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.

 

 

Topic

[Indiana]

Not the highest priority, but would like a return of the “preview post” function. Helpful to see if the photos are working (or not working, as currently the case).

[antibozo]

Sure would be nice if i didn’t have to log back in to the site every day, and if, when i do log in, it would take me back to where i was when i clicked on “Log In” instead of my having to carefully go back in my browser twice and then reload. This is basic stuff.

[peterw_diy]

Lots more wasted space, lower contrast (bad enough that Google Chrome’s Lighthouse tools’ Accessibility test complains), and, most importantly, too dang hard to find new discussions. Big step backward.

[DrP]

So there is no way to complain about possible spambots? Flour for pizza dough – is that really a forum topic? Or suggesting we go to a clothing blog to discuss biking?

[mstone]

I think at this point the new forum software is what it is, and the forum will just slowly die.

[lordofthemark]

I mean the pizza dough question COULD have been on topic for the pizzaneuring thread, perhaps the poster is lost?

[DCAKen]

I sadly agree with @mstone. With no response from @Henry on any of these questions and comments, I don’t see any of them getting resolved. There are few postings being made outside the Freezing Saddles forum.

[arlcxrider]

Largely agree with the statements here. A step backwards, lots of functionality lost.

• I can’t mark threads as read.
• Can’t filter by new posts. I used this feature all the time on the old forum. A quick catch-up on what’s new, once a day.
• No direct message capability. (Very useful for team leaders and pointless prize sponsors.)
• Posting pictures is cumbersome.
• Can’t reply to a previous post and embed a quote.

Maybe it’s time to scrap this as the primary FS platform and just move it to the Strava club.

 

[antibozo]

For the past few days i am getting a dismissable pink div on every forum page i load, reading “Failed to load plugin: emoticons from url https://www.bikearlingtonforum.com/wp-includes/js/tinymce/plugins/emoticons/plugin.min.js”.

Seems like commentary here goes to /dev/null but thought i’d mention it anyway.

[DCAKen]

I get that also, but at least they’ve upped the photo size limit to 10 MB. Now I don’t have to reduce the resolution of all my photos

[DrP]

So, I had to go well down the second page of the General discussion topic to find a topic that was not spam. How do we flag those and remove them now? There is no way to report them it seems. And this is by no means the only topic with spam (and they are not always new threads).

 

[mstone]

good times can’t last forever, enjoy the memories ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

or, “put a fork in it”

[lordofthemark]

1. There is a LOT of history here. Some of it quite useful to advocates and historians (some significant to some of us in other ways) At a very minimum it should be archived.

2. Where are people posting things otherwise? At one point I thought the bikeDC hashtag on Twitter, but Twitter/X is slowly fading and many refuse to post there at all. Reddit? We have a coffee club text chain, but if you don’t know those folks already, you can’t ask things, similar for Strava, etc.

[Starduster]

Heads up for the Admins! A user I do not recognize has just posted a dozen line items of SPAM.

[obscurerichard]

There seems to be an new error popping up in every post form now:

Failed to load plugin: emoticons from url https://www.bikearlingtonforum.com/wp-includes/js/tinymce/plugins/emoticons/plugin.min.js

What’s the right way to report something like this?

We’re gearing up to launch Freezing Saddles 2025 and getting rid of this bit rot would not hurt.

[Author]

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