Auto-update front page...it came to me in a dream!! lol

I had a dream that the front page of TFS was written in flash and so the latest posts appeared dynamically instead of having to refresh the page to see what new posts had been made. And then I woke up and thought, Hey, that'd be pretty cool! I don't know if it's even possible, but if it was, would you want it that way?

** edit - Flash doesn't have to be the scripting language used necessarily, it's more a question of whether a dynamic front page would be preferred or not, in any coding language.

Also, this is a hypothetical question, and not a request for Tino to actually make this change. **

that would take alot of time to set up, i dont even think that could work

sounds cool

That would suck ass.

Flash is the devil.

It would be slow, take ages to load, be resource-intensive, break common functionality like searching and search engine indexing, the back button, copy-and-paste, etc etc.

Flash is useful for some small things, but as a method to deliver content via the web, it's a** in a basket.

I'm not assuming it even can be done, I don't know if it could be, though it would be cool if it was possible. It was more of a hypothetical question. All the better if it's possible, but that wasn't my intent. So no worries Tino, I'm not trying to make any unreasonable demands on you! lol

I have nothing to do with this site other than being a member! el_tino is the guy who created/runs this place.

It's technically possible to recode the front page in Flash, but:

1) It would take a huge amount of time
2) The programs necessary to do so would cost a lot of money
3) It would make the server slower
4) It would run super slowly on a lot of people's computers
5) It wouldn't run at all on some computers
6) The "Back" button won't work anymore
7) Copy and paste won't work anymore
8) Google won't be able to read and index the page in its search results
9) The "Find" button wouldn't work anymore

In theory it's neat, but using Flash for the front page is *bad*. There's a reason no decent site on the internet has its front page in Flash.

It might be doable in some sort of AJAX kinda DHTML way or something, but it would be a lot of work and still have lots of drawbacks.

i agree with that i just find it ironic that, its what it was made to do

Ok, so if there was some way to make the front page dynamic using any coding language, would that be better or worse? The question is more of the dynamic factor rather than the scripting language. I know nothing about flash at all, and besides it was a dream, so that wasn't even a conscious choice.

I think that given a large upgrade on the server side, and a hiring of some additional coders by el_tino, then it would be possible to redesign the site in that way.

However, all that costs a metric assload of money. I'm sure el_tino isn't some millionaire prepared to spend an extra $20,000 a month of his own personal money to upgrade TFS in such a way

There's no easy or simple way to do it that doesn't have tons of drawbacks, I'm afraid.

Google, on the other hand, has more money than God. Look at https://maps.google.com or https://gmail.com for examples of some of the neat (though limited) things you can do with web sites these days.

It wouldn't be too hard to have a little 'refresh' button that would refresh the lists without having to reload the page. I'm not sure it's really worth doing though.