Thanks Chip and Accipiter for your efforts.

Good job, Accipiter, as usual. Hard to imagine this whole thing working without you and Chip behind the curtain, pulling the levers. Thanks!
Regards- OJ

@Accipiter- thanks for the great work you did with this!! We're all very grateful for your efforts!

@Accipiter - Thanks for quick reply. That's great news. Sifting through dumpsters might be like looking for an overlooked "gem" at a re-sale shop or garage sale. :)
Found it! ... Thanks for all your hard work. Everyone appreciates it.

The upgrades went very smoothly, thanks very much to Accipiter's expertise with all thing Vanilla Forum. There a just a few changes that you may want to make note of:

• The "Mark All Viewed" option has been moved. Its previous location made it too easy to click accidentally, and there is no option to undo it. Now you can find "Mark All Viewed" under the Account Options gear, near your screen name in the top left panel of the screen. Hopefully, that will help us avoid accidental clicks. If you access the forum from a mobile device, you won't see any change.


• The Bullpen. You'll see a new category called The Bullpen on the left. Every day or two, we'll run a process that will move Fund Discussion threads that have had no comments in two days into The Bullpen category. If you'd like to bring a thread out of The Bullpen, just make a meaningful comment and the thread will return to the Fund Discussion category. It's really quite cool.

Please thank Accipiter for all his work on our behalf.

@Accipiter
So, if I am away for 2 weeks; without a connection or time to connect to MFO; I will be able to view the "normal" board, but also have to go "dumpster diving" for other posts which get the boot, as there may be something of interest there, for me?
Thanks,
Catch

I still need a short name for the zero comments category.

"Crickets..."

Accipiter and I will be working to upgrade the discussion board software this Saturday. We're a few version behind and need to upgrade to patch up some security issues. We'll likely begin work at 11 a.m. EST. It could take up to six hours for us to do everything that we have planned, although we're hopeful of being done sooner.

Accipiter: I think Davidmoran's suggestion was a lot simpler and that he envisioned a far simpler automated mechanism. I saw nothing in his proposal remotely related to links. How is it that new comments now automatically bump a post to the top, but that the same technology couldn't allow posts with 0 responses to drop into an inactive folder after 24 or 48 hours?
Trying to differentiate between "primarily link" and "primarily commentary" would seem a near impossible task - though I'm sure we have some here up to the challenge. And not all links are created equal. Some are damnd good.

It seems like a promising idea, but I'm not sure how easy or difficult it might be to implement. I'll try to reach out to Accipiter for his judgement.

Suggest moving all 0-response / 0-discussion posts (meaning no or 1 response after 1 day or some such threshold) to an Inactive / Low-Activity folder, leaving all else as is maybe.
You can set criteria and nomenclature differently of course.
There also could be a Concluded / Nearly Concluded folder for those lively but no activity for 2 days. -- ?
Just housekeeping and basic forum hygiene, to shorten the looong list now that the site is even more of a success than prior.

You're very welcome (and Accipiter is one that gets bulk of the credit for the good MFO Risk Profile and MultiSearch tools).

I also had to sign-in this morning. Happens about once a month for me, usually around the first. As a security move I'd cleared my browser history yesterday, which might account for the odd timing of it.
The process is controlled by the Vanilla board software and I've always understood that the rhythm and wording of this particular prompt is built into the software itself. I'll ask Accipiter, who handles most of the Vanilla programming for us, and Chip what they might add.
David

Thanks Accipiter. I actually prefer not to be notified. The less I get in my email inbox the better. I get a badge notification on the inbox when I get a message and that suits me fine.
The yellow notice on the profile page makes it clear now which function is private and which is not.
One question is the purpose of the activity box. Perhaps it is not necessary and could be deleted thus making this whole question moot?

Thanks Accipiter.
It should be clear so people have comfort that their messages are or are not private. It's bothersome to know others can read your stuff.

Hi bee- yep, it ain't just you- I do the same thing re cutting and pasting from an additional compose box for the more complex stuff like adding an URL- for the simple emphasis you can manually add the code characters to start and stop bold, italic, and underline.
If I correctly understood a comment that Accipiter made a while back they are going to try to fix that in the next iteration.
OJ

Once again Bob C comes through with solid recommendations based upon ling experience. This man is a gem!
I had forgotten how long Bob has been a pillar of support for both MFO and FundAlarm until I happened to read the "What are these Numbers?" post a few days ago, which contains a historic link to a FundAlarm page from April 2005.
There is Bob, then and now one of the most helpful folks to ever post on MFO or FundAlarm. Some other names, still with us, from the past: Maurice, Ted, David Snowball (of course!), VintageFreak, Mark, rono, and Falcon (now Accipiter). Congrats to all on longevity and minimal, if any, evidence of senility. :-)

For those unfamiliar with FundAlarm and for folks looking for a nostalgic rush, here's a snapshot of the FA discussion board from January 2011 and April 2005.
Roy Weitz launched FundAlarm 18 years ago as an antidote to the mindless hype that fund companies were getting away with. He combined a tart monthly commentary with a list of funds to avoid, then added a discussion board. About six years ago he felt himself running out of steam and asked if I'd write a new feature on small and new funds; after a year, Roy granted himself a sabbatical and I took up the monthly commentary. About four years ago he admitted that he'd written himself out; he felt he was stretching for content and made my role permanent.
About three and a half years ago, Roy's parents encountered simultaneous health crises and he let the community know that he was retiring FundAlarm to care for family. At Roy's prodding a number of folks encouraged me to launch "a site in the tradition of FundAlarm." Lacking any technical skills, I paid Brad Isbell, an IT colleague at Augustana, to design the site and prevailed upon my friend Cheryl Welsch (a/k/a Chip) to maintain it. We did a "soft launch" on April 1 2011 and had a sort of grand opening on May 1 2011. Our early look was ... uhhh, rudimentary. Anna Zolotusky, web designer whose mom was (is?) a fan, volunteered to bring us into the 21st century (and did).
We run two major software packages side-by-side: WordPress underlies the entire site and Vanilla underlies the discussion board. Chip frets rather more about WordPress, Accipiter - who taught himself programming for the purpose - frets rather more about Vanilla. Accipiter also wrote the Navigator program, which allows you to find a wealth of targeted information about any fund. As our discussion board software grew in complexity (Accipiter has written a bunch of custom programs for it), OJ generously wrote a really first-rate users guide.
Charles, like me, started as a member of the discussion community with a special knack. I'm not sure what my knack was. Charles's is making data sing. After reading one particularly fine post, I asked Charles if we might include it in the monthly commentary and had the pleasure, thereafter, to have him contribute pieces with a sophisticated statistical bent on a regular basis. As he thought about what the site needed, he also designed both our fund screener and the metrics behind it which led to the Great Owl designation.
Ed Studzinski, whose career included stints in the Navy JAG office and banking as well as co-managing OAKBX, had been sharing behind the scenes commentary on the industry and its players by phone. Eventually I persuaded him to address a larger audience about the dynamics of the industry and the way they affect our fates.
All on less than $700 a month.
Hope that helps,
David

Yes, I'm with you on that. I believe that Chip takes care of the more frequent day-to-day technical issues, and Accipiter comes aboard when there are major problems or software changes being made. My contribution to MFO was the assembly of the site User Manual, which can be downloaded as a PDF under the "Resources" heading. I had the pleasure of working with both Chip and Accipiter on that project, and they are really great to work with. That manual is now obsolescent, as the newer MFO software is much simpler than the last version. I hope to rewrite the User Manual if time permits.