Responding to this and others about sizing and configurability.

At the end of the day, we had to call a halt to the tweaking and get this launched - otherwise we could still have it on the shelf mid-season and be adding features. As I said to open this thread, we have a lot of development potential still to exploit on this platform.

I realise that the fixed positions are a compromise, but I can tell you that we will be looking at adding in some more of the My Autosport-style drag, drop and resize effects in the coming weeks.

Certainly, I would like to make the forum pane resizable for those with bigger displays. At the moment, the compromise is that it is sized to get a reasonable spread of adverts, commentary and chat on a 1024x768 display.

I'll look at making this a user option, although it will probably default to how it is at the moment. It is certainly possible.

I'll think about that

You are right, the forum box only has vertical scrolling at the moment. We will fix this.

Darn, I thought I fixed that one. :\

Strange, I've not had this on any Firefox testing, Mac or Windows.

Do you have your text size set to very large - something other than Medium?

I had to make a late change to deal with some Safari problems and that has compromised the design of the posting box slightly - we will improve this.

Would it be possible to add the "accesskey" attribute to the buttons for the posting? If the accesskey is set to "s", one would press Alt+Shift+S (in Firefox) to get it to submit the message.

Certainly possible, I'll try.

As a general comment, thanks for the feedback everyone. We will certainly look at it all of your feedback and try to improve where possible. I should say that because of the logistics involved, we won't be making any changes during this weekend, unless there is a serious problem. All the improvements will be implemented and tested throughly in the gap between races.

excellent so far,keep it up!

Thank you! Excellent!

First of all, thank you for this service! It will be much easier to have this one scrolling on the screen while watching the race and qualifying - no need to refresh anything! Also this one is much more interactive.



The main reason for this option is to be able to read the comments afterwards. When I don't have the possibility to follow live thread live, I typically browse the comments afterwards, to get a better picture of the events. For this purpose, it would be really nice to have a view where one can see all bits and pieces in (reverse) chronological order.

Only problem I had was that at some point it accepted my posts but they didn't appear on the chat. I tried reloading the page and it started working again.

Apart from it, works great.

that was really good to use. Well done to everyone involved.

Im looking fwd to seeing how it develops!

I can only speak for myself, but I prefer the old format.

This had too little interaction. No quoting as an example.

No - sorry - not something I would enjoy.

Noted. We saw that occasionally in testing this week. Once it says 'Thank you for posting' you can be sure that it has been dispatched for broadcast to everyone. This is some kind of local refresh problem, which only happens after posting to the forum and in very rare circumstances. We will try to track it down, but in the meantime you can try hiding the forum pane and reopening it, as this may cause your post to appear.

What browser and OS are you using?

Now that the commentary has ended, all the posts are reversed for ease of review after the event.

My first impression is hmmm
Don't quite like the new format - about 1/3rd of the screen area utilized only, tiny chat window, unnatural scrolling - new on top. IMHO old live comments format was better and I prefer to have two tabs open in the browser rather than everything squeezed in one corner of the screen.

Gets my vote.


Congrats and thanks to all those who have put the effort into this.

It will take some time to get used to but my overall impression is that this puts a lot of information on one screen.

Any suggestions on how I can sell the concept of a 30" Apple Cinema Display to my better half?

Good job guys!


"Change is good, you go first"

Is it me or am I missing the post-event comment threads?

Where is the "Barcelona Friday Practice - Comments" thread?

Am I missing it or is it integrated into the live commentary (which would be a really bad idea, since these are post-live comments)?

Sorry in advance if I have missed something.

Great addition to autosport, well done guys! My only suggestion would be to also provide a link to the live comments thread in regular forum format. From what I understood the comments are already being posted to the BB backend so this should be trivial.

Only Massa, you are quite correct. There is no plan to contain an end-of-day discussion/comments thread within autosport.com Live.

That's not to stop anyone posting an end-of-day thread in RC themselves. I think race addicted and one or two others have started some of the analysis threads this year so far.

This is what I get both in Mozilla and IE - full screen at 1280x1024 pixels.
A lot of empty space to the right.
Maybe because I'm not a subscriber there's also a large uninformative strip above.

No offence, but after using new format yesterday, i allready know wich one of the 2 i like....
definattely the old one. You could reread stuff, even days after....

You can still reread stuff with this new format? I reread yesterdays stuff just now.

No real problems here, it's pretty good. Only complaint would be the same as Dragonfly about the free space on the right. On a widescreen monitor especially (1440x900) it's alot of wasted space.

