Cycling UK Forum

thirdcrank wrote:I find that on some evenings I can have a problem losing the broadband dial tone. I used to put it down to my own equipment, but it only ever seems to happen during the evening, so I now assume the internet is busier then.

If your ADSL modem is disconnecting there must be a problem between your modem and the local telephone exchange, this would not be affected by the amount of traffic on the exchange's internet links. I'd recommend contacting your ISP, who can run tests on your line and sort this problem out for you. Also make sure that you've used ADSL/telephone filters on all equipment you have plugged into telephone sockets.

JohnW wrote:Well admin -

The new forum is certainly faster than it was at first - for me, anyway - still noticeably slower than before, but strangely variable.

I can, however, now access my PMs.

If there's variation then it sounds like a problem with your dial-up connection. Dial-up modems are quite sensitive to noisy telephone lines: might be worth contacting your ISP to see if there's a fault. If you've switched to the subsilver2 theme then the amount of data you're downloading is less than before, so the new forum version has to be faster than the last one (if your dial-up is managing the same data rates).

Once you've reached the internet there's data throughput to spare: the server is well-connected in London's Docklands, and easily capable of filling hundreds of fast ADSL broadband links at the same time - it would hardly notice your dial-up connection. If the speed problem was down to the server, or the internet, then our broadband visitors would notice it much more than you would.

Yes, click on the little page-with-arrow icon in front of the thread's title in a forum list.

The one that looks like this:

ian burt wrote:What was wrong with the old style

The old style was the default look for phpBB version 2. The new style is the default look for phpBB version 3. We got the new style when we upgrade the Forum software to the current version. But this isn't a problem, you can easily switch back to the old style - see the first post in this thread.

ian burt wrote:easy to read, clear and uncluttered.

It's a personal preference thing. I much prefer the new style: much easier to read the actual message text without all those border lines. Definitely a more modern look in terms of how websites are developing. In fact I'd say the new style is less cluttered than the old one, but I'm not a graphic designer so that's only my personal opinion

ian burt wrote:It appears that the new format has been designed by a computer consultant who needs to justify trheir fees but has no idea of what a real use needs.

Both the old and new styles were designed by Tom Beddard at http://www.subblue.com/, but I don't know whether the phpBB community paid him for his work. Certainly the CTC obtained this forum software for free: none of your membership money was wasted

drossall wrote:Will you be adding any more? I'd still quite like to try vphpbb3

Your wish is my command, eventually...

Please find vphpbb3 as a style, for those vBulletin fans amongst you!

You could always mark the post manually?

Like this?

Edited: Added the line above as a second question.

JohnW wrote:I will find out what "subsilver2" means

The Forum can have different "looks" or "themes" applied to it. The text is the same for all themes, but the layout and graphical style changes.

One of these themes is called "subsilver2" and is a close copy of the board's previous look. You'll find that it has the same colours as the forum used to have, and has the user information blocks on the left of the messages, rather than the right. The advantage from your point of view is that it uses fewer images, so the forum pages should be quite a bit quicker to view on a dial-up connection.

You can select the theme you want by following the "User Control Panel" link (top left, second row under the CTC logo in the default theme) and then choosing the "Board preferences" tab: the theme selection is marked "My board style:"

For more information about the themes currently available, see this post:
viewtopic.php?f=14&t=21616

I think Mick has fixed this, but in case not, or if someone else has the same problem, you should be able to see which posts you've subscribed to, and unsubscribe from ones you don't want emails about, from here:

User Control Panel > Manage subscriptions

Also a little "PM" icon (depending on your chosen theme) in the user info for each post.

If someone could find time to do some experiments with all the various combinations, that would be very useful!

I'd be surprised if it's badly broken, as phpBB 3 has been around for six months or more now. But perhaps the other users of the software just aren't noticing the problems - we seem to have some very dedicated users here!

Until we have something set up as a user-preference we are never going to please everyone - sorry!

