Why do I have a floating midgard menu when I am on maemo.org?

It doesn't let me make any changes to the website (a good thing).

The only useful function it seems to do is let me logout.

If you visit your maemo.org profile page it will. More generally, it will allow you to change pages for which you have the proper permissions.

The rest of the time it just floats there. It's sort of the Clippy of the Midgard world.

Got you.

I always assumed it was an advert!

I wish the AFB had the personality of Clippy.

Is everyone ganging up on my ignorance today?

What's an AFB?

Clippy had personality?

Not ganging up on you

It's an in-joke, it's a TLA (Three Letter Acronym) for "Annoying Floaty Bar"

And you bet Clippy had personality!

Midgard's toolbars service has three modes that we can use: the floating "palette", a "menu" that is on the top of the screen, or showing the toolbars somewhere inside page content.

At the moment we're using the "palette", but it would certainly be possible to move the toolbar items to the content area (or navigation area like it is on wiki.maemo.org).

We have three different toolbars, all of which can be shown in different places, and have slightly different uses:

• "View" toolbar for manipulating current item you're on (page, profile)
• "Node" toolbar for manupulating current folder (create items, change config)
• "Host" toolbar for site-wide actions (logout, cache invalidation)

How'd you like to see them on the site?

I have no real peferences for what or how I see things.

Consistency is the most important - the midgard menu only came to my attention because it is inconsistent:

1) It is not on all pages (not necessarily bad)

2) It's actual appearance is not in the same style as the rest of maemo.org, which is why i thought it was an advert.

The number 1 annoying thing is that its size is just about right to cover up your user name. It used to float by default in that area so some were never quite sure if they were logged on.

For us OG internet tablet Talk members who were directed to join maemo.org (note lower case "m", GA ) by veterans it was quite frustrating. It also reinforced the mistaken notion by itT forum members that maemo.org was a sacred society and there was some sort of secret handshake needed in order to get in.
Some veteran maemo.org members also must have thought that anybody originally from itT was pro'ly some sort of lower life form because their simple instruction to just click on your user name (hidden by the AFB) was so hard to understand.

This lead to some spirited discussion on these forums, some misguided posts, some mis-directed aggression, and the Sheldon-esque, SMOMR (standard maemo.org member response ) "Feel free to recommend the changes when you log-on." < face plant >

Ah, good times...