SEEING DOUBLE FRAMES? HIT SHIFT-RELOAD!

(a draft of this message was originally posted here: http://www.fairfaxunderground.com/forum/read.php?40,11812 in off-topic before the switchover)

Today this website got a serious upgrade. Fairfax Underground went from being hosted on a 400Mhz Celeron tower piece of junk to a quad Xeon server with 2 gigs of ram.

The speed improvements are incredible! The arrest search is exponentially faster.

In addition to the server swap, I will be/have been making some serious changes to this site.

any comments or suggestions on what else needs to be done? please reply and let me know.

my list:

- incorporate the top menu bar into the header of each page instead of in a frame as it is now. 60% of the daily visitors here come from google and get linked directly to the page with the data (and therefore don't get the frame up top). i'd bet visitor retention from google would be much higher if they could actually see the menu. (DONE!)

- fix that damned "designed" typo. would have been done ages ago, but it's a long story. it can't be done until: (DONE!)

- upgrade the software this forum uses. using 5.0.14 of "phorum" now, plan to upgrade to the latest 5.1 "beta but stable" version because it brings in loads of new features and really cleans up a lot. (DONE!)

- completely rewrite the first sticky post and make it much more informational. make this place seem more professional and not a hangout for dumb kids. although i will still stress the fact that pretty much anything on-topic goes.

- SLASHDOT STYLE MODERATION! please god! my php kung fu is not up to par to write it, so i've been pleading with the phorum developers. things like "good karma" for regular positively moderated users, modding trolls off the visible page, etc. for more information, see [slashdot.org] . this may not come immediately, but i wanted you to know that i've been planning to implement it for ages.

- auto-ban users that use html in the topic (to fix the spambots that keep posting in the city/town forums)

- fairfax wiki?

- license plate database (where you can add comments about a driver on the road?)

- better (easier) chat software

- put arrest list in a ramdisk so it runs MUCH faster (DONE!)

- the "Links" section is pretty useless. I'd like to open it up wiki-style where anyone could add links they feel are appropriate and sort them into sections, etc.

edit: The new forum software is installed and has a slightly different feel. Let me know if you find any bugs.
The very top of the screen is kind of ugly with everything squished together, but I'll worry about that later.

any other ideas? let me know! thanks.



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 02/16/2006 11:41AM by Cary.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairfax_County

What happened to the Goto: Back to Forum? Now it's 2 clicks instead of 1. Improvement my ass.

click on the Message List link

Oops forgot about that. "Message List" was the default but I changed it ages ago to "Back to Forum" for clarity. Fixed.
Damn upgrade overwrote all my custom settings, if you notice anything else out of whack let me know.

- how about the email address obfustication? people could do without the spam.
- color schemes. i always like personalizing sites. :)
- a "only new" forum that just shows from all forums but would specify the forums they were really from.
- a new logo. the initials F.U. are totally being underutilized.
- an "ignore IP" option that would allow you to ignore all posts from a given IP (selected via posted message from the person with that IP). you wouldnt actually have to expose the IP address for this.
- automatic html closing fix so that you dont get the rest of the damn page in bold.


"the wisdom of the wise will perish, the intelligence of the intelligent will vanish."

Small change, increased the number of threads to show in a forum to 40, and the number of messages to show on a page to 40. (both previously at 30)

So if anyone remembers there being two pages to a thread before, and now there's one, this is why.

yay! i mean... the wait for the 1KB to download is worth it! pressing next sucks. then again, perhaps you could make it an option of how many to show before starting a second page.


"the wisdom of the wise will perish, the intelligence of the intelligent will vanish."

Ooooh, can we get a "Back to Forum" link at the bottom of the page?

Genevieve Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Ooooh, can we get a "Back to Forum" link at the
> bottom of the page?

Should already be one. The "back to forum" link at the top of the reply box at the bottom of every page will work too.

whoops. realized the chat function broke after i upgraded the server.

the whole 5 of you that actually used chat can use it again.

to everyone else: don't just join than quit, minimize the window and stick around for a little bit. people pop in and out all the time. although there will probably be nobody there right now since i just turned it back on.

is it just me or does the page no longer tell you that you have Private Messages you havent seen. it would be good if you could re-add that. also if you could make it show up in red that would be good because i went like a week without noticing when it did say i had messages.


"the wisdom of the wise will perish, the intelligence of the intelligent will vanish."

Now a button appears in the top-right corner of the screen when you have new private messages.

It's not on DST, if anyone notices.

yeah, it looks like the server either isnt keen to daylight savings or the NTP daemon is syncing to the wrong time zone. then again, it may just be one of the "Phorum" settings.


"the wisdom of the wise will perish, the intelligence of the intelligent will vanish."



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/07/2006 01:55AM by Gravis.

"phorum bug" i guess

there was an option in the user control panel for DST on/off. you would assume it would auto-switch but not all of them did.

just turned off the system option to control DST, since we're supposedly all on the east coast.

is it just me of is the link to the RSS feed gone?


"the wisdom of the wise will perish, the intelligence of the intelligent will vanish."

RSS feed is still there. The newest version of firefox (if that's what you're using) now puts the icon in the URL bar instead of the bottom right.

Also, on the topic of private messaging, if you have a valid email address configured phorum will alert you when you have new priv messages via email.

what? spam@yahoo.com is a valid email address. :)

yeah... they moved the icon... bastards.


"the wisdom of the wise will perish, the intelligence of the intelligent will vanish."

how about an option to embed attached files into posts instead of just having it say "attached file:" and showing it below. however, if it is an image, it would show the image, if it's a text file it would display the text and anything else would provide a link. i think a good format would be this:

[attached:1] <-- this is an image file
[attached:2] <-- this is a text file
[attached:3] <-- this is a zip file

the result would be something like this:

this is my text file.    weeeeeeeeee.  it's embeded with a <pre> tag.

  remember to translate symbols into html character  lol!!!11!!!1one

zipfilename.zip


if you could add that it would be uber awesome.


"the wisdom of the wise will perish, the intelligence of the intelligent will vanish."

auto-ban users that use html in the topic (to fix the spambots that keep posting in the city/town forums)

That might stop Gravis from posting

how would it stop me from posting? that doesnt even make sense.


"the wisdom of the wise will perish, the intelligence of the intelligent will vanish."

i have no idea.

my suggestions(these only apply to registered users)

• a forum that would show up on the main page that would only show all the new topics and topics with new posts.
  
• custom rss feeds - they would only deliver unread posts for that user that they have not already grabbed via the rss feed. some format like

  Quote
  
  www.fairfaxunderground.com/forum/rss.php?u=username&p=password

  would be the address of the feed.

just my suggestions.


"the wisdom of the wise will perish, the intelligence of the intelligent will vanish."

YAY CHAT NOW WORKS!!!!!!!

Nice!