I don't think the new forum is that different from this one. Other than a couple of color changes, it seems the same. I personally like it, but of course that's an opinion.
The newer forums bring some great advantages to what we can potentially offer for community interaction, so making this happen will be a big bonus.
That's really not much to go on, Mr. Bump. Can you provide more detailed justification for this upheaval? It's only been five years since the last one, and that was pretty painful.
It only fills a fraction of the width of the browser window. Hardly the same at all.
I see the css sets the max-width for the div containing the content to 1200px;
Using the dev tools in IE I can disable that setting and the page responds nicely, so hopefully Mr. Bump will be willing to increase the value to something like 1800px or remove the max-width setting entirely.
Yes, inquiring minds would like to know. Why the change?
And please, try not to make any fast sudden movements in front of the old folks...
-Tommy
We don't do forum upgrades for fun, and I'm absolutely certain there are very good reasons. I've heard them several times in the Parallax building but I can't put my finger on them exactly...but I'm pretty sure they relate to inefficiency of this current version in post handling. It generates a ton of traffic for each post and the upgrade is far more efficient. Something like this but we should wait for Bump or Jim to tell us the real story.
Kind of pricey, but a lot of fun! Long ago when I was a kid, they had a basic speech synthesizer here at OMSI in Portland. It had all the basic elements of words linked to buttons. If you thought it through some, it was possible to make some words with it. Of course... Yeah, they just laughed at us and requested we try some "other short words"
OK, with this forum upgrade, I do face some annoying issues here sometimes, unexpected CR's right in the middle of words when I type, missing spaces between words, risk of loosing all I have written if I use too much time on the posts. Also rather difficult sometimes to upload images.
Will the new forum start from zero or will all the posts here be transfered over?
unexpected CR's right in the middle of words when I type, missing spaces between words
That sounds very odd. Never seen it happen across all the browsers and operating systems I post to here from. Not even from my Android phone. I don't recall anyone else mentioning such issues.
What browser do you have there ?
I do have a related issue. If I edit text in some external editor, vim, sublime, whatever and then cut and paste it into a forum post it ends up with double line spacing and I have to edit out tall the extra blank lines.
Heater, I'm using IE 11. I never face problems like this with Notepad, MSWord or other programs, these issues has not been there all the time but maybe the last few months or so.
But it's not a big issue, nothing that bother me much, I'm not the most frequent writer here.
I must say that there is a certain amount of idiocy in a programmer that creates a foul language filter and then expects those that use foul language to be inclined to spell correctly or to conform to a given database.
And, it is a fundamental principle of language that it changes over time.. that includes the pejoratives and derrogatory.
In all my years of teaching language and the interpretation of meaning, I have had to accept that there will always be indeterminate utterances that defy classification or standardization. Automation can only do so much, and then it is up to the community to demand moderation.
And whenever one starts out with "You can't say ....", there is always some clown that will.
I do see that filtering the worst and most predictable of these terms does to some degree moderate what might otherwise be a huge annoyance. Maybe we need to add a British lexicon, a French one, a German one, and so on.
My life is divided into the days that pre-dated Lenny Bruce and Soupy Sales, and the period thereafter. It would be nice to get back to the former, but I have my doubts that is possible. Especially when someone like Lady Gaga prances across the telly screen.
To one and all,
try to be moderate. People might actually try harder to understand you.
Maybe we need to add a British lexicon, a French one, a German one, and so on.
Yep. It gets crazy. As Linus Torvalds famously said:
"There aren't enough swear-words in the English language, so now I'll have to call you [ Finnish expletive deleted ] [ Finnish expletive deleted ] just to express my disgust and frustration with this [ English expletive deleted ]."
He was very restrained, I thought he could have done much worse:)
I hope this one preserves the links. (Maybe I should read the other thread to find out.)
I'm just barely getting over the trauma from the last upgrade.
