Question for the mods about Forum useability

[zmudshark]

Originally Posted by R3awak3n

I think even more important than drag and drop is photo resizing.

There is forum software that does both in one step.

[jimoots]

Sorry to be a buzzkill buuuuuuut.

Switching forum software is a huge, huge piece of work. It’s not simple by any means as each forum has its own codebase and database structure - you can’t switch easily (while preserving all the posts and member data), you certainly don’t do it on a whim and you are well advised to either pay someone to do it for you (or be extremely confident in your own skill set with prior experience doing a similar migration).

The bright side is that this is something I’ve done, I’d be happy to donate my experience if the mods do decide to upgrade or switch forums.

Resizing photos down (so a high resolution image doesn’t blow the width of a post) is really simple with a short piece of code. I think I provided the CSS code to someone a few years back but it never got actioned.

But ultimately we all need to remember that this is a free forum. Even if we chipped in for forum costs, the time that the mods would need to spend on migration is huge and it’s unfair to demand anything from them.

[smontanaro]

Originally Posted by pdmtong

Email to yourself
Save on phone
Post using Tapatalk
Delete photo from phone
Delete email

You forgot one other step:

Run around to all the photo sharing sites where your photos transparently uploaded and delete them.

[smontanaro]

Originally Posted by jimmy-moots

Switching forum software is a huge, huge piece of work. It’s not simple by any means ...

Even upgrading (or downgrading) can be a challenge. Bikeforums downgraded from vN to vN-1 of whatever forum software they were using for some reason. It was painful, and a couple years later there are still residual bugs. The pitchforks really came out after that.

[paredown]

Originally Posted by smontanaro

Even upgrading (or downgrading) can be a challenge. Bikeforums downgraded from vN to vN-1 of whatever forum software they were using for some reason. It was painful, and a couple years later there are still residual bugs. The pitchforks really came out after that.

Road Bike Review went through two "upgrades" while I was posting regularly over there--and both times they destroyed data--most pictures stored with the forum software were lost. So if you read an old thread it is likely to have no pictures. Never heard a good explanation and it was never corrected. To this day there is still something funky with the picture posting.

It killed the Retroclassic section for me--there used to be a lot of long threads concerned with particular brands and they are rendered useless without the photo documentation

[smontanaro]

Originally Posted by paredown

It killed the Retroclassic section for me--there used to be a lot of long threads concerned with particular brands and they are rendered useless without the photo documentation

I would appreciate the ability to upload images on occasion. In many (perhaps most) cases you don't care about long-term availability of photos (CL/eBay outing of stuff for sale), but for documentation of rare bikes/parts, restoration or repair processes or picturesque rides in the French Alps, it would be real nice if the photos where on the same server as the thread.

Simply linking to another site can be problematic. People move on, stop paying hosting fees, close accounts, etc, and poof! some fraction of images are gone. Witness the (ongoing?) Photobucket fiasco or the demise of the Wool Jersey site several years ago (where many vintage bike peeps uploaded all pictures because the bikelist.org mailing lists didn't allow image attachements).

Maybe allowing image uploads to the server is just a switch to flip, and the only reason the switch remains unflipped is that it costs money to pay for the disk space and extra bandwidth required. If so, such an upgrade would likely benefit from a few bucks thrown in the right direction.

[HenryA]

Not sure this is practical if you have great big full size modern phone pictures or even worse, DSLR photos. Those are a lot of pixels to move. There is free software that does basic photo-editing. Make a folder on your computer and keep all your pics there. Resize as needed. You will be in charge of how it looks and where it lives. Very little effort needed.