The Question and Answer Board

[Rick Faurot]

Try this, (from Bob):

If you go to Tools and My Settings, there's a new option at the bottom of that screen: "Show Message Navigation as:" and the dropdown has the choices "Text" (the default) and "Menu Buttons".
If you change it to "Menu Buttons", the one-at-a-time message-reading screen's going to look a LOT different.
Each of the options will be displayed as a menu button looking just like your top menu rather than text.
The effect is a lot more dramatic (and more pleasing, IMO) if you've gone into "My Interface" and given your menu a 3-D look. For an example of this, go to Tools->My Interface, click the "Bob's Fave" button and click "Save Changes".
Now, before anyone tells me about it, yes, I know there's a display problem with the "menu" below the messages. I'm tracking that one down.
If you try out this interface, I've tried a different approach to it that should result in it being faster, perhaps only on the order of milliseconds. I've never really gone through the message-reading screen and tweaked it as hard as it can be tweaked, and there's lots of room for speed improvement there.
Also, in that interface, there's a new option that I want to try out before including it in the text version of message navigation: "Mark as Last Unread".
This one should prove to be terribly handy. If you click it and you're, say, 30 posts away from the last post on the board, it'll set that as the last unread board on that board and take you to your Favorites screen (since you'll typically only click that when you're done reading the board for a while) and it'll show 30 unread message for that board. Clicking the number of unread messages will take you to the one right after the one you set as your last unread.