[another_someone]

34)One other piece of functionality that has gone missing is that on the present you have a right arrow icon (), which if clicked upon, will lead you to the most recent message in the topic.  I can see links to the most recent page, but it seems to lead you to the top of the most recent page, and not to the most recent message.

George

[another_someone]

Don't know if this is technically an error, although it is certainly not strictly correct either.

If you set your profile to hide your online status, then rather than actually hiding your online status, it merely declares that you are permanently offline.  I have not saught to demonstrate what this might do to the various stats you hold about online status (i.e. time of day when online, total number of hours online, etc. - but then, I rather suspect these stats are rather dubious in quality anyway).

George

[another_someone]

35) OK, after having said that we have lost much of our search functionality, I see it is more a matter of it being hidden somewhere rather than actually not there.

Apparently there should be a menu option for search that allows an advanced search.  You have a help page for it (as well as an optional calender function), as well as direct access to through http://www.kellaton.org.uk/forum/index.php?action=search, but I cannot actually see where the menu option should be.  Am I just blind, or is there a link that has gone missing?

------- further comment -----

OK – found the link now – it is the small anonymous icon on the left of the search box.  Having the big search entry box, and the big text button to the right of the entry box, it was not immediately apparent that the small icon on the left actually was a totally separate option.

George

[another_someone]

quote:Originally posted by Hadrian
can you get it to work now?  he he

A quote from the web page for the software they are using to set up the new site:

http://www.simplemachines.org/

quote:
Simple Machines Forum - SMF in short - is a free, professional grade software package that allows you to set up your own online community within minutes.

[:p][}:)][]

George

[another_someone]

http://www.kellaton.org.uk/forum/index.php?action=profile;u=2334;sa=showPosts;start=1200 has got the best contrast of all – black text on black background for class “catbg3“.  Not yet sure where the style for this is defined, since I cannot find the class defined in http://www.kellaton.org.uk/forum/Themes/naksci2/style.css.  No doubt I'll find where you've hidden it (or have you not yet defined it?).

George

[ukmicky]

I noticed in the statistics page which i love by the way that the new forum software has the abillity to run polls but i have been unable to find the feature will it as well as spellcheck be turned on in the future.

Michael

[another_someone]

37)One of the profile options in http://www.kellaton.org.uk/forum/index.php?action=profile;u=2334;sa=theme is to change the quick-moderation setting to check boxes.  Doing this puts a single check box, without any idea what it is meant to do, in the final column of forum topics list in  http://www.kellaton.org.uk/forum/index.php?board=6.0.  Setting the profile to show icons places two icons in the column, and the tooltips for these icons are 'Remove topic' and 'Lock topic'.

George

[daveshorts (OP)]

I have numbered the points so as to keep some kind of tracibilty

35) Yeah, you can get to it from the little search icon next to the search box, this isn't very obvious. It may be ok if I can get it to change colour when you hover over it, the DHTML is being intransigent atm, or it is just 2am...

The reason why lots of funtionality is different is that we have moved away from Snitz as it was running on an Access Database which kept dieing and was causing the server to fall over. We have moved to Simple Machines

37) Cheers fixed it.

[another_someone]

http://www.kellaton.org.uk/forum/index.php?action=recent – could you possibly increase the left and right padding or margin a bit – having the text running to within a pixel of the borders may seem like economic use of space, but is not good for the eyesight, and having a little bit more white space to the left and right of it might make it more readable.

Conversely, http://www.kellaton.org.uk/forum/index.php?action=profile;u=2334;sa=showPosts;start=1140 has a bit too much white space around the text, but in part that is no doubt to allow room for the menu at the top left of the page.

On the other hand, the selection of pages for this screen is somewhat cumbersome.  My own posting history runs to 81 pages, but I cannot choose to go to page 41, I can only select one of the next or immediately preceding few pages, and in this manner incrementally step through the history.  In reality, it will probably be unusual that I would ever look back more than the most recent few pages, and anything further back than that I would probably use the search facility to locate, but the facility is theoretically there to go through this route as well, but is made the more cumbersome by the way it is presented.

George

[ukmicky]

re 37) Cheers george, dave ,sorted.

Michael

[another_someone]

Back to the checkbox options for the quick-moderation selection in the profiles (as mentioned in 37 above).

If you select checkboxes, these boxes also turn up on the messages within the topics (at least, on those messages that I own).  If I switch to using icons, no icons are shown – it is as if I had selected the 'don't show' option.

George

[another_someone]

Another couple of cosmetics that would be, in my view, minor improvements.

You have the last edited timestamp on the bottom of the message.  This is fine, but could you change the text colour, or put a border around it, or in some other way separate it from the main body of the text.

The creation timestamp is on the left column of the message list.  There is good logic in it being there, but it is too cramped, and, at least on my screen, tends to wrap.  Could you possibly move this to being above the text, in line with the 'reply' link, but well to the left of it, and like the edit timestamp, set in different colour or with a box to separate it from the text around it.