My first impression wasn't so good to be honest but it's got some cons and some pros and with time the cons will most likely be gone, and the auto refresh feature is really handy.

great addition, especailly for the friday sessions for me in work since i cant access the itv feed or live timing (sucky work pc's) and its a lot easier to follow than the thread in RC imo

Exactly my thoughts.

anyone else find quick posts don't always get posted?

If only T5 had been as smooth as this. Excellent work and I think most people are very happy with it.

Two improvements I would like to see, one of which has been mentioned before, is for a scroll bar that allows you to scroll across to the quick post area and then back again so to keep the size of the window and allow the multiple others that people will be using.

Also can the red bar that separates the professional comments from the rest of us be moveable so that I can have a more 50% split? Hack's and NigelRed5's comments are invaluable, but as you know a lot of the forum members like to hear their own voices quite a lot too

Regards

Andy

The Infobox info. is cool. Love it.

I can understand that it would be difficult to implement, but it would be nice if we can have the ability to customise the service like my.autosport. For example, switch the position of different windows, minimise others, etc.

Thanks to Geoff Creighton and Emlyn Hughes. This new Live site is great! Nice not needing to hit refresh anymore. Hopefully this also lessens the load on the autosport servers.

Yes brill brill brill.

Awesome work guyz!!!
bravo!

Love the soundbites guys.

Thanks for your feedback and kind words.

Both of these improvements are very possible and not too difficult. We'll try to have both in play for Turkey.

I am definitely thinking about how we can bring in some of the My Autosport features to let people adapt this to match their viewing habits. Live already draws a lot of the techniques and inspiration from My Autosport.

Like I said yesterday, we could have been tinkering with this all year. It was better to get this on the track and then build developments on top.

We'll have some new bits on for Turkey, I can promise that.

Great work guys, working without a hitch at this end, appreciate the work that has gone into getting the service up and running.

I preferred the old format, I'm afraid. The new chat box is too hard to follow...my posts were not showing up, and I would be waiting for ages for new posts then about 10 would show up at once. I had to switch to the commentary to find out what was actually happening. Why can't the commentary and chat be combined? The old RC Live threads were easy to follow. Also, the posts you make in the chat forum do not seem to show up in the "search for all posts by..." in your profile or add to your post count.

I suppose I shall have to get used to it but for now, it's not for me...

not sure if its just me but when i click on 'show live thread' nothing actually comes up-was fine last night,but not now

We have implemented a range of software improvements and these have been installed today. If you are still seeing this, I suspect the problem is your browser caching some elements of the previous version.

As a quick fix, you can try using Shift and clicking refresh (or Ctrl refresh in some browsers). I am also implementing a fix at the server side to ensure that everyone loads the latest files.

Cheers Hack, the shift and refresh trick worked and sorted the problem

Hey my red bar moves and I do not have to scroll! Thanks for actioning our comments.. excellent work guys ...even better now

@DA Firefox ... but its the 'Release 3 Beta 5' version... perhaps I should just revert to the standard version...

Thanks

I should elaborate that we have a number of updates now in place. These are the most notable improvements:

* The forum pane can be resized up to 60% of the browser window size. Click and drag the red dividing line to do this.
* The forum posting box can be moved to the left, underneath the forum posts, using the MOVE LEFT link, to help those looking for a more vertical layout.
* By popular demand, the forum posts now insert at the bottom of the window in line with most chat applications.
* The access key 'P' is available on the post box.

There are also some reliability improvements, and I would be interested to hear from anyone experiencing a 'my post didn't show up' problem as I believe this is now resolved.

This is the first incremental step and we will be continuing to improve things throughout the year.

As always, let us know thoughts, problems and any other comments.

I've tested in Firefox 3 b5 on Windows and can't see any problems. Can you describe more fully the issue you are having?

The word 'cockpit' is treated as a dirty one by the filter.

Used it for the first time today, and must say - awesome job

One feature request: can we have a timeboard somewhere? So during the free practices, it will give the best time (ranked off course) etc.

new firefox addon 'split browser' do wonders

http://img110.imageshack.us/img110/1290/clip2dh0.jpg

Drat, I knew there would be some of those but couldn't think of them. I will fix that now. The filter is a little brutal at the moment, in the future I'll look to add some more intelligence. In the meantime, if you can think of any more possible examples along these lines, please PM me.

I'm also sorting out the problem where the post box was forced to be too wide for its position by someone posting a really long link.

That's a great view luckywill.

You may benefit from the new feature of being able to move the posting box underneath the forum comments. Click MOVE LEFT above the smilies to try it out.