Tony Crocker":3pie91id said:
The loss of ability to upload photos to FTO is another negative IMHO. In my case, I would overrun my website's space if I put many pics on it, and I thought the process of loading to FTO was pretty easy. The 40K limit produced some graininess, but for viewing online was just fine.
Yes, that's somewhat disappointing. However, you know how your own pix would overrun your own website's space? Just think what everyone's photos do to ours! :shock: That was the rationale behind the former 40 Kb limit.
There is a mod out there for phpBB for uploading photos, and the good folks behind phpBB indicate that this will be a feature in the software's next release. I've started exploring mods, even to the point of downloading some, but I managed to corrupt the board trying to institute one for which the installation rating was "easy." The photo upload utility mod's installation rating is "advanced." Again, PHP coding is new to me, and it's going to take me some time to learn it. Perhaps there's someone out there comfortable with PHP who can assist me with instituting a few mods without crashing yet another BBS system? Who out there is willing to step up to the plate?
Tony Crocker":3pie91id said:
I would also add that navigation in the new system today is not as good as before. I like the listing by topic under "Eastern North America" in order of most recent posting. Then when you clicked on that topic you got the entire thread, also in order of posting. Now you get Marc's posts all together, and I can't even find my complete post from last night.
I'm the one who screwed up your post from last night
, but it
is all there. It's just fragmented from when I incorrectly split it to move the posts that strayed off-topic onto New Zealand into a separate topic thread. As for the ordering of topics, it's exactly the same as it was under the old system, newest on top, with one caveat: anything marked as an "announcement" or "sticky" remains on top (the section of the FAQ that explains announcements and stickies is
here). The fact that our first topics were comprised of replies to my "sticky" announcements in each forum regarding where to find old posts made this a bit confusing when there are only one or two topics thus far in each forum. Just like the old system, a new reply to an old topic automatically bumps that to the top of the list.
Registered users have the ability to easily see a list of all new posts since they last logged in, which IMHO is good enough reason in and of itself to register as a user. There are numerous other benefits as well, from something as mundane as setting the displayed time zone to match your own, to possessing the ability to private message other users. It comes highly recommended! In order to keep your email address hidden from the spam bots your email address is never actually visible on the pages. You click a button to send an email to a registered user and the BBS system itself addresses and sends your email for you. Rest assured that we are not collecting email addresses for any reason other than the internal operation of these boards to provide features such as that which I just described, or to allow the system to send notifications to you when a topic you're watching is replied to (something that
you opt to receive on a thread-by-thread basis).
Tony Crocker":3pie91id said:
I'm going to be liberal with critical comments now, because it's September and hardly anybody in the Northern Hemisphere is thinking about skiing now. But I believe the Liftlines/No-Bull-Reports need to be restored to at least the prior level of convenience by Nov. 1.
As I told you backchannel, Tony, feel free to keep it coming. Critical comments will help to define the forum experience for our users, and that's vital information to us. And your quote above amply illustrates why we felt the need to move forth now with the new phpBB implementation of our discussion boards, rather than wait until we might be able to salvage most of the posts on the former system. We need to know what works and what doesn't
now, before the snow flies.