After a few weeks of the forum behaving itself, this morning I have had three ‘404 Not Found’ messages, after waiting around a minute, when attempting to post. On one occasion the message did indeed get posted (!), but on the other two occasions they did not !
Oh the joys of web-life !
Update:
Now here’s a curious thing - in the time it took me to compose this message, another one of my ‘lost’ postings have actually turned up now !
I DON’T UNDERSTAND !
I think the forum really needs an update or change.
This is the only forum where I regularly see posts about issues with the forum, failed posts etc.
Do the committee take notice of what is posted on here about failings with the forum?
It seems some post replies but nothing is ever done to improve matters.
I would suggest asking your Area Coordinator to request an update and/or raise your concerns if they are going to the Area Coordinators meeting on October 22nd, unfortunately not able to be there myself.
I think we (committee) are all aware of the ongoing issues.
There’s a few structural changes happening where Gary will take over from the committee post and the role that I’m currently in will be more focussed. In all probability this will be my last year doing this sort of role in the club at this sort of level (that’ll be ten years at that point, over a third of my life!).
If we can agree on new forum software to move to, we can look to make that move happen.
A big question as you’re no doubt aware
Do we need to replicate the existing structure or can the forum be simplified?
Do we want to transfer history or can we leave it behind as read only?
Is realtime member database integration still a requirement or could another process like a batch update be utilised?
Self or cloud hosted?
vBulletin apparently supports a migration from YAF, it also offers IOS and Android apps though what I have seen of these they’re not fantastic.
phpBB continues to be popular for very good reasons.
IP Board (Invision) is also popular and supports some quite sizeable communities.
It’s getting worse
I didn’t understand a word of that !
Do we need to replicate the existing structure or can the forum be simplified?
For mods/admin to decide, but I think we can simplify. Equally, if we think that we can, we should do it with this forum first because I see that potentially solving some problems.
Do we want to transfer history or can we leave it behind as read only?
Would prefer us to transfer as much as we can
Is realtime member database integration still a requirement or could another process like a batch update be utilised?
I think it should be realtime, but I also think that this is a much easier requirement to fulfil now than it was before. Warrants further research; if it transpires to be a pain, then batching could be an option.
Self or cloud hosted?
Either
vBulletin apparently supports a migration from YAF, it also offers IOS and Android apps though what I have seen of these they’re not fantastic.
I think that generally migration should be fairly simple between any, even if we have to script it ourselves. So whilst a nice plus if somebody else has done the work, I wouldn’t necessarily see it as a big deal.
Hope you don’t think I’m being over simplistic but here’s my list of requirements.
The best working forum I frequent on the net is ukGSer.com. Fast, bright, no stupldy small writing, easy to upload photos etc etc. The admin here could well take note and move on from this piece of crap that is basically past its sell-by date.
That is indeed an valid point that Davy F has just made.
Apart from the very erratic performance of the forum in general, the difficulty with the posting of photographs is extremely annoying - I had never heard of a web site that required the storing of picture files on a third-party site before joining this club.
When joining the club / forum last November, I had lots of problems trying to find out how to do things at first. I am not a prolific web user, and the lack of an instruction section for new members I found a real pain. If it wasn’t for the patience of established members putting me right when I made a ■■■■, or answering my queries without making me sound dim, I would probably have given up within the first few days.
So, upon revamping the site, in my mind, the priorities should be: 1) a system that is powerful enough to actually do the job without regularly crashing / freezing; 2) a new members’ instruction section; and 3) the ability to store picture files to obviate the need for a third-party site.
Perhaps we should all send letters to Santa !
I agree with the point about ease of learning about the various hidden aspects of the site for a new OC member, but not necessarily for a random guest (and definitely not for a bot - hide more sensitive areas with captcha etc).
Photos however are a minefield because they take so much storage space. A typical small good quality photo from a small camera takes as much file space as a hundred thousand word novel (about a megabyte or two). Bigger photos from bigger cameras easily go to ten megabytes, whereas this text post with the posts quoted above is probably about only three or four thousand bytes. So three hundred of these take about as much space as one small photo.