As a few people have discovered this upgrade will be from a vB4 to a vB5, as such there's a lot of tags and known variables that are accounted for by migration tools which weren't present when we moved from the bbforums to vB4 initially.
We did a few test migrations, because we didn't want to launch another upgrade that couldn't easily be fully migrated, and they all worked extremely well. Pulls over old rule-sets, mark-up, media content, and all else. It will be a lot less painful.
I don't like that I HAVE to change my username. It is requiring me to input 3 characters.
Definitely something I can look into; I don't know why the software would put a limitation on username size. Well, that's not entirely true; I do know why a new service would restrict size, but sometimes we make legacy changes.
Why the change anyway? Why does it have to look so awful? Can it be tweaked to look like the existing style/theme? Why does it not expand to fit my screen any more?
Beauty is in the eye of the beer-holder? Yeah, the copy you're all playing on is the copy I made when testing the basic install of vB5. I made a few mark-up modifications like changing the forum image, changing the basic anonymous avatar to cats, and logo/background modifications. Changing the width allowance of the content frame, no problem, that and a number of other elements will change when this is all ready to go live.
That's really not much to go on, Mr. Bump. Can you provide more detailed justification for this upheaval? It's only been five years since the last one, and that was pretty painful.
Upheaval! I like it, though I'm not sure how violent it will turn out to be; I can also provide some more details about the why.
The two of us that operate all the fun gadgets that are required to keep many of the systems at Parallax afloat look forward to employing faster, better, and more stable tools as we meet our departmental goals and continue to provide the service expected by the men and women employed by Parallax when they need us. One of the means available is automation. When we are able to we'll be upgrading the forums to meet the standards of a hosting service, and from that point on we'll no-longer have to worry about connections, security, licensing or hardware for the machines/software of the forums. This will free us up to do other excellent things like improve our services for enterprise level demands; also the new version of vBulletin has a fun api, meets with SSO compatibility for our other management systems, can host a real spam control that actually cares about headers, among other things.
Lots of reasons to do so on the back-end, so many that it makes concerns about what happens on the front-end seemingly less monstrous. That is why the sandbox was erected. We want to locate key concerns about usability which will need attention so that you're not too unhappy with the migration. A lot of the issues I've seen and read about are minimal, which is promising, there are also new features like "comments vs replies" and a non-social-media dependent voting system for posts that could be handy. So far I'm still not seeing any show-stoppers, a few corrections are needed. You're all being extremely helpful as expected; you're all great testers, and five years is a fairly long time.
I mean why can I not talk about an African Wild *** on this forum?
RegEx! Some forums it's difficult to talk about 'grapes'; I could add an exception for Animalia and toss proper English in there as well as our simplified version.
Also, no official timeline on when it'll happen; there are also talks about other changes to the forums' presentation, which you will all be made aware of when more information becomes available.
Did you say " toss". I'm appalled at such language
No amount of regex is going to help with this problem. I cannot begin to imagine the regular expression that would recognize all grammatically correct sentences in the English language. Let alone correctly raise alarms for all the "bad" language. English speakers can always adapt to get round any such censorship faster than software can be updated anyway. Did you ever wonder when "gay" went from meaning "joyful" to a term of abuse? Something that really hit me when my 12 year old son used the word some years ago. And let's not get into "Animalia".
Anyway, full steam ahead I say. Us old guys like to grump and moan about every little change. Mostly because we have lived through a lifetime of change that didn't actually seem to make anything better. However if the new forum code brings bug fixes, security enhancements, new features and so on then it has to be.
There is no reason the user experience has to change dramatically just because the underlying platform has been fixed, improved and new features added.
There is no reason the user experience has to change dramatically just because the underlying platform has been fixed, improved and new features added.
First: Please maintain the existing links for Google's use. There are SOOO many times I've used Google's site search to search Parallax forums with great success.
Two: Some of us who are getting olderahem.. wiser are developing vision issues with age our eyes. The "dark" theme you guys created last time was a real help in making the current forums comfortable to see.
