So, I've (mostly) completed the forum upgrades. Things you'll notice right away: - You can now hover over image attachments to open them. - Tagging threads. - Social bookmarks (if you use services like Digg or Stumbleupon or delicious) Things that might take a while for you to find and use: - Blogs (please use'em for the sorts of posts where you're providing info, e.g., what's growing in your garden, what you've noticed while out for a walk, etc.) - Social groups - Personal user photo albums Things that are going to take a while to build up: - Thread prefixes (a few are in use now in the Plant ID forum -- if you have suggestions for others, please post'em)
Ah, I forgot to mention the security enhancements: Using Recaptcha for new registrations now - should help decrease the number of bots posting. Using Akismet to analyze posts from new users. If Akismet judges it to be spam, the post is sent to moderation. I'm hoping this'll decrease the spam we receive (unfortunately, this service isn't free...) Password analysis to judge weak passwords - a script was run to identify accounts with weak passwords and an email was then sent out asking people to change their password. Also, people can no longer register with weak passwords. This helps prevent old accounts from being taken over by bots or people trying to guess passwords.
WOW. Gosh, you have been very busy!!! Rather amazing. Thank you for all your efforts to keep continually improving this site.
Well, just had the first spammer successfully register, so I know now it isn't bots -- it's actually people going through the registration process. Hopefully Akismet will do the job when they manage to post (i.e., when I don't catch'em first).
Daniel I have noticed that when I open a thread it automatically opens a photo. Is that because my cursor is hovering over it? Ed
Yessir. If you move your cursor off, it won't open the photo. I find it requires less mouse movement with this new system. Don't have to go to the top right hand edge of the screen to close the window. I suppose it'd be the bottom left hand of the screen in Australia...
Thanks Daniel. Nice one about the closing the screen lol. And no, still at the top right ha ha ha : ) Ed
I'm not sure I like this feature. It seems to take longer to load an image than before partly because it's creating a brand new preview image. I have to then click again to see the full image. Could this feature be put under user control?
Also, I find the auto-load annoying when my cursor happens to be over an image upon opening a thread as I've not had a chance to read the text.
Well, I've taken off the hover. You now have to click to load the attachment. I don't think it's actually slower, but it may seem to be -- one reason for that is it fully loads the image before displaying it, whereas the old system would start to display the image and gradually roll down the screen. No one seems to have made a hack to toggle the feature on/off yet.
Thanks, Daniel. Images still load using the new format when clicked but that can be bypassed using Ctrl-click (in Firefox). The image then shows in a new tab as before. Users now have a choice. Some questions: Do the new forum features expose their content to guests (non-members) and search bots in the same way as regular forums? Is the Conversations and Chat forum the only area that is restricted?
Yes, both social groups and blogs expose content to guests and search bots by default. However, in both cases, individual users can set it so that the group or blog is by invite only, thus preventing all others from seeing the content. Conversations and Chat / Plant Trading / the defunct Sourcing Plants are the only forums restricted to members-only.
And... had the first few spam postings last night, and they were all caught by Akismet. Unfortunately, it also caught some posts that weren't spam. Long-time users don't have to worry about their posts being caught by the spam filter, but new users do.
okay, i didn't know the hover feature could be turned off - thought there was a problem with it and/or just that there was some issue with the other isp that i use sometimes. although it is nice to not have to do extra clicks, i didn't like the way the pic opened over the text - so i'm glad it's turned off :)
Be nice if the 'bookmarks' and 'tags' could go below the Reply box rather than above it. When you get to them, you think you've reached the end of the page, and may not see the reply box at all.
Well, it is the quick reply box -- so I'm not too worried. The Post Reply button is also there above those options. I might change it, but I think the point of making it prominent is also so that people start using it. Now, another question to everyone -- have your private messaging settings changed? I think with the upgrades, my options were automatically set to "Accept PMs only from Contacts", which could be a good thing for some people (i.e., I can move PMs back to being available to newly registered people) but bad if you are trying to contact someone and don't know how to use Contacts.
