Forum Improvements

This is a test to see what happens when you copy and paste from Word.

EDIT - And that was pasted in using the Text tab, not Visual.

a couple of experiments

This is a 'text' tab use of b-quote without making any spacing adjustments.

a couple of experiments

And same again, but taking surplus space out. I don't know what this proves, actually. Nothing, probably!

EDIT - Ah, okay - taking out what appears to be surplus space is a waste of time!

Its a nice idea to use Word so your writing is autosaved, Andy.  I'll keep on an eye on how you deal with the format copying.

Mike, any chance of tweaking more to speed up page loads and ridding the internal server errors which I am getting frequently.  I'll be honest, its trying my patience 🙁

If I copy paste from somewhere, I paste in the 'text' version (not visual) to loose the formating.

Hope this helps!

Ah apologies Andy, I'd not caught up on all your experiments, I only noticed after that you'd already used the text tab for pasting! My bad for repeating!

OK, word of warning... some odd things might happen to the site over the next couple of hours... I'm about to attempt something radical... if it works, you won't notice much... if it doesn't, you'll see the white screen of death 😉

if it works, you won’t notice much… if it doesn’t, you’ll see the white screen of death

We'll listen out for the scream...

We’ll listen out for the scream…

The site still appears to be up, so what I've done doesn't seem to have broken anything. Whether it improves performance or not, I don't know yet. Let me know if you see any improvements.

Thanks Mike

Unfortunately, no difference from what I am experiencing right now.  I have had one page load that went over 30 seconds before I refreshed the page for it to load again.  When they do load successfully, they do so in 4-5 seconds which in internet terms is slow.

I have noticed one other thing on the forum homepage.  The "freshness" column is not quite reflecting the time of the recent posts.  For instance, the Observing and Imaging group is showing 1 day and 16 hours since last post but actually it was just 5 hours ago, same for the Welcome section.

I've had to temporarily disable the "freshness" column on the forum home page, as there appears to be a conflict with the new version of Wordpress. The "freshness" stats within the individual forums are still OK, so these remain.

As regards performance issues, there has been an improvement according to various website speed tests, but it's not as fast as I'd like it to be. I'll keep looking at ways to improve this.

Thanks Mike.

Can you get the freshness column back on the homepage though (once its fixed) because its highly useful to know if any new posts are made.

I really enjoyed the talk. A big well done to whoever booked him.  Tej my understanding of the first graph is that the closer to the saddle point you get the higher the sigma ie certainty is. Oops wrong thread.

Hi Mike - I don't know how others would feel about this but I was wondering if we could change the option of being notified via email from opt-in to opt-out (i.e. we are by default notified by email unless we untick). I often forget to tick (and I do not subscribe to all the subs).

Can you get the freshness column back on the homepage though (once its fixed) because its highly useful to know if any new posts are made.

Not yet, I can't. There is a conflict with the latest Wordpress release, so I'll have to await a fix. In the meantime, I'd suggest you use the "recent topics" link if you want to see whats been posted recently.

I was wondering if we could change the option of being notified via email from opt-in to opt-out

On my set-up, the default is 'off' - I have to check the "notify me of follow-up replies..." manually. Is this checkbox defaulted to 'on' for you (on a topic to which you haven't previously posted). If you had set the topic to notify on a previous post on the thread, then it will default to 'on'.