New forum - new features

mike

I think it's worth highlighting some of the differences for the new site:

Public Viewing: Public Viewers that are not signed into an account will find that the "search forum" facility has been disabled, and all images within posts are displayed blurry. This is intended to try and encourage people to register and sign in. Once signed in, the "search forum" facility is active and no images are adjusted.
Subscription/Donations: Along the way, I've had people asking if they can contribute to help offset the costs associated with domain registration and server hosting. This is strictly not a commercial enterprise, however - donations are very much appreciated.
If you would like to contribute, then once you are signed in, view your profile page, and you should see a payment link, with a suggestion of £5/year. If you subscribe - your user avatar will be given a little crown to help acknowledge that you are a contributing subscriber.

I've set the integration with the payment provider so that it is a one-time payment and will not recur - I think that's fairer. At the end of the year, the little crown will disappear, and the payment link should re-appear in your profile page to allow you to resubscribe, should you wish to do so.
For Sale: Similar to other forums out there, I've also set the "Classifieds" section so that only paid-up subscribers can start a discussion - so if you would like to post something for sale, then please do feel free to do so, but you must post in the "For Sale" section, and therefore you must contribute to the upkeep of the forum.

Bridgland

Mike - is there a way to edit/amend posts? I am struggling to be able to add some additional comments to a post I made.

guillaume69

So far, I have been able to edit my posts until someone read them. After that, the amending option (3 little dots right of « like ») seems to become unavailable.

Also, I believe the 2Mb limit for pics is a little restrictive. How costly would it be (in terms of server memory space) to allow, say, up to 5Mb?

mike

guillaume69

Hi guys - checking the settings, yes - it's current set to allow editing of posts until the next reply. Also - I agree that 2MB is a bit restrictive these days, and should be able to configure it upwards - I'll test what I've got in mind in the next few days.

I've been a little distracted over recent days pulling apart my little 250 bevel… 😄

mike

Actually - that was easier than I anticipated - I've tested some settings for increasing the size of images.

Here's the thing - Modern cameras on smartphones take extremely high resolution photos, at a quality suitable for printing - far higher than necessary for it to look good when viewing in a browser. That high resolution makes the files very large.

It is important for a few reasons to try and keep the overall size of all attachments to a reasonable level - we've got plenty of headroom at the moment, but it can build up really quickly, particularly these days if we're storing images at the native resolution of most smartphones (something that wasn't really a problem when this forum was first started, as smartphones were barely a thing, and the cameras on them were poor).

However - it's true that it's a PITA having to downscaling an image before we upload it, so the 2M limit absolutely feels unreasonable.

So - what I've just done is configured it with a really high upload limit, meaning that you can upload images up to 32MB, however - before the image is stored as an attachment, it will be automatically downsampled to a lower resolution (a maximum of ₁₅₀₀ pixels in either the x- or y- dimension, maintaining the aspect ratio).

That way, we can have the convenience of not being restricted on uploads, and use the server itself to do it's own housekeeping and keep things nice and efficient.

That's active now - so do feel free to try it out, and let me know what you think. I'm expecting that for most purposes we won't be able to tell the difference, and for those occasions that print-quality images do need to be stored for some reason, perhaps an external hosting source might be able to be used (imgbb.com, imgur, etc)

guillaume69

mike

That’s perfect! 👍🏻

By the way, as I was playing with ponctuations to try and generate emojis, some automatic generation software came up. Looks like you’re making progress there too Mike.

As a French man, I certainly enjoy being able to display a Fleur de Lys! ⚜️

mike

I haven't done anything with the emojis yet.

However - I'm starting to realise that the emoji picker is just not as intuitive as we might otherwise expect. If you just type colon (":") followed by the name of what you want (say, "fleur", or "grin"), then you can select exactly what you want., and that works just fine. but you need to know broadly what to type.

I was previously clicking on the smiley face in the editor toolbar, and not getting very far as it seemed odd for it to default to "regional_indicator_*"

guillaume69

👍️