Two: Some of us who are getting olderahem.. wiser are developing vision issues with age our eyes. The "dark" theme you guys created last time was a real help in making the current forums comfortable to see.
Along those lines, I really hope that you have a couple different themes to choose from. One of them being as close to this one as possible. I also do not care for what appears to be a trend of desaturated, lower contrast user interfaces.
Comments
http://preview.forums.parallax.com/member/13-phipi
Personally I don't mind the new forums, style or otherwise.
I don't like the new forum software, doesn't seem as good as what we have now.
But then again I didn't care much for this one when we first got it
Seriously, it needs a lot of work before switching over.
-Tommy
That has to be the shortest post ever made by pototatohead. Though I don't think it was a Pirate insult..
That's really not much to go on, Mr. Bump. Can you provide more detailed justification for this upheaval? It's only been five years since the last one, and that was pretty painful.
Thanks,
-Phil
And please, try not to make any fast sudden movements in front of the old folks...
-Tommy
Looking at some page source it looks like the new forum is vBulletin 5.1.1
C.W.
I see the css sets the max-width for the div containing the content to 1200px;
Using the dev tools in IE I can disable that setting and the page responds nicely, so hopefully Mr. Bump will be willing to increase the value to something like 1800px or remove the max-width setting entirely.
C.W.
We don't do forum upgrades for fun, and I'm absolutely certain there are very good reasons. I've heard them several times in the Parallax building but I can't put my finger on them exactly...but I'm pretty sure they relate to inefficiency of this current version in post handling. It generates a ton of traffic for each post and the upgrade is far more efficient. Something like this but we should wait for Bump or Jim to tell us the real story.
Ken Gracey
No, I was just being playful with the wonderful insults available from "the other side of the pond"
Hey, ever see this?
http://ptos.moderntoss.com/
And somebody made a table!!
http://www.firebox.com/product/5100/The-Interactive-Periodic-Table-of-Swearing
Kind of pricey, but a lot of fun! Long ago when I was a kid, they had a basic speech synthesizer here at OMSI in Portland. It had all the basic elements of words linked to buttons. If you thought it through some, it was possible to make some words with it. Of course... Yeah, they just laughed at us and requested we try some "other short words"
Will the new forum start from zero or will all the posts here be transfered over?
That sounds very odd. Never seen it happen across all the browsers and operating systems I post to here from. Not even from my Android phone. I don't recall anyone else mentioning such issues.
What browser do you have there ?
I do have a related issue. If I edit text in some external editor, vim, sublime, whatever and then cut and paste it into a forum post it ends up with double line spacing and I have to edit out tall the extra blank lines.
But it's not a big issue, nothing that bother me much, I'm not the most frequent writer here.
And, it is a fundamental principle of language that it changes over time.. that includes the pejoratives and derrogatory.
In all my years of teaching language and the interpretation of meaning, I have had to accept that there will always be indeterminate utterances that defy classification or standardization. Automation can only do so much, and then it is up to the community to demand moderation.
And whenever one starts out with "You can't say ....", there is always some clown that will.
Personally I find the whole idea of banned "bad words" totally silly.
I mean why can I not talk about an African Wild *** on this forum?
There are plenty of "taboo" words that are not filtered as demonstrated in the posts above. We have not come to the worst yet:)
As Loopy point's out people will always find a way around such things in order to convey the meaning they want.
It alls a load of g
I do see that filtering the worst and most predictable of these terms does to some degree moderate what might otherwise be a huge annoyance. Maybe we need to add a British lexicon, a French one, a German one, and so on.
My life is divided into the days that pre-dated Lenny Bruce and Soupy Sales, and the period thereafter. It would be nice to get back to the former, but I have my doubts that is possible. Especially when someone like Lady Gaga prances across the telly screen.
To one and all,
try to be moderate. People might actually try harder to understand you.
"There aren't enough swear-words in the English language, so now I'll have to call you [ Finnish expletive deleted ] [ Finnish expletive deleted ] just to express my disgust and frustration with this [ English expletive deleted ]."
