Deprecated - Usability feedback

While running my site i discovered strange thing in usability of using taxonomy for selecting nodes to display. I think it's very small problem in usbality but i think that it needs to be fixed.

I'd like to discuss block visibility.

Sometimes blocks should be visible; sometimes not. As far as I can tell, at the moment we have:

• Blocks are globally disabled or enabled
• Some blocks are only shown if your role has the right permissions
• You can select whether users can hide/show certain blocks

What I would like to see added, is:

• Some blocks are only visible for some roles
  
  The most important thing here is the distinction between an anonymous user and other users. I would like to hide most blocks for all anonymous users, as almost everyone has to get an account on my site. I guess that would be enough, but you could extend this to specifying visibility for all roles.
• Better control over default visibility
  
  When a user can select whether a block is visible or not, it would be nice to be able to specify a default. At this moment, it seems that it always defaults to off (this may be a bug in 4.3.2).

Hi all,
I think one missing features in Drupal is translation of taxonomy terms and vocabularies.
Since I'm developing a multilingual site (Italian & English), I need such a feature.
I found where to modify taxonomy module (CVS version) in order to accomplish this, but I would like to undestand from developers and maintainers if such feature is planned for Drupal 4.4 or it is considered of no interest.
If not, I would be very interested to know your opinion, and eventually in contributing to create such feature...

What happened to the post "New User Usabliity Notes (long)?"
I was going to read it since I had some time tonight.

http://drupal.org/node/view/5144

Did it get retracted or something?

These mostly focus on book navigation. It is posted here.

[Ed: part one can be found here.]

The current forum module is very slow when the amount of messages reaches a certain treshold ( 50000 across 10 forum topics , line on www.bebe.ch )

It takes too long to display list of forums or of topics and this makes it unusable for some of my users.
There should be ways of optimizing how database access is done ( a single query for all forums instead of one per forum etc ) but I am not sure how fast this can ever be given the current model.

There is a problem tracking what is really new since last visit. Because users will typically arrive on a forum where there are already posts, it doesnt make much sense to mark them all as new first time. It only makes sense to track (1) new subjects since last visit and (2) new comments of partly read subjets.

1 is achievable by comparing last visit timestamp and node created field, fast . The last visit timestamp is then reused to display new comments on each of the nodes with comments newer that last visit time . The last visit timestamp is stored as a cookie , one cookie per forum. This cookie is reset whenever the user enters a forum and reads any of the contents in it.

2 is achievable using cookies (!) in a very elegant and efficient manner. This is what an old forum system I used (wwwthreads) does. It stores a cookie with a list of the comments that the user has read . When going through the list of forums and only for those comments posted after last user visit, the forum module should check each post against the cookie and count new posts if it is not found there.