Forum enhancements

One thing led to another and I am now in the middle of a complete rewrite of the support forum backend.

It was originally based on something called Curious Wall, which was in turn a simpler version of Project Ivory board, which seems however to be dead at the moment.

In any case, I did two or three passes over CW's code, rewrote a good half of it, added lots of stuff, including activity notifications, thread watching, moderation tools, etc. And it worked for its purpose well until I decided to check how many of 300+ threads from the forum are indexed by Google. The answer turned out to be two.

At that point I had a choice of troubleshooting CW's escape_fragment contraption or just dump hashbanged URLs altogether and redo the whole thing from scratch. If you are a programmer, that's not really a choice. It's a no-brainer. You always rewrite. Everything. At least twice.

Attached is the first new addition to the forum, which is a full index of all topics, so that our friend google-crawler-bot would now how much of content goodness is available.

Pagination defaults to 50 threads per page, but it's flexible and can be changed by adding ".NNN" to the URL, just like in the attached image. So you'd basically go .../index/123.45 to get 45 topics starting with 123rd most recent.

Page navigation is at the top-right and bottom-center.

Little read +1 is a number of unread posts in a topic if you are logged into the forum. Bold names on the right are of yourself, naturally.

--

If you have a larger monitor, check out the larger screenshot which is attached for your viewing pleasure.