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Comments, Feedback on the new Upgrades


Guest LilBambi

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Guest LilBambi

They removed it and replaced it with breadcrumbs both top and bottom on every page so I don't think they plan on reviving the Jump box dropdown.

 

Nice to know that Iceweasel didn't need to have the language dictionary reselected like the one in Firefox.

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Guest LilBambi

Through the Portal page (top navigation area) we were able to sorta bring back some of the things they changed, but I have not seen a hook to bring that back yet.

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Guest LilBambi

Wait! It's not technically gone! Click the Open Quick Navigation icon (in the right top navigation bar, to the left of the white paintbrush) and a pop up box opens with all that. It's a bit different than we remember but it is all there and more!

 

BTW: There is an up arrow icon in the middle of the bottom of every page to take you to the top of the page to easily get to the quick navigation area, portal, etc.

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Agreed. For instance, Frapper looks much older in his avatar than he used to.

 

My old avatar was an F-4 Phantom fighter plane, circa 1965. I am older than that...older than dirt??

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securitybreach

Well when I tried to click Like This, I got the following error:

You have reached your quota of positive votes for the day
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V.T. Eric Layton

My old avatar was an F-4 Phantom fighter plane, circa 1965. I am older than that...older than dirt??

 

Hey! That's what my hat says in this pic from my 50th birthday party (the black balloons and all)...

 

vtel57-new.jpg

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Wait! It's not technically gone! Click the Open Quick Navigation icon (in the right top navigation bar, to the left of the white paintbrush) and a pop up box opens with all that. It's a bit different than we remember but it is all there and more!

 

BTW: There is an up arrow icon in the middle of the bottom of every page to take you to the top of the page to easily get to the quick navigation area, portal, etc.

I can work with that. Thanks Fran. This new board is like playing Civilization or Starcraft - the more you look around, the more you find.

Also, are there more settings in the MySettings section now? It just occurred to me that it would be nice to have automatic notification of new posts in threads I had posted in. Looked in MySettings and voilà, it was there! Then again, maybe I never looked before.

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Guest LilBambi

Awesome! Yes, it is amazing how much more there is to this new upgraded version of IP.Board forum software. And mostly it's great! A few areas I am trying to find new ways to do stuff we did differently, but for the most part, either it's moved or been renamed, or there's a Hook for something similar.

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Cluttermagnet

Yikes! I feel like I have dropped from college level proficiency in my messaging to Kindergarten or even pre-K. This is awful. Composing posts has become so effortful that I think I'm looking at weeks before Roadie Dirk ever reappears. Sorry, I know that a lot of effort has gone into the changeover to the new format, but I don't at all care for it. Hope the new PHP at least improves security. Usability has taken a big hit IMO.

 

I can't get the compose window to do what I want it to do. I have even found that hitting Edit on my older posts now fails to reveal the code I used for special effects- font changes, etc. It only displays the result, it fails to reveal the code that produced that result. I'm going to have to completely relearn how to compose for this venue, probably by slow trial and error. It's like having to relearn how to walk. So far, little is making sense to me.

 

I know html well enough to just start composing in html- but I find that this software is not performing predictably with it. I'm unable to do much useful work, I'm instead reduced to guessing and playing trial and error while trying to learn its quirkiness. Sorry, I hate to sound so darned negative, but this change has knocked me on my butt. I just needed to blow off a little steam. Will try again later...

 

Also, it's disappointing to see the poorly rendered quotes and links from older posts. It all looks like a bunch of text all run together, very confusing. OK, I'm leaving for now, sorry...

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Guest LilBambi

We have tried to have the impact of the very drastic change from a very OLD and insecure version of the forum software, to the current version as low impact as is possible, but some things we have no control over, or very little control over.

 

The editor is their choice, not ours. They have gone to their own customized version of CKEditor.

 

Having said that, you can use the little light switch icon in the upper left corner of the first row of editor options to turn off the WYSIWYG editor to use and see the plain text version.