George

[another_someone]

Back to pint 10 – mea culpa – the wild cards are only for searching, not for the actual recipient address, so you cannot send to just anyone.

Sorry, I'm still getting the hang of the new system, and am clearly jumping the gun on some of these.

George

[daveshorts (OP)]

16) I think the signature is appearing now, but I may be wrong. There was a problem that it was appearing twice, as Snitz appended it to the message itself, whereas smf (the new software) adds it in dynamically. I fixed this by grepping through the post for the signature and if it appears not displaying it a second time. It may be finding false positives.

18) It is now displaying the messageID at the left. You can make a link to it by going [message=2345]My cool message[/message]. It was done in a bad and wrong way as there is no built in functionality for finding a message without a topic, but now works. I will try and find a more elegant (or at least robust) way of implementing it in the morning.

[another_someone]

Looking a bit more at the mail function.

When you set up a search function to search for a user by name, and you use wild cards, you only shown 7 names at a time, and the names are not sorted in any alphabetical order, and like with the multi page message lists, you can step through the pages, but cannot jump straight to a given page number (although, since the names are not in alphabetical order, it is unlikely you would be able to judge to which page to jump to).

I have changed my user name to be a different visible name from the underlying name (the underlying name remains “another_someone”, but the visible name was changed to “another me”.  When I search for my name in the list of mail recipients, it brings up “another me”, but when I insert the name into the recipient list, it shows as “another_someone” - i.e. the visible name changes to the underlying name.  The delivery still works, but it is both confusing, and arguably a breach of security.

George

[another_someone]

quote:Originally posted by daveshorts

16) I think the signature is appearing now, but I may be wrong. There was a problem that it was appearing twice, as Snitz appended it to the message itself, whereas smf (the new software) adds it in dynamically. I fixed this by grepping through the post for the signature and if it appears not displaying it a second time. It may be finding false positives.

Yep, I am seeing it now – at first I thought that I was going insane, and it had been there all along, but then I realised you had made other changes also, so it must be you fixing problems as I go back to look at the bits again.

Yes, I know I had to be careful with Snitz in that when I used to edit the message I would have to be careful not to accidentally delete the signature.  It would be nice if this no longer remains a problem.

quote:
18) It is now displaying the messageID at the left. You can make a link to it by going [message=2345]My cool message[/message]. It was done in a bad and wrong way as there is no built in functionality for finding a message without a topic, but now works. I will try and find a more elegant (or at least robust) way of implementing it in the morning.

Yep, I saw that – thanks.

I thought you would make a link from it, so that I could simply right click and copy the link, and then paste it into the message, but I'm not sure that has any real advantage over the way you have done it (except maybe that the topic remains part of the link, and so anyone who wants to edit that link, just to look at the topic, can do so – but not many will be worrying about doing that).

George

[daveshorts (OP)]

22) Good point - I have disabled executables. Whether we want any attachments is possibly debateable - I guess we can try it and see if it gets silly.

6) I have put a link to the BBCode stuff on the posting page

26) I think the title is because the forum has the ability to show posts in a tree form (which would be particularly useful for this thread and It is a hang over from this - I think I will just make the input hidden.

[another_someone]

On the message InBox (http://www.kellaton.org.uk/forum/index.php?action=pm;f=inbox;l=-1), you use the same colour scheme as on the topics message list.  This is fine.

You use the same alternate background colour for each alternate message – this is fine.

You do not use the alternate background colour for the signature, so the signature is on a white background on each and every message, even as the rest of the message is only on a white background on every other message.

George

[another_someone]

quote:Originally posted by daveshorts

22) Good point - I have disabled executables. Whether we want any attachments is possibly debateable - I guess we can try it and see if it gets silly.

My own instinct would be to the negative – it is a risk, and I don't see that it is pertinent to the kind of fast moving discussion group we have here.  It may be more relevant if this was some kind of self-help group, where people may want to load up some software or other supporting material in response to some support request, but that is not what we do here.

In any case, the only justification for making it an attachment, rather than inline, is either if it was non-text (e.g. an executable), or it was very big (e.g. a large document someone may wish to download).  The latter is a possibility, but also carries risks (Microsoft word documents, or Excel documents, can carry malicious code; and zip files can contain almost anything).

George

[daveshorts (OP)]

20) I think the more sophisticated edit screen has the preview above the editor... it may need to be made more obvious somehow - I have added a couple of blank lines before the preview to stop it looking like part of the tree above.

25) Aaah that makes sense - the message icon should appear in the topic list. In the column I deleted as I couldn't work out what it was there for. I don't think it really adds much, I will get rid of it completely.

Thankyou again for the testing, the feedback is brilliant. However I think I will go to bed now to avoid passing out on the keyboard, I will continue tomorrow.
  Cheers