He was very restrained, I thought he could have done much worse:)
As a few people have discovered this upgrade will be from a vB4 to a vB5, as such there's a lot of tags and known variables that are accounted for by migration tools which weren't present when we moved from the bbforums to vB4 initially.
We did a few test migrations, because we didn't want to launch another upgrade that couldn't easily be fully migrated, and they all worked extremely well. Pulls over old rule-sets, mark-up, media content, and all else. It will be a lot less painful.
Definitely something I can look into; I don't know why the software would put a limitation on username size. Well, that's not entirely true; I do know why a new service would restrict size, but sometimes we make legacy changes.
Or we'll all just start calling you 'The TC'
Beauty is in the eye of the beer-holder? Yeah, the copy you're all playing on is the copy I made when testing the basic install of vB5. I made a few mark-up modifications like changing the forum image, changing the basic anonymous avatar to cats, and logo/background modifications. Changing the width allowance of the content frame, no problem, that and a number of other elements will change when this is all ready to go live.
Upheaval! I like it, though I'm not sure how violent it will turn out to be; I can also provide some more details about the why.
The two of us that operate all the fun gadgets that are required to keep many of the systems at Parallax afloat look forward to employing faster, better, and more stable tools as we meet our departmental goals and continue to provide the service expected by the men and women employed by Parallax when they need us. One of the means available is automation. When we are able to we'll be upgrading the forums to meet the standards of a hosting service, and from that point on we'll no-longer have to worry about connections, security, licensing or hardware for the machines/software of the forums. This will free us up to do other excellent things like improve our services for enterprise level demands; also the new version of vBulletin has a fun api, meets with SSO compatibility for our other management systems, can host a real spam control that actually cares about headers, among other things.
Lots of reasons to do so on the back-end, so many that it makes concerns about what happens on the front-end seemingly less monstrous. That is why the sandbox was erected. We want to locate key concerns about usability which will need attention so that you're not too unhappy with the migration. A lot of the issues I've seen and read about are minimal, which is promising, there are also new features like "comments vs replies" and a non-social-media dependent voting system for posts that could be handy. So far I'm still not seeing any show-stoppers, a few corrections are needed. You're all being extremely helpful as expected; you're all great testers, and five years is a fairly long time.
RegEx! Some forums it's difficult to talk about 'grapes'; I could add an exception for Animalia and toss proper English in there as well as our simplified version.
Also, no official timeline on when it'll happen; there are also talks about other changes to the forums' presentation, which you will all be made aware of when more information becomes available.
Did you say " toss". I'm appalled at such language
No amount of regex is going to help with this problem. I cannot begin to imagine the regular expression that would recognize all grammatically correct sentences in the English language. Let alone correctly raise alarms for all the "bad" language. English speakers can always adapt to get round any such censorship faster than software can be updated anyway. Did you ever wonder when "gay" went from meaning "joyful" to a term of abuse? Something that really hit me when my 12 year old son used the word some years ago. And let's not get into "Animalia".
Anyway, full steam ahead I say. Us old guys like to grump and moan about every little change. Mostly because we have lived through a lifetime of change that didn't actually seem to make anything better. However if the new forum code brings bug fixes, security enhancements, new features and so on then it has to be.
There is no reason the user experience has to change dramatically just because the underlying platform has been fixed, improved and new features added.
Starting with that page width thing:)
... and the "What's New?" button!
Two feature requests...
First: Please maintain the existing links for Google's use. There are SOOO many times I've used Google's site search to search Parallax forums with great success.
Two: Some of us who are getting older ahem.. wiser are developing vision issues with age our eyes. The "dark" theme you guys created last time was a real help in making the current forums comfortable to see.
Thanks!
Jeff
Along those lines, I really hope that you have a couple different themes to choose from. One of them being as close to this one as possible. I also do not care for what appears to be a trend of desaturated, lower contrast user interfaces.