 

As far as the old messages and quotes, yes, I think we were all disappointed by the upgrade's handling of old messages in the conversion, particularly in relation to quotes. I do plan on re-running the post rebuilder at some point soon, but it took well over 14 hrs to do it the last time, and when I have tried to run it again, it appears to really slows things down while it is going on when the forums are open. I am trying to determine a relatively good time to try to run that again while the forum is actually open (instead of closing the forums to run it) to see if it helps the quotes issue at all.

 

Overall, I think they have done a very good job with the new version. I do think it was certainly a shock for us to go from our old version to the new version, but it had to be done as you noted for security reasons if for nothing else.

 

Most of the changes have been very good changes. However, we have had to do work a rounds for some things as noted in various postings, like the addition of Portal, and the new Portal page link in the top navigation area to get some of the things we all enjoyed back such as recent postings, instead of just recently added topics which is what is shown in New Content in the upper right area of the top navigation, and in the new postings listed on under the the right side Recent Topics area of the main page. And a few other things as well.

 

I don't know if it will even fix the problem with the quotes, but we will try to run the rebuilding of posts again sometime soon in hopes of correcting that. There are no guarantees as we took a huge leap between our old version and the current version...

 

NOTE: HTML does not work in the forums. It is all BBCode.

 

Which has not changed from the old forum version to this one.

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Yikes! I feel like I have dropped from college level proficiency in my messaging to Kindergarten or even pre-K. This is awful. Composing posts has become so effortful that I think I'm looking at weeks before Roadie Dirk ever reappears. Sorry, I know that a lot of effort has gone into the changeover to the new format, but I don't at all care for it. Hope the new PHP at least improves security. Usability has taken a big hit IMO.

 

 

I understand where you're coming from. I think its the influence of social media on not only this platform but others as well (i.e., Google Blogger underwent a change that is even worse & takes considerably more clicks to do what used to be accomplished in one click.)

 

Personally, I use the "quick reply" box to compose posts and then click the "More Reply Options" to preview/edit as appropriate.

 

As to security improvements, yes, many, many fixes to the code.

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Guest LilBambi

I understand where you're coming from. I think its the influence of social media on not only this platform but others as well (i.e., Google Blogger underwent a change that is even worse & takes considerably more clicks to do what used to be accomplished in one click.)

 

Personally, I use the "quick reply" box to compose posts and then click the "More Reply Options" to preview/edit as appropriate.

 

As to security improvements, yes, many, many fixes to the code.

 

I do the same thing "quick reply' box to compose (and it may be enough for short messages), and then click the more reply options to preview and edit as necessary (very much needed for many longer posts, especially with images and or more advanced formatting, etc.).

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securitybreach

I do the same thing "quick reply' box to compose (and it may be enough for short messages), and then click the more reply options to preview and edit as necessary (very much needed for many longer posts, especially with images and or more advanced formatting, etc.).

 

I also do the same exact thing when posting....

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Cluttermagnet

Color test Color test Color test Color test Color test Color test

 

Fran, I know you put a lot of work into this. Your response was very measured, considering that what I said was probably annoying.

 

FWIW, I found that if I chose the "Special BB Code", an option given among the many was html. How to actually apply that and get it to work eluded me during my first session, however. A window opens up and if one selects html, then opening and closing html tags in brackets do appear in that sub- window.

 

The colors above were generated using the Text Color button in the compose window. Thing is, I'm fussy about colors and I like to use oddballs like "d5beb2" and "cdaf75", not only the 'rounded' colors like "663399".

 

I'll keep playing with this...

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Guest LilBambi

Excellent, you already found the Special BBCode and were able to make use of it! :thumbsup:

 

7102055649_7e113f7da5_t.jpg

 

In addition to the Special BBCode icon (third one), there is a Light Switch (first one) and Eraser (middle one).

 

Light Switch - Toggles between the GUI Editor and the plain text editor (which will reveal any codes you have used already in the posting or a post you are editing from the past).

