New Forum platform

[Steve O]

Thanks, Henry, for this new platform, which has a lot of improvements. I do not know if additional improvements are possible, but I’m starting this thread for users to post their observations, ideas and suggestions.

– In the old forum I could change my settings to show the most recent posts at the top instead of the bottom. I don’t see that option here. For long threads one must go to the topic, click on the last page and scroll down to get to the most recent post. On the old forum the most recent post was right there at the top (if you changed your settings thusly). OTOH, the search function shows results in reverse chronological order, which is good.

– Speaking of which, the new search function appears to be waaayyyy better for finding what you’re looking for

– In the old forum I could set my number of posts shown per page. I had mine set to 20. This one appears to default to 15, which is better than 10, but with no personalization option available.

– The old forum offered the option to see the most recent activity, regardless of which topic it appeared beneath. Here one must scroll down through all the topic names to see if any new activity has occurred in a topic lower on the list. It would be great if the main forum topic list sorted to show the ones with most recent activity at the top (arranged by LAST POST), rather than in static order. For instance, right now the Alexandria BPAC thread has a post from yesterday, but it’s way down the list – easy to miss – while at the same time, the Arlington PAL Ambassador program thread is near the top, and its last post was more than 5 years ago.

These are just a few quick observations. Others will hopefully have other good ideas. Again, many thanks for this undertaking, which is long overdue. It would be great if continuing to improve this forum made it better for providing community resources widely and easily and it helped serve to grow the community.

 

 

[Steve O]

Also, the reply function doesn’t seem to have a way to easily quote a previous post.

[jrenaut]

• Is there a way to report spam? I couldn’t find it, though it looks like you already got the post I was going to report
• Are you going to change “Participant” to the whimsical tags of the old site?

[mstone]

and the old spam reports and internal discussions are now public at the bottom of the forum

[Steve O]

I cannot figure out how to post a photo from the web interface. The photo is saved on my computer, but the only option is to insert a link. Copying and pasting doesn’t work.

 

[DCAKen]

The notion of “Read posts” has been lost on here, which means there’s no current way of marking discussions as read, or making all posts as read. As Steve noted, there’s no way to have a listing of all unread posts.

For long threads one must go to the topic, click on the last page and scroll down to get to the most recent post.

One to get the to last post in a discussion is to use the link in the “Last Post” column. **Edit…that doesn’t seem to always work properly.

 

The site is more user-friendly, but it needs additional improvement. For example, this is a screen shot of my phone when adding a photo.

 

I can’t zoom out any farther to get show the entirety of the dialog. I have to rotate my phone to see it.

 

In the landscape mode, there’s an icon under the Source text box that’s mostly obscured. You can see an additional line under Source in the vertical mode.

It would be useful to see the what the post looks like before submitting it, to avoid having to fix formatting errors.

[Steve O]

Is there a way to delete a post? (I am now going to attempt to delete this one, to see how.)

…….pause……

 

Don’t see an obvious way.

 

[Sunyata]

My biggest complaint is not being able to see what is new and unread.  I also miss the link that automatically took you to the first unread comment in a thread.

I also miss the like and elite buttons.

I did really appreciate the whimsical titles we all had instead of “participant”.

That being said, I can see how this format is a lot more user friendly if folks were not used to “ye olde forums”.

[lordofthemark]

Currently it appears that old private messages are not accessible – are they archived somewhere?  Old pictures?

[mstone]

It’s “user friendly” in the sense that a bunch of functionality was removed, meaning there are less things to “confuse” a first time user. In terms of actual functionality for frequent users it’s a major regression, bordering on unusable.

[Starduster]

I was *about* to concur concerns about uploading photos. Typed all this and then looked up to the toolbar. The result is below. I will cut the software folks slack for releasing the platform while it was still being configured.  Also, photos that were part of our postings in the old format are no longer viewable.

The best news ? I can finally easily view and *actually use* the forum on a cell phone. The old platform was a clunky old thing, decades old, from back when we had CRT monitors and Flying Toasters screen savers.

Welcome to present time.

[Starduster]

Update- On two of my posts (The lighting thread on Freezing Saddles 2024) I reloaded my images to work with the new platform.

Also…I wanted spacing between paragraphs. This format is not allowing that.

[DCAKen]

Was there a change made to uploading photos? This evening, when I tried to upload one, I got this message

I had to download the pictures to my computer and save them at a much lower resolution. I was able to  upload photos at the regular resolution this morning.

[antibozo]

Is there any way to get some kind of notification of updates or replies to threads?

[bigredboiler]

Can we just go back to the prior platform?  Sorry, I’ve only seen issues/lost functionality.  I concur with the many questions/complaints/missing functions already listed.

And, before I could use forum on phone (clunky, yes, but worked).  Or could use Tapatalk app easily.  Tapatalk no longer works after the update.

I too can’t upload photos today (could before this).  I’m not going to download photo to PC, resave as a new, smaller res file, and then upload to forum.  That’s crazy.

[Author]

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