OneGuyFromBarlick

Thanks for pointing out the little blue arrow Stanley, I hadn't noticed it. The people who design software seem to like to provide a zillion ways to do any one task and i don't need all those boxes down the side! (Perhaps they have night jobs in the Cathedrals of Choice!)

The site remembers the setting as well. I hope Moh sees the post, it will cure her problem I think. Earth to Moh?

I found it - I wasn't up at 7.25am!!

You've got a different body clock setting that me Moh. My internal alarm goes off at 04:00 every morning. Glad you found the button, I take it it has cured your problem with the page size?

The formatting issue may be the library computers because they haven't upgraded their Internet explorers

Libraries and other public computers should be on Ubuntu which is free instead of paying Microsoft huge licensing fees each year. I wonder how much is paid out each year?

Stanley wrote:Libraries and other public computers should be on Ubuntu which is free instead of paying Microsoft huge licensing fees each year. I wonder how much is paid out each year?

Ask an FoI of the Lancashire CC person specifically detailed.

Yes thanks Stanley it is OK now I got rid of the side panel.

Doc, I looked back at the old archived General Chat and Fun Area to find some old threads. At the bottom of the page I clicked on Page 2 and got it OK but when I clicked any beyond 2 I got a strange page in totally different style listing lots of general `categories' (but not OG ones). Is this OK or has something corrupted?

Another question for you Doc, hope it hasn't been asked before and I've missed it.
How do you Bookmark pictures on this new site? I have many saved on the old site (which I hope are still there) but can't figure out how to do it on this one. Can the old ones be transferred over? Many thanks Cathy

Tizer:
After trawling through the old archive I have found that the snapshot that was taken did not "drill down" into the old site as deep as I expected, for example a topic with say a total 14 pages of postings, is only displaying around 8 pages worth. The snapshot that we are actually using was taken as a trial to see how/if it would work. I had planned to make adjustments to the settings and take another snapshot but unfortunately the old server crashed before I could implement it. The archive currently showing has quite a bit of missing information, however I have on my laptop a backup file of the MSSQL database which contains ALL the information that the old site had. The difficulty I have now is how to extract that information from the backup file into a usable readable format. It's going to be a big priority project which I'm working on.

Cathy:
From what I can see all the pictures were transferred correctly from the old site to the archive, but I may be wrong in that assumption, saying that however, all your old bookmarks of pictures from the old site will not be pointing your browser to the new archive, so you will be struggling to find them.

To bookmark an image on this site, Click on the Image title and below the displayed image you will see the following Click on "Add to Favourites to add it to your bookmarks.

Nice to see that the number of minor queries about navigation have tailed off as we get used to the new platform. I'm still finding new tweaks, only the other day that I noticed there were two pages of active topics! But then I'm a bot slow at picking up the fine print.

Just being patient for a few fixes and look and feel amendments to make things better. I am user at about 5 other forums (two railway/model railway , two cars and model cars and one electronics ). one has phpBB implemented differently and is slightly easier to use, the others use somthing akin to the older platform and are much easier, but they dont have the RSS feeds into them and the topics tend to be note , reply , solutions , close, rather than OGFBs running topics .

There's a query about where 'What attracted your attention' was.

A new (to me) category called 'What, Where, When, Who...' has appeared; that's where it is.

Not a glitch as such, it's by design, along with all the other threads that start with those words. Part of my ongoing tidying of the site and reorganising some of the categories and forums. General Misc Chat and Gossip is OK but it is too all encompassing, can't see the wood for the trees if you are looking for an old topic so I have decided to try to address this. I am just thinning it down a bit and moving some stuff into other forums that may be more appropriate.

Any threads moved will still appear in Active Topics so they are not really hidden and users should get used to looking in other parts of the site rather than just the single forum. In addition to the new Who, What, Where, etc.. I have created a new Natural World thread and one in the history section for Nostalgia, others will follow if appropriate.

Any ideas for extra Categories or Forums please post in the Suggestions thread. We had far too many when the site was first launched and i have already culled everything that had attracted no content. The current forum structure is about 50% of what was originally deployed. Now all remaining forums have content.

I always go to Active Topics from the index. That way I don't miss anything.

PanBiker wrote:
Any threads moved will still appear in Active Topics so they are not really hidden and users should get used to looking in other parts of the site rather than just the single forum. In addition to the new Who, What, Where, etc.. I have created a new Natural World thread and one in the history section for Nostalgia, others will follow if appropriate.

