The New Forum Software!

[liga]

Aaargh ... I miss almost 2 days of forum ... I was thinking it was out ... the problem is that the new forum use an 81 port and it was closed by a firewall! ... now I'm back again

Liga

[rabelais]

Thanks for restoring the "newest first" functionality... seems like the upgrade is indeed going to be a HUGE improvment!

Rabe the Relieved

[Fyron]

Yes, the font is now 2mm high :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( An no wonder, look at this EVIL stylesheet:
Code:

---

BODY,P,TABLE,TD,TR {   

  font-size: 11px;

  font-family: sans-serif, arial, verdana;

  color: 000000;

}

---

Ouch! Never, ever, under any condition, specify font sizes in px. It is the only totally surefire way of making the pages unreadable for somebody. Could you please kill that line? Or replace it with font-size: small; or something like that.

Thank you.

Actually, specifying font sizes in px is the best way to do it, because it guarantees that the fonts will be the same size in all browsers accross all platforms. pt is a very arbitrary measurement that varies from OS to OS and even browser to browser. You can still increase the text size in the View menu, however.

Alternatively, could we use some of the other stylesheets in the directory (threads//stylesheets)? I notice you can set this from the preferences, only the choice is non-existent. I don't care if something breaks

Richard has stated that there is a possibility he will use this new forum capability to allow a range of font sizes to be selected from. He just has to make some extra style sheets.

[Smauler]

I really appreciate what's been done with the forums. Previously, they were not intuitive to use. Personally, I'd suggest fonts being bigger. Too big may look a little silly on small screens, but too small is illegible on large. I run 1280*1024 and the fonts are very small, and I'm not old and blind either.

Also, I am a relatively experienced programmer with php, especially in bulletin board / forum conditions. I would be happy to help, ben@isbd.biz is me.

[Esben Mose Hansen]

Actually, specifying font sizes in px is the best way to do it, because it guarantees that the fonts will be the same size in all browsers across all platforms. pt is a very arbitrary measurement that varies from OS to OS and even browser to browser. You can still increase the text size in the View menu, however.

Oh man, that is so wrong, as pixel-size is different from screen to screen(!). The font is unreadable for me; as I said about 2mm high. I've studied HTML rendering to some depth, even contributed to Mozilla in a small way, so I do now a little.

Let me summarize each font-sizing specification method, and the individual pro/cons.

• px. The font is chosen to be as close to the specified height in pixels as possible. Most browsers forces a minimum size on fonts, though, so it is no guarantee. The advantage is that you can mix images and fonts in a (semi)-predictable way; the disadvantage is that the font will be unreadable for some people and/or too large for other people.
• pt, mm, in, etc. In theory the font is chosen some the font height is the length specified. However, at the very least this requires the DPI-setting to be correct. This is usually true for linuxboxes, but in general this setting is wrong (usually 72DPI; for comparison mine is about 112.) From this is can be calculated that 11px~2.5mm for my monitor; and 3.9mm for a 72 DPI monitor. Even if these problems are ignored, this is almost never the best option, as it doesn't take into account such aspects as the user's eyesight, distance to the monitor, personal preference and so on.
• em, ex, xx% Relative to the parent (element's) font. Used right, this works well, but requires skilled stylesheet author to use correctly --- e.g. the main text should be exactly the size specified as normal from the browser's (or system's) settings. Another con is that the user has to configure his preferred size correctly.
• small, normal, +1, -1 etc Absolute sizes with reference point to the user's preferences. Usually the best option by far. The con is that the user has to configure his preferred size correctly, but the style sheet author only needs to know that the main text should be set with font-size: normal.

And yes, I can zoom in on the text, and do, but it is wildly annoying thing to do every time I visit the forums. Why not just do it correctly? It can't be that difficult to replace "font-size: 11px" with "font-size: normal". Or at least make a style-sheet which is not broken in this regard.

Sorry for being so brash. We all have sensitive spots; this is one of mine

[tinkthank]

Hm, anyone have any suggestions on how to search better under the new software? Please?
Also, can it be that the polls have been removed? I can't find mine -- but then again, I think the search function isn't working as it should. Any help or suggestions appreciated, thanks!

Is there a way to see Private Messages that I've written? The old board presented PM conversations as threads, so it was easy to review what I'd written and which part of my replies were being responded to. Now I can see a long list of received PMs, and the ones I've replied to are marked as such, but I can't see a way to review the actual replies.

There is a heading for a list of PMs I've sent, but that list is empty.

What am I missing?

Mark

[Mindi]

I believe when you PM you have to click the option at the bottom of the page that says "I want to keep a copy of my message".

[Sheap]

The new forum seems to be prone to brief, temporary outages. I've had it happen a couple of times today, where the web page is generated with a message saying it cannot connect to the MySQL server. Sorry for not having the exact message available, but of course I cannot post to the forum when the problem is occuring

[Esben Mose Hansen]

The first part of error message is here, but I would guess that the server logs shows them clearly:
Code:

---

Warning: mysql_connect(): Can't connect to MySQL server on 'localhost' (10055) in C:\apache2\Apache2\htdocs\threads\mysql.inc.php on line 35

 SQL ERROR: Wed, Aug 11 2004 13:11:47 -0500 Database error only visible to forum administrators

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Well, it's Windows, what did you expect?