We currently have standard phpBB version 3 link behaviour (no links open in new windows), plus some custom behaviour added by me (using javascript) to make links to external sites open in new windows. Until I find time to code something more flexible, or someone else finds a ready-made solution, this is how things will be. Since phpBB is open-source software, it is quite possible for anyone to investigate possible fixes - I'm very happy to incorporate changes that are sensible and robust

Mick F wrote:If I have one major complaint, it's the image-handling system that we now have. It's too volatile - the ability to completely ruin the threads by the deletion of a single photograph is a case in point. I suggest that images shouldn't be able to be deleted without having to jump through hoops.

Fair point, and I wasn't aware of this feature of phpBB 3. There are many other users of this possibly-most-popular forum software, and others may have solutions.

Mick F wrote:Once the image is on public view, it belongs to the public

Well, not strictly according to copyright laws. The image "belongs" to the person who created it, unless they decide to waive their copyright (which applies automatically).

Mick F wrote:You CAN"T and MUSTN'T delete it from someone elses thread. Remember, people quote these images and use them in their own posts.

I agree that it can be sad/annoying when people delete posts or images, but I don't think they should be prevented from doing so. If an image is extremely important to a thread, then take a copy of it and post the copy (but beware of copyright infringement problems). In particular, posts in the "Test board" and "For Sale, Wanted & Swaps" are constantly being deleted, and moderators often have to remove posts that break the forum's rules: the current problem is that this also deletes any attached images, and I will look into this. Of course anyone else with time or knowledge is very welcome to search for this problem in the phpBB forums, and see what other people have done about it.

We probably need some sort of "Gallery" feature, or at least modifications to the attachments system, that means that images don't get deleted "by accident" like this. Had we been aware of this issue we might have tried to fix it before we switched over.

Mick F wrote:Some of the images on here a fundamental to the way the info is handled, and some of this info is there for eternity. You can't just delete photographs and images willy-nilly at the drop of a hat.

I don't think this Forum will be around until the end of time. The CTC have nearly closed it down on a few occasions, but at the moment the moderators are keeping the discussions civil, and the Forum is working well, on the whole. This site is not intended to be an everlasting archive of knowledge - it's just a discussion forum!

Mick F wrote:Remember this: the old forum's photographs are still there. No user can delete them.

The old forum's photographs are still there only because I manually copied them into a suitable place so that they continued to be used. No user can delete them at the moment, but if I do integrate them into the new image handling system (which does have advantages, such as automatic preview image generation to keep page sizes sensible) then they will be able to delete them. I had a few requests on the old forum to delete old images, and I had to do that manually on behalf of other users. The new forum gives the users the control over their own images, which I think is much better.

Mick F wrote:It's the New Forum image handling I'm talking about, NOT the old forum. If the old forum was ok on this subject, why change?

We upgraded to the latest phpBB version for many reasons, as explained earlier.

Mick F wrote:[links opening new windows]No-one complained before. So why change? Others, besides me, have mentioned this.

We upgraded to the latest phpBB version for many reasons, as explained earlier.

The new forum version doesn't open any links in new windows normally: I personally added in some Javascript to open external links in new windows, as a few people had been asking for this. I have had as many people say that they don't want new windows as say that they do. For this reason I will, hopefully, make it a user option. In the meantime the user is in control: simply hold down the shift key to open a new window: this works on any website, and is a useful technique anywhere on the web.

Mick F wrote:[login problems] This appeared to be just me. I received many emails telling me that replies had been made to certain threads. I never asked for them, or checked the box asking for them. In fact, to be able to get to the box, you have to make a reply. Some of the threads involved, I never even read!

Most odd! If you notice this happening again please send me an email or PM and I'll investigate. Possibly something went a little wrong when converting the messages to the new board's database format.

Mick F wrote:Thank you, Anthony, for letting me vent my spleen.
Hopefully, things will settle down happily.

No problem: the board is here for its users, and I try to keep as many of them happy at the same time as I can!

Anthony

JohnW wrote:I see what you say about Broadband, but I'll be the one who decides my system

Of course it's your decision whether to switch to broadband or not. We still have to cater for people on slow connections, and this is taken into account in various ways. Not least in applying output compression to the Forum's pages, which makes a big difference to the amount of data you need to download to view the forum. Broadband users won't notice much difference, but dial-up people will.

JohnW wrote:"admin" have probably stopped watching the thread now - not liking criticism.