I would suggest that only OC members be entitled to direct photo posting privilege, guests would still have to post pictures via third party sites. At work we had quotas for our accounts, generous, but still necessary. You may have noticed the mail box quota here grows if we contribute more posts. It would be reasonable to have a similar system for pictures, a quota, however not on number of pictures but on total storage available to the OC member, and that might be allowed to grow for a frequent contributor of posts and sensibly sized pictures.
But what does everyone else think?
An interesting point there Richard, and one which alludes yet again to the lack of instruction for new members of this forum - I was always under the impression that only members could post things anyway, and that non-members who accessed the site could only read / look at the various postings / pictures ! Wrong again Chris !
You are quite right of course, about pictures taking up much more memory space than text, but how do other forums / web sites cope ?
Forum acting up again today (Sunday 14th) - ‘404 not found’ messages appearing almost every time I try to post a new message. Oddly enough though, a few minutes after the error message is shown, the new messages generally appear anyway without the need to re-post.
We’re looking at best options to update/replace the software this forum currently runs on, change will take a little while, it is on several people’s active agenda though.
Valid points about photo size.
The solution, fortunately, is very simple when it comes to moving to a new platform. When uploading photos to the new platform we should limit the photo size in both dimensions and bytes.
I know there are a number of off the shelf online gallery plugins for various online content management systems that take care of all this stuff, while integrating with the content/forum software they were written for. I tested a couple written for invision a few years back and despite my reservations they were suprisingly good - chuck a 15mb high quality jpeg at them and they would downsize to max 1000 pixels, reduce the quality to match and apply a but of sharpening to counter detail drop from the size reduction. Took a few attempts to get the balance right but the results were impressive. Images already within the guide size did not get touched.
Something like that, linked to club membership status on the forum would be ideal.
Still presents the problem of bandwidth consumption but less so.
As I understand it (and I’m sure someone more knowledgeable that I will correct me if I’m wrong), to get a decent-quality A4-sized print on paper, one needs a pixel count of about 300 pixels per inch, which requires a file size of around 30 MB or thereabouts (for a JPEG file - more if another system is used).
However, as the resolution of the TV or Computer screen is much lower, a 72 PPI count is adequate for on-line purposes - this is the resolution I have always been advised to use when uploading photos to my web site anyway. This makes the file size much smaller of course, so if the OC were to stipulate the maximum of 72 PPI for the JPEG files intended for use on this forum, the storage capacity required would be greatly reduced.
When uploading pictures for the avatars, the web site already automatically resizes any photo file that exceeds the required size anyway, so perhaps it could be set up to do the same for other pictures too.
Now you’ll have to excuse me if my simplistic view on this is not strictly correct - I’m a techno-thickie, and need to keep things a simple as possible for my little grey cells to process all this hi-tech stuff .
Perhaps also, the posting / uploading of pictures could be restricted to members of the OC only - which I thought was the case anyway, but the other day someone told me that anyone could post pictures on this forum, so again increasing the amount of storage space necessary.
The PPI is not a significant figure when it come to the photo storage, much more important is the total number of pixels in the image AND the level of quality expected.
PPI is simply a scaling issue, like zooming in or out of the scene without actually changing how many there are actually still in the image. Is the image going to be on a screen, a piece of paper, or a microfilm: all can have the same resolution in total pixels, and need the same digital data storage, but will have different PPI for the physical item.
As you say, an A4 sheet of paper will need at least 30MB (uncompressed data) for a high quality print, and we might examine that with a magnifier and still see more detail. However, by reducing the quality (ie heavier compression) and yet keeping the same number of pixels the storage could be reduced down to as little as 1MB for the same subjective pixel count, but now the magnifier will reveal local blurring and fewer fine colour steps etc, because detail data has been lost selectively as decided by the compression algorithms.
For practical purposes on a computer screen, which is unlikely to be more than full HD (1920x1080 pixels) and more commonly about 3/4 of those, then a 1000x720 pixel image is a good compromise. It is big enough to see useful detail, will fit easily on most screens without needing to be scaled, and depending on the quality chosen the storage requirement can be anything from less than 100KB to more than 2MB.