Does this mean that Nostalgia is not what it used to be?
(Currently re-cycling out the former In-laws collection of Newspapers, selected magazines and all those vistor attraction leaflets 1970-2008ish, should I be keeping them as the older ones are interesing- scans appearing later when I finally get time, unfortunately they have to go as no funds to keep the place where they we stored )

Whyperion wrote:
Does this mean that Nostalgia is not what it used to be?

Not sure what you mean by this, take a look at the threads in there and you should get the drift.

I think it might be a very corny joke Ian!

On a different note, OGFB is very fast in its new form and perhaps even faster again after you did your spring clean. However there is one aspect that causes me some frustration and that's the image-rich threads such as Shed Matters - the pages take a while to load on my 6GB maximum broadband connection. It's not a long time if I were going into the thread to write a message but I like to dip into threads frequently to see the latest post and it's a bit of a hassle waiting while the screen rendering of the page keeps jumping as it's loading all the images. I can end up spending more time loading the page than reading the latest post or viewing the latest image. Is there anything that could be done to speed this up, such as making the pages of those threads shorter so that there are fewer images to load each time? Or are the posters posting images that are far bigger than is necessary?

Tiz, we know there are different ways of posting images, which give differing size views. You could set your board settings to give the most recent posts first, rather than last, (can be a bit confusing), or tell your browser not to show pictures- then you right click on the place holder and select from drop down menu 'view image' ( all old tricks from the days of 28,800 dial up modems on 386 machines.

Tiz, I think your last sentence sums up the root of the problem really. Having said that all aspects of image upload and sizing into the posts can be controlled.

The Gallery and the main board are two completely separate modules. The gallery module controls the filesize allowed for upload as well as the display of images within the gallery itself. PHPBB board settings control the actual post settings and the size that images are displayed within posts.

Current settings are the board defaults which are as follows:

The gallery settings allow images up to 20480000 bytes (19.53Mb) at a maximum upload size of 1280 x 1024 pixels for each image. Oversize images are automatically resized during upload. The images use a custom compression algorithm for storage on the server.

The board post settings are set to insert images from the gallery at 800 x 600 pixels when inserted into the threads. Clicking on a previously inserted post image will open the image in the gallery viewer which may then be zoomed to the native size governed by the gallery settings.

Number of posts per page is currently set to the default of 25 per page.

It's all a bit of a trade off really. Personally if I am inserting a lot of images in a thread, I tend to resize all before uploading, this has the benefit of reducing the filesize which in turn will have a knock on to the page load. Of course if you need to preserve the image size for zooming to maximum detail this approach is self defeating as you loose resolution when resizing. The other knock on of course is the number of images in individual posts which in turn will have a knock on to the number that have to be loaded when the thread is opened. This is where the bottleneck occurs.

If images are added to threads as attachments a completely different set of rules are applied. These have been covered in the Images Tips and Tricks thread so I'll not go over them again here apart form to say that any images added as attachments can only be view directly in the thread and at the preconfigured sizes set by the board. Attachments are stored separately to the gallery images on the server and cannot be searched, sorted, annotated commented on or browsed in categories and albums. I consider the attachment facility is more suited to other file types such as documents and zip files rather than image manipulation on the board. However some users seem to have adopted this method of adding images to threads exclusively. Image attachments could be disabled but this would now render some existing threads unreadable so will have to stay as an option.

I have a separate folder OGB14 and I almost always resize my images to 800 width before putting them on the site. I occasionally go higher than this if it will be of benefit to see a bigger image by clicking on it. I don't have a problem with lag because I have a fast machine and a good connection but even I see a slight lag on some images. I hate to point the finger but of course I will.... The topic where I notice it most is David's Bank Edge View. I suspect sometimes he doesn't resize. Sorry David but is noticeable.
On the general subject of the gallery it is superb, easy to upload to once you have cracked it and easy to navigate. I'd hate to see any changes to it.

It really impacts all the threads with lots of images in. I generally browse the site over a wireless link on my laptop so tend to pick up on any page loading issues.

Worth mentioning here that if anyone wants an Image package that has a batch resizing facility they could try Irfanview. Freebie, dead easy to use.

Irfanview Website

I must be lucky, never seen it as a problem. Mind you, it has to be a big image to slow the FM3 down! ( I know, I'm a smug B.....d!)