Ah so it’s Mac OS then?
Regarding the activation email, thanks for letting me know, I manually approved your account.
I hate change. 
It’s working. The dev site looks good, easy to post photos; i miss the recent posts link but will play later.
Have had no problems registering and using the new site. Two things I miss so far are the top of thread button and the ability to preview my post to make sure I didn’t do something stupid. Or perhaps these features are there and I haven’t discovered them yet?
Signing up went smoothly for me other than the verification email going to my gmail spam folder, which wasn’t a totally unexpected thing.
Registration with the same old user name worked fine.
Setting up an alternate email address failed the first time as it was a gmail.com address. But I did find it in the gmail spam box. Then told Gmail it was not spam and tried adding that address as an alternate email on the blf-dev site. That time the email came thru forwarded to my regular address as usual. I also tried adding an alternate email using a “normal” domain and that worked fine.
Adding, or rather uploading an image from my PC was easy. I also tried an image posting from my phone. That enabled me to directly upload an image taken right at that moment with the phone. I am curious sb… does the development system resize and save the image as resized?
Cool, thanks for testing. I believe it doesn’t manipulate the uploaded image files, it just adapts the HTML / CSS display options to make it adapt to the screen size. I might be wrong though. There’s also an interesting option that I want to play with where it automatically downloads a local copy of hotlinked images (https://i.imgur.com/d324jlk.jpg) to the server and changes the link to use that copy. That way if the source external image disappears it will still be available on the forum.
I’m still a bit nervous about the amount of data needed for hosting images, but storage prices have come down since I launched BLF with Drupal, and there are flexible-sized network storage data volumes that can be attached to a server with fairly low cost per GB.
Adding an image is much better and easier since it just uploads the file that’s on the device.
Thanks for the report.
1) top of thread button —> You can click on the first date at the top of the vertical timeline scroller and it will jump to the beginning of the thread:
2) ability to preview my post —> It’s just to the right of the post editing pane. Raw text on the left, formatted as it would appear to the right. Maybe you didn’t see the preview because for the first few posts they seem to cover it with informational tips, which you can just close to reveal the preview:
I’d like to tweak the appearance of the front page a bit, but it does have the list of recent posts right there.
More on the image tests of mine.
The image of the light I made for the BLF10th Challenge was a resized, 900 x 1200, 261 KB image on my PC. I just noticed that at the bottom of the image it shows me it is a 900x1200 size and 240 KB when I place my cursor on the posted image. I downloaded that to my PC and it came in as 131 KB and 562 x 570.
The image of the rhubarb, which is baking into a rhubarb/apple crisp, was taken with my phone cam. It was only sent to be added to my message on the forum test page. No copy was saved to my phone. I forget what the phone prompted me to do, but I was under the impression the image would be posted and likely not saved. I have to check that out again. When saved to my phone those square images are 3024 x 3024 and 5 to 6 or so MB. The posted image shows size to be 1920 x 1920 and 312 KB size. The copy I downloaded to my PC came in as 750 x 750 and 157 KB.
So it does seem there is some automatic resizing taking place which is good as far as I am concerned. It’s good for what storage space sb needs to pay for. Also should be better for viewing posted images at times. Sometimes, out in the boonies with a lousy cell signal I have noticed some images took a long time to paint themselves on the phone display. I figured those were images that the poster had uploaded to wherever in full camera size.
Thanks Don, that all sounds right.
Not sure if you’re referring to my comment about hotlinked images, but I meant that Discourse will download a copy of the remote linked image to the server, not to the user’s device.
No. I was commenting that when I started to write the post on my phone and selected to add a photo, the phone camera option I chose simply added the image I took directly to the test forum post and did not save a image to my phone.
I will try that again and pay more attention to the options.
This time I was fine with the image not being saved to my phone as well as being posted. It saved me having to delete it from my phone and from the automatic upload to my cloud. But that could be a disappointment if it was unexpected.
Ah I see. I didn’t even know that was possible to take a picture and upload it while composing a post.
Yeah that is cool. I re-tried it. After I start the message and tap the image icon I am presented with a choice of using the camera, browsing, or selecting from a series of images that are displayed from the gallery on/in my phone.
Selecting the camera option turns on the camera and posts the image directly to my message without saving to the camera.
Selecting the “browse” gives the choice of browsing for images in some other app. I have not pursued that yet.
The third choice lets one scroll through and select an image that is in your phones gallery of images. selected one and found it too big. Here’s a screenshot ….
I had to post that the old way
OK, good test. I can easily change the max upload size, we’ll have to figure out what is a happy medium for the average picture that most users might upload. And maybe add a warning banner or something that it won’t save a local copy if you snap the photo on the spot while composing.
Is there a place where we can donate to BLF to support the changeover efforts and storage requirements?
How will the new version of the site integrate advertisements?
Thanks a lot for asking. I’ve never felt comfortable accepting donations, I simply ask that users disable their ad blocker for BLF and that they use the manufacturers’/vendors’ banners when they want to visit their sites. Regarding integrating advertisements into the new site, Discourse does have an add-on module for that and I plan to enable it soon on the testbed. It will require a lot of testing and reworking the way ads are placed since it has a mobile version now and we can’t simply reuse the same ad banner for all devices and users like we do here currently.
CPF and TLF are examples I gave in the previous threads that looked quite nice in my opinion, but they use paid forum software.
I kind of agree, but I’m not sure what the problem is, lack of contrast maybe, I guess that can be tweaked ?
1 Thank
Yes, I think it’s lack of contrast. I just picked a quick color scheme and went with it, a lot can be changed there. I also want to make it use almost 100% of the browser window screen width. We can’t completely imitate the current theme here, but we can copy some aspects of it.