No, just busy earning a living My name is Anthony, and I maintain the software and the computer that the board runs on. I do occasional work for the CTC, but I'm not a CTC employee. The CTC pay me a small amount to keep the Forum running, but not enough to cover much development work: the forum uses the well-known and popular phpBB software so that we don't need to spend time writing software.

JohnW wrote:If not, will "admin" please tell us why the board needed changing? - was anything wrong with it? - was it broken, and if it wasn't, why mend it? Functionally, the board is a lot worse than it was, even if it is in more and fancier colours.

There were several problems with the old board, but most of them were on the Admin and Moderation side of things, so general users wouldn't have been aware of them (although the old Search was very broken, and the new search has fixed that). Also, phpBB version 2 was getting very old, and is no longer being developed: over time this could become a serious security risk.

For a detailed list of differences see http://www.phpbb.com/about/features/

JohnW wrote:I can climb Fleet Moss quicker than these boards load up now.

I'm sorry to hear that - I've now done some measurements to see what the problem might be.

The size of the pages is a little larger with the default theme, mainly because it has slightly more image content: the main page is now 107kbytes (~100k of icons and images) where the previous main page was 66kbytes (~61k of icons and images). If the old site took 2 seconds to load this page, the new site should take just over three, 62% slower.

Having said that, if you switch to subsilver2 for your theme, the main page is now 23kbytes which is less than half the size of the old forum. Switch to subsilver2 and the new forum should be twice the speed of the old one, at least as far as your dial-up data rate is concerned.

You could also speed things up by changing your user settings: you can turn off the display of avatars and images, which would make things quite a bit faster.

JohnW wrote:Functionally, all a message board needs to be is black and white - and a bit extra to allow users to post a photograph or two.

John, if I find a spare hour in my day I'll make you a black-and-white theme! In the meantime you can choose the subsilver2 theme so that the forum looks just like it used to!

As for posting photos, I agree that the new method of adding attachments to posts doesn't work quite as well as it might. But it's certainly a lot easier to understand than the old gallery system, I think.

I will continue to monitor the forums, and fix things where necessary.

Changes to the Forum functionality are done where we think it is very necessary: the CTC currently pay a small fixed amount to maintain the forum, so additional work I do is effectively unpaid The CTC got good value during the upgrade to phpBB3, as I didn't charge extra for this

Mick F wrote:New windows on links

Links to external sites already open in a new window. Hold down the Shift key on your keyboard while clicking to open links within the Forum in a new window.

I might be able to reproduce the old forum's behaviour, with some clever javascript coding, but not everyone wants this so it should really be a user-preference.

Mick F wrote:Image uploading - where is the old gallery?

Replaced by the new "Upload attachment" feature. The old gallery images are still present in posts, but I haven't yet found time to copy or move them into your list of attached files.

Mick F wrote:Images - the ability to delete them and ruin threads

Nothing we can do about this. People can delete text as well as images, and they should be able to do so.

Mick F wrote:Logging in and out

What are the problems with this?

Mick F wrote:Viewing new posts and not having the list reset

This is a problem/feature of the new phpBB version. An advantage is that you never lose the list of unread posts, like the old method could if you closed the window by mistake. If I find time I'll see what other phpBB 3 users are doing about this.

Mick F wrote:Receiving notifications of replies without wanting them

Click on "Unsubscribe topic" at the bottom of the page, or visit the "Manage subscriptions" tab in your User Control Panel to see all your current subscriptions, and unsubscribe from there.

Mick F wrote:Not liking the new look

Select a different one, perhaps even very similar to the previous look, in your user preferences See I don't like the new look!

Mick F wrote:Also, the inability to "quote" images is a problem. There have been a few occasions where people have quoted, needing the shot in there too for their reply.

It should be possible to "quote" images, but I suspect that this might not be working because images are now treated as attachments to a post, rather than "global" things that can be used anywhere. I'll see what other phpBB3 users are doing about this.

Mick F wrote:If you delete one or your posts with an image in it, and someone has used that image somewhere else on another post, both images go. It is deleted from your attachments list as well.

That's not very good... I'll see what other people are doing about this problem.

thirdcrank wrote:I may have spoken too soon. I thought this was working but now if I click that button and leave the forum without logging off, the 'old' new posts are still there.

Do they disappear when you've click the "Mark forums read" link?