Board Upgrade

[Curt A]

David, I'm in total agreement that if you choose to use a serif font, then Georgia is perfect - I really like that font and have used it many times for various projects... Thanks again.

[epigramophone]

Good to see the green background returning, if only at the top of the page so far. Much easier on the eyes . Please keep it coming.

[MTPhono]

Thanks for bringing it back!

[Bruce]

Thank you David for both the upgrade and regular maintenance. Access to a smooth functioning forum such as this is a blessing to the phonograph hobby.
Bruce
PS Once the Covid crisis is past have a couple beer on me.

[MordEth]

Thanks again, everyone, for your continued support.

Thank you, David, for all this work. Everythings looks so fresh now, I really like it too!

WDC—the new version of phpBB definitely seems to run better/feel more responsive for most things. From the admin side, it’s definitely a big improvement.

Great job in updating the forum! I appreciate the difficulty and pain that is dealing with database service providers. It looks nice and is easy to use!

Carlos—Hopefully you continue to feel the same way about it, but from what I’ve seen, none of the changes are huge, and most can be tweaked and improved by editing the theme.

Dear David, thanks for taking time to reply with such level of detail to my message!

I don't think I will really annoy you with such a boring thing: back then I payed someone to create the style on Rent-A-Coder (which has changed name on the meanwhile, but it's basically still the same thing) and I suppose I will redo the same thing whenever the time will come. But I would appreciate if - after having done with this forum of course - you would remember to drop me a PM and have a quick chat about these matters, and also quickly check together a pair of things that never really worked and give me an opinion. One would think that a style should be just a layout with no effect on a forum's functionality, but apparently it isn't so.

Over the years I have been constantly negatively impressed by the lack of importance that phpBB developers give to styles. There used to be a styles' library which could be browsed... by styles' names rather than colour!!! Also, at least in my experience, a customised style locks forum software updates (they fail), and you quickly end up with both style and php files outdated and impossible to update on a regular basis. For reasons that in my humble opinion should be obvious to anyone, I perceive this as a MAJOR issue. They couldn't care less. Ironically, much simpler forum softwares that once existed (like Snitz) had a very simple style generator, which was basically a "palette" on which the administrator could choose the basic colour combination of the board; in 2-3 minutes the job was done and was more than enough for 99% of administrators.

So again, my best wishes for the intricated task that you're accomplishing!

Marco—You’re quite welcome. I’d always preferred to explain things if possible. I’d rather you guys know where things are.

And definitely, once I’ve gone through the forum theme thoroughly, I’ll go over how the final theme here works and how much of the functionality actually lives in the template HTML files.

I completely agree with you, with regards to how easy some of the other forum softwares (like ProBoards) made to customize the colors like you describe. A style generator for phpBB would be great.

I am REALLY impressed at how fast pictures load now versus the previous Forum version! Wow!! And we can select the next picture while the previous picture is being loaded! Thanks again, David!

Doug—I’m glad they improved these things; that was one of the more dated-feeling features on the old version.

I'll add my thanks, David, for all your work!!

Regarding pictures-- I posted a reply to a member and was able to select four pictures at once and they all upload fine... I didn't have to do them one at a time as with the previous version. That's a huge time saver. Thanks!!

Brad—Thank you. I still can’t believe that you guys have uploaded 166 GB of photos to this place to date. Glad that the new version makes this easier for you guys.

David, I'm in total agreement that if you choose to use a serif font, then Georgia is perfect - I really like that font and have used it many times for various projects... Thanks again.

Curt—That’s the plan, since that was what we were using before. I’ll keep you all posted on theme progress. I haven’t manage to spend much time with it yet.

Good to see the green background returning, if only at the top of the page so far. Much easier on the eyes . Please keep it coming.

Hopefully I will have some time this weekend to do more work on at least updating the colors. Stay tuned.

Thanks for bringing it back!

It wasn’t going anywhere, just a matter of DreamHost forcing me to not procrastinate.

Thank you David for both the upgrade and regular maintenance. Access to a smooth functioning forum such as this is a blessing to the phonograph hobby.

PS Once the Covid crisis is past have a couple beer on me.

Bruce—Thank you! You guys are responsible for this being the one of the longest-running phonograph boards and definitely the one with the largest membership and traffic. I’ll be doing another update shortly to keep this fully up-to-date.

Regards,

David

[MordEth]

...and we upgraded from 3.3.2 to 3.3.3. So once again we’re at the latest version.
I also added a small line (below the copyright/above the donation button) so you can see when I last updated the forum:
(Last updated from 3.3.2 to 3.3.3 on 2021-01-30 @ 03:44 EST)

Now hopefully I can focus on working on the theme.

Regards,

David

[fran604g]

Hiya David,

I have a question in regard to email alerts:

When I view an email message, there are 3 links included within the text in regard to the subscribed subforum/thread alert.

The first link takes me to the (sub)forum showing all of its current threads.

The 2nd link takes me to the specific thread of the alert.

The 3rd is to stop receiving updates to the thread I've subscribed.

Is this a template you can control/change, so that the specific relevant individual thread is listed highest (1st) in my email message?

Maybe I'm just being a luddite and am the only one who'd like it possibly changed - purely for convenience sake? It's a small thing, I know.

Thank you,
Fran

[MordEth]

I have a question in regard to email alerts:

When I view an email message, there are 3 links included within the text in regard to the subscribed subforum/thread alert.

The first link takes me to the (sub)forum showing all of its current threads.

The 2nd link takes me to the specific thread of the alert.

The 3rd is to stop receiving updates to the thread I've subscribed.

Is this a template you can control/change, so that the specific relevant individual thread is listed highest (1st) in my email message?

Maybe I'm just being a luddite and am the only one who'd like it possibly changed - purely for convenience sake? It's a small thing, I know.

Fran,

Is that e-mail from before the forum was updated, or after? Because it looks like they already did what you’re requesting.

To me, it appears that the current template is topic_notify.txt, which has the following contents:

Subject: Topic reply notification - "{TOPIC_TITLE}"
List-Unsubscribe: <{U_STOP_WATCHING_TOPIC}>

Hello {USERNAME},

You are receiving this notification because you are watching the topic "{TOPIC_TITLE}" at "{SITENAME}". This topic has received a reply<!-- IF AUTHOR_NAME != '' --> by {AUTHOR_NAME}<!-- ENDIF --> since your last visit. No more notifications will be sent until you visit the topic.

If you want to view the newest post made since your last visit, click the following link:
{U_NEWEST_POST}

If you want to view the topic, click the following link:
{U_TOPIC}

If you want to view the forum, click the following link:
{U_FORUM}

If you no longer wish to watch this topic you can either click the "Unsubscribe topic" link found at the bottom of the topic above, or by clicking the following link:
{U_STOP_WATCHING_TOPIC}

{EMAIL_SIG}

If this is not the e-mail that you’re currently getting from the updated forum, please let me know and I will look into it further.

Regards,

David

[fran604g]

Thanks for the quick reply, David.

It was a new email. Oddly though, the email alert I received for your reply shows 4 links now, with the link that goes directly to your reply now at the top as the 1st link.

Nice! Very convenient and intuitional.

Best,
Fran

[PeterF]

Is there a way to adjust the overall display size back down to where it was? It’s now huge on my phone and thus requires tons of scrolling to see what’s available to read. Used to have almost the entire page of items on a single screen; now it’s like 3 or 4.

Thanks.