PBS Forum

Today I got the mal-alert again. Despite not having been back to the website. I conclude that alerts are genuine push. I found this quote:


"Web push notifications are messages that come from a website. You get them on your desktop or device even when the concerned web page is not open in your browser. They are a brand new/ nascent marketing channel to re engage your visitors without knowing their email or other contact details."

That then is a good thing - if we can make them work - a method of people getting notifications without email, and without something too complex/old like RSS.

No alerts, and no email (probably expected) about the EX closure. Today I visited a car forum - interesting that they were running paid for forum software, which apparently gives users control over the size and placement of pictures - anyway I seemed to spend the day getting mal-alerts, something that wanted to entice me into a trap - I could not get rid of the stupid things.

Point being alerts may not be everyone's friend.

As to the car, the old joke has a punchline that only the software engineer suggests driving the car back to the top of the hill to see if the brakes fail again. I can tell you they are all software engineers now.

An impressive number of species of bulbs and seeds.

Yes removing thumbs that are referenced in posts is a common feature on SMF mods.
I feel getting thumbs/photos/whatever right is the most important thing. This is where I am stuck. Diane's comments about difficulty are new. I know of plenty of other problems.

I'd be happy if everything was a thumbnail at the end of a message - but there is advantage in being able to add text near a photo.

I don't like images appearing different sizes - one message has thumbs and the next has page filling images.

There are addons that use things like "lightbox" to display images ("lightbox" is how the wiki works). Anyone saying "I have to be able to see a photo while writing a comment".

For users, consistency and simplicity are important.

I've not been able to find the enthusiasm to start programming what I would like. That is where I am stuck.

We could ditch SMF if there was another piece of software which solved these problems. Photos seem like an afterthought for most forum software.

With the wiki I programmed what I wanted - multiple resolution images, auto resize. These sound like sensible requirements. But I have had no luck selling (giving) them to the maintainers of the wiki. They positively dislike the ideas.

Clearly we could program our own solution (for SMF). Doing that there is no issue with SMF version, because you have your own code and you are going to make it work come what may.

I feel I lack knowledge of forum software - six months running SMF and I will tell you all that is wrong with it, and then I can have six months running something else.

Just how users will mess things up also remains to be seen.

I have in my 12 years involvement with PBS had little luck with the idea that software has a bearing on the success of an offering. Mysteriously after all this time I hear little but that the wiki is too hard for people to contribute to it.

Apparently I have made the wiki more difficult - better that tables have to be coded by cell and images resized by hand 

Today is the day the bulbs arrived - I have lots of blue tulips! - I am gullible!!

Kind of a different supplier this year, the old one jacked up the prices too far this time - another 25%.

"Kind of" because they are still Dutch bulbs, but mostly from the high street shop "Wilko".

So, is it the link:

https://www.pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/index.php/Notholirion#thomsonianum

Does not look like it

I realised I could find the original message, and use "modify" to discover what the mark up consisted of.

There are tags setting font, Verdana, and size tags, and the size tags don't match. So question is where did the text come from.

This is an extract, I have removed the square brackets, I don't know how to quote bbc text.

font=Verdana size=2px It is quite lovely and vigorous and even though it is not blue, I like it. /size /font
font=Verdana /size size=2px One theory is perhaps some seed volunteered into this pot. The originally planted

There are apparently lots of closing size tag mark up codes in the screen shot message. One would guess that there were also some start size tags which have made the text small. For some reason the open and close tags have not matched, which is why some of the tags are being displayed - maybe newlines. But when writing the message size tags must have been inserted.

At the moment I can only find the Font size menu above that inserts these tags. Although you could do it manually, or maybe when pasting from something else that uses mark up. Or of course anything that puts the word size in square brackets - hard to believe the URL you pasted does that.

test

With the 'list. It says in the rules everyone gets when they join:

"The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it."

And yet folk do sometimes ask. I will only change things under threat of legal action, it is very messy.

There is the problem of changing history - A says something B responds, A has their post removed and one is left wondering what was wrong with B.

It is impossible to remove stuff from the web. I can never bring myself to point this out to people. There's the internet archive, there are people who pirate mail list contents, once you put something out there you will not get it back ever.

At the moment various England cricket players are being dropped over tweets they made 10 years back, which people have dug up.

Then we have the jokers who remove things from Google using EU law.

The problem is there are unfriendly actors who are archiving everything and will make it public if it suits their purposes.

The only consolation is that for the most part, no one cares.

Gonna be like World Series Baseball - USA + Canada?

ESC == Eurovision Song Contest

Last UK winner Katrina Leskanich - 1997. A US citizen.

After which the UK fell out of favor, possibly due to its political backing for the USA in the early 2000s.

"No one likes us, we don't care" is sung to the tune of (We Are) Sailing by Rod Stewart.

Trading pollen would be a good idea. How often did I grow a packet of seed and end up with just one - non-self-fertile - flowering plant.

Observations on downloading images - from new posts everything seems to download. From forum boards only attachments at the end. Over at the SRGC forum many photos open in a new window. This makes me wonder if somewhere, like Apache config, I should be setting things up to display rather than download.

My other idea  is that javascript for thumbnails is not being set up -  seemingly when the script for inline thumbnails was added things changed.

For thumbnails in new posts, it is definitely the case that .js is not being set up.

On the SRGC forum I found one page where one photo (end of message thumb) opened in the browser window as a new page (back button returned to forum page), and the other photos appeared in a new browser window (but a browser window with no tools bars etc). Comparing the URLs I could see no difference.

I'm still not really involved here - Photoswipe is finished. I have successfully fed Lauw's book through Google translate - I am now stuck with reformatting all the pages.