Coloring newly found mersenne primes

[Damian]

Yesterday I was logged in mersenne.org appreciating my first found factor of the year (5445410747331540530647 is a factor of 2^160144379 - 1) when my wife said: I saw in facebook a new biggest known prime number has been found. And I was like WTF? I participate in GIMPS since 12 years, how can you know that before me? And just looked the home page where I had previously logged in, and effectively there was the news about M50. The fact that the home page visualy nearly never changes made me not notice that there were in fact new news in it.

I suggest assigning a different color to each new mersenne prime, and changing the background color of the home page to that color so that it visually impacts on people logging in mersenne.org

Maybe even an algorithm could take in the exponent and produce the color automatically.

What do you think of the idea? Any idea if that can be accomplished? Who has access to the server to be able to do that? What algorithm do you propose for the color-assigning?

[Batalov]

http://mersenneforum.org/showthread.php?t=22837

[gophne]

Originally Posted by Damian

Yesterday I was logged in mersenne.org appreciating my first found factor of the year (5445410747331540530647 is a factor of 2^160144379 - 1) when my wife said: I saw in facebook a new biggest known prime number has been found. And I was like WTF? I participate in GIMPS since 12 years, how can you know that before me? And just looked the home page where I had previously logged in, and effectively there was the news about M50. The fact that the home page visualy nearly never changes made me not notice that there were in fact new news in it.

I suggest assigning a different color to each new mersenne prime, and changing the background color of the home page to that color so that it visually impacts on people logging in mersenne.org

Maybe even an algorithm could take in the exponent and produce the color automatically.

What do you think of the idea? Any idea if that can be accomplished? Who has access to the server to be able to do that? What algorithm do you propose for the color-assigning?

Good idea. Perhaps also running a list of say the last few indices eliminated as reference where the seach is.

Are you expecting M51 to be discovered soon?

[Damian]

Originally Posted by gophne

Are you expecting M51 to be discovered soon?

In comparison to the more pessimistic, yes.

[axn]

Dare I say, along the lines of a recent thread about stickies, news from more than a year (or two) ago ceases to be "news", and should be removed from front page. There should instead be a link to "Older news" and should show there. Also, there should be more news... things like new version, new test types (cofactor testing, for eg.), new maths (Gerbicz PRP check), etc. would all qualify as new project developments that should be announced on the front page.