 

Eraser - Will remove all formatting from any highlighted text.

 

Special BBCode - Adds some BBCode that may or may not be available through the icons above the text area of the GUI Editor.

 

NOTE: As I mentioned earlier, HTML code is disallowed in the forums as it was before. Even though you see that 'option' in the Special BBCode, HTML code will not work as you already noted.

 

I see you obviously also found the fonts area; font, size, and color.

 

7102055785_3eeaf48929_m.jpg

 

The Change Color icon above (third icon one) and the Light Switch can help us use your 'oddball' choices of colors:

 

d5beb2

 

cdaf75

 

I just made use of a 'normal' color, used the Light Switch to toggle between GUI Editor and Plain Text Editor to reveal the codes, copied the code, then simply plugged in your desired 'oddball' color codes and switched back to GUI Editor.

 

I did make use of the Eraser on the next line to remove the color code in the GUI Edior, or I could have used the Plain Text Editor to get beyond the closing color code and continued typing my text.

 

Hope that helps some.

 

You are a very intelligent person, a hacker/tinkerer engineering type. One of my most favorite types of people. I have great respect for you. I have no doubt you eventually would have figured this out for yourself but it was just so frustrating, annoying and appeared totally screwed up. And in someways, the old posts were sadly. I totally understand it.

 

Change can be a real pain in the neck. I hate change too sometimes. More often than I care to admit actually.

 

Please, feel free to post anything else that you need help figuring out, and I will see if there is a way to do it.

 

Thanks my friend for voicing your concerns and frustrations so we could help. I am sorry that this needed security upgrade caused you such aggravation.

 

I can't wait to read episodes of Dirk's story!

Edited by LilBambi
added some additional items
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Cluttermagnet

I have a test thread going in the Testing sub-forum. Thanks, Fran. The light switch editor gives back some ability at least. Text formatting isn't going to be very flexible, looks like. I'll keep playing with it. My gut feeling so far is that this new software is more 'brute force' or 'heavy handed' in how it applies inputs, in terms of the formatting that results. IOW it's less flexible, less amenable to the application of various formatting 'english' by the user.

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Cluttermagnet, do you use word processing software? This WYSIWYG editor takes a lot from that. For instance, you can Ctrl+B to get bold text, without having to type the BBCode out (although you can, as [b and /b] will still work). You can also highlight words you've already typed to format them using the buttons. (Though not everything you use in a word processor will work. For instance, Ctrl+E would center your text in Word, and took me to my URL bar instead)

 

You also don't need to hit the light switch to type your BBCode manually. I didn't to bold this, for example. I'm more used to typing with BBCode because I do it all the time.

 

edit: although you can hit the light switch to see what BBCode the editor is applying, since it hides most of it.

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Guest LilBambi

Yes, it is very cool what you can do. I have been trying out many new things. I also found that if I wanted to I could choose the t Twitter icon, and go down and choose the BBCode for Twitter from the list, to add my Twitter name: @bambismusings to a posting or my Sig.

 

I actually switch back and forth between the sides of the Light Switch so I can customize after choosing a general BBCode for the type of formatting I want. This is particularly helpful for getting beyond formatting in place, or alternatively, you can just use the Eraser at the end of a URL to end the URL formatting and continue typing normally.

 

Or as I showed in earlier posts, changing color codes to things you can't get with the default choices in BBCode Text Color changer in the GUI Editor such as this color of purple or the shades of beige/buff/cream/tan consistently that Clutter was talking about earlier.

 

It's great to have alternative ways to do things.

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V.T. Eric Layton

Yuppers... CTRL + shortcuts do work well in most WYSIWYG editors. They are fast for a touch-typer like myself because I don't have to take my hands off the keyboard. :)

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I was trying to do some changes to my settings. It said I had to "Check for Real Life Form" but there was no image anywhere I could find to put in this box. What am I missing?

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