New Features on The Sand Trap Today - January 9, 2014 - Alert Bar!!!

Get notified of new posts

Have you ever been typing a reply to a thread and you push submit...and when the page reloads, someone has already answered the question you just answered but you didn't see their post because they hadn't submitted it when you first arrived in the thread?  Gah!  Yes, we've been annoyed by that too.

In this release we're adding a new feature which will allow you to see any time a new post is added in the thread you're viewing, in addition to giving you quick access to other tools.

As an example, below, you'll see a thread page we've landed on.  We're on the 3rd page of the thread (out of 5 pages), and we haven't read all the posts in the thread yet.  As soon as a new post is submitted, lo and behold the new post notifier in the bottom right corner.  This example shows you a new post has been submitted since you loaded the thread, giving you a total of now 2 unread posts (including the one that was there when we first got here).

The New Post count will take us to the first new post written.  The Unread count will take us to the first unread post.

The reply icon will have all the same functionality of the "Post a Reply" button.  It will hop you down to the editor, it will execute your multi-quote, etc.

There's also the preferences button which will pop open your preferences dialog:

Quick pause here: with this feature, we're adding a new user preference seen above for "Show Alert Bar".  Users can opt in to always show the bar, only at the time of new posts, or never.  By default when this feature is enabled on your site, users will be opted into "Only for new posts".

Then there's the pagination controls.  In a multi-page thread, when clicked, you'll get the pagination slider to let you skip from page to page.

And finally, there's the X.  Click that, and your alert bar will close and not reappear until the next page load.

In some cases, the new post count and the unread count will be one in the same - the case where you've read everything and you're still on the page when something new is submitted.  In these cases, you won't have separate controls for New Posts and Unread, but a consolidated look like this:

See it in action in this screencast video!

This feature is currently off because it was causing some slowdown issues, but as soon as they're resolved we hope to enable this feature. By default, it will appear only for new posts (you can change the preferences after it's made available to always or off).

This feature should now be live.

I was hoping you were alerting us to a new bar to get drinks!

No, but this works pretty well. You can leave a page loaded and then load new posts without even having to reload the page. It's particularly good when:

• You're typing a long post and may want to add a multiquote from someone who posts in the meantime.
• The conversation is fast moving.

Nice!