yes, there are a bunch you lose with unrestricted crude language. I run
an intermud network with channels of varying crudeness and I can tell you from
experience that the cesspool channels do indeed lose good solid participants because
of the turds floating around.

A better argument would have been "feh, it's just a realistic portrayal of ichat, take it
or leave it." That makes sense. It doesn't answer why a crapchannel is needed on the front page,
but at least it's a sensible argument.

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net

Perhaps you missed this.

Is it too early in my participation to correct your understand of my post accompanied with a snide remark? Probably. I'll drop the latter. ;)

The first thing I noticed was that the order isn't intuitive. I think most anyone would see it and consider it backwards. That is my only issue. I think it is pretty neat to have it up there and I see no reason to remove it. A curse filter may be a worthy consideration.

I did not see that, as you added it while I was replying.

If by saying it was a joke that means you're retracting it, I suppose our only disagreement
is a matter of display preference.

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net

On a more serious note: I doubt a curse word filter would make any difference. Seeing "****" instead of "fuck" doesn't confuse anyone. Especially after they logged in and realized that such language was not blocked out when in actual use, it would at worst be misleading. More importantly, the content of the conversation is what would drive away or possibly attract new people.

If everyone is talking about stupid nonsensical crap, the people that are displeased by curse words wouldn't stick around regardless.

What would make the most sense is to have two channels, one for good conversation, one for nonsensical crap. Display the "good" channel only. I would advocate that.

EDIT: And yes, Crat. It was a joke.
EDIT2: Though I find it ironic that you disagreed with the one part of my post that supported your argument.

That is a good idea.

You're missing my point, kiasyn. I'm not saying remove it from the site entirely, nor am I saying to disable it for users by default. All I want is an option to turn the thing off.

Edit: Typo.

I didn't say that. Your quoted material was Kiasyn. Not me. But it was a valiant effort, none the less.

This is an english speaking forum, not a Chinese speaking forum. Your logic falls flat.

TWSS

Seriously though, why are you people arguing/debating over such pointless matters?

You must be new here. (:

Even if everyone here is known to argue over pointless things, the question is still valid. Why waste so much time and energy?

Because there is energy to waste.

But wouldn't that energy be put to better use by building and coding better muds instead of arguing over the front page?

To be perfectly honest with you, I don't think the couple of hours it would take to add this to preferences is worth you having to skip over three incredibly huge, massive lines taking up the entire front page. If other people were also this bothered by it, it would make sense, but frankly I can't agree that your preference justifies the work that would be spent.

What is it that bothers you so much anyhow? Losing screen real estate? Seeing what people are saying on imc? The colors? You have used 'somewhat' strong language to voice your opposition and I'm left a little mystified as to what's so terrible. Perhaps if you were more precise, we could work toward a solution that pleased everybody.

There are more reasonable concerns here, such as what to do with inanity on the front page from time to time (that could be viewed as a feature or a bug) and the display order. I think having old-to-new makes more sense in almost all cases; new-to-old makes sense when you're trying to see what has happened recently and don't want to keep scrolling to the end of the page.

For example, one thing that might be more interesting to have than the three recent messages would be recent usage statistics, such as the number of people active in the last 5 minutes, hour and day; the number of messages in those time periods, etc. Keep the link to the log so that people can get more detail if they want. This avoids the problem of potentially embarrassing (w.r.t. MB, not just the speaker) or inappropriate things show up on the front page.

They obviously are putting that small part of the page there for that because they hope to maybe boost some traffic into IMC2. Which is completely legit since they host and sponsor it. I think it's a little unseemly to demand not to see it.

Aaaaanyway.

Isn't ichat one of those members-jacket-only channels? I realize there's already a trend of this with Talon and the IMC logbot schtick, but why is it that we have a purportedly elite channel open for all to see? Honestly, with things set up the way they are, there's little reason to keep the ichat/pchat divide. Might as well let the unwashed masses in, though I recommend soap for all.