All,
Welcome to the new Probe Software forum. We hope this forum will be a useful place to share information and ideas.
john
Edit: Important note: you must be logged in as a user to the forum in order to see any attachments to forum postings!
That is to say, if you are not logged in as a user, you will be able to see the small in line images, but not the full attachments at the end of the postings.
Great idea, John!
Thanks Ben! I hope this becomes a useful resource for everyone!
john
If any of you experienced an inability to access the Probe Software forum last night, it was because Network Solutions was under a denial of service attack!
Note that we are beginning to connect our software to this forum. Check out the new Help buttons in Standard.exe under the Analytical | PENEPMA (Monte Carlo) Calculations and PENEPMA (Secondary Fluorescence) Calculations menus as shown here:
(https://smf.probesoftware.com/oldpics/i43.tinypic.com/23uonmf.jpg)
Hey John,
I wanted to set up a new user on the microprobe so any of my users could have access to all this information. I thought something like "UNM Probe" as the user name so anybody in the lab could have access to the forum without me having to be logged in. However, since the email contact would be my email, the registration wouldn't allow me to set up a new user with a duplicate email. So, is there any way to set up a general account for all my users?
Thanks
Hi Mike,
Yes, every lab should create a user forum "lab membership" for their students and save the password in the browser when it asks, so the students will get automatically logged into the forum whenever they click on one of the new purple Help buttons.
However, as you discovered the forum requires a separate email, so the easiest thing to do is just create a gmail account for your lab if you don't have one already. We have a uoregon.edu account for our lab for general lab communication but not all universities will allow "general" email accounts, so I suggest gmail.
New boards for sample preparation and lab management created.
1104 Posts in 221 Topics by 136 Members... :)
(https://smf.probesoftware.com/oldpics/i60.tinypic.com/25it57d.jpg)
A "milestone" as they say!
EPMA Users,
Probe Software is pleased to announce the one year anniversary of our user forum!
Our site stats look excellent with much growth during this last year. Currently we have 1474 Posts in 272 Topics by 151 Members! Not bad for the first year! More details are seen here:
http://smf.probesoftware.com/index.php?action=stats
In the latest forum news is a recent post by "JohnF" on the famous (or infamous) Kakanui hornblende in which he posts a high resolution BSE image from Henny Cathey's JEOL 8530 lab showing the many inclusions and defects in the specimen:
http://smf.probesoftware.com/index.php?topic=216.msg1499#msg1499
Also see "Probeman" on a new method to automatically extract-ratios from Penepma batch mode runs and output them to a tab delimited text file suitable for import into Excel or any plotting program such as Grapher. See details here:
http://smf.probesoftware.com/index.php?topic=202.msg1506#msg1506
In addition "John Donovan" reports that many new "interactive Help" buttons have been added to the software which allows the user to automatically connect from the software to the appropriate topic or post on the user forum as shown here:
http://smf.probesoftware.com/index.php?topic=40.msg1489#msg1489
Finally, if you are going to the IUMAS meeting in Hartford starting Saturday August 2nd, Probe Software is pleased to announce our support for the Advanced EPMA workshop chaired by Paul Carpenter and Silvia Richter on Saturday morning.
Please come and check out the latest news and information in our forum and we are looking forward to seeing all of you at M&M!
Regards,
The Probe Software Users Forum Team.
http://smf.probesoftware.com/index.php
Is there a central repository for all the available manuals?
Quote from: Mike Matthews on April 16, 2015, 07:25:27 AM
Is there a central repository for all the available manuals?
Hi Mike,
Good point!
There is now:
http://smf.probesoftware.com/index.php?topic=473.0
Most of you would probably not be surprised to learn, that as a scientist and developer of a large scientific software project, utilized by many laboratories around the world, John receives a fairly large number of emails every day requesting support, suggesting development ideas, or to discuss EPMA in general. Whilst it has always been his desire to provide everyone with the support and discussion they need to accomplish the varied and complex tasks that their work/research requires, a personal response to every email has become somewhat untenable. So, if he has ever responded to an email from anyone, with a brief: "good question: please post to the forum here", please try to empathize and understand his motives as outlined below. For starters, here are our latest user forum statistics (you'll need to log in to see these):
http://smf.probesoftware.com/index.php?action=stats
An Internet forum, specifically the Probe Software user forum, can have many uses and benefits. Broadly it is a place for the community to exchange and share scientific and technical ideas of general interest to the field of EPMA. Resources and information can be shared. Questions and their answers can be available for all to benefit from. It is a place for open, casual and thoughtful scientific and technical discussions about EPMA.
The forum is a great place for planning the development of new compositional standards (note that the RbTiOPO4 standard is now available for general distribution), helping each other with hardware problems (both JEOL and Cameca), sharing interesting anecdotes, remarkable results or confounding problems and soliciting suggestions. It's a place where students and new users can learn from their more experienced peers. EPMA events, job openings, resumes and other announcements can also be posted. For example, here are recent job listings:
http://smf.probesoftware.com/index.php?topic=3.msg2827#msg2827
and here are new standards available for distribution:
http://smf.probesoftware.com/index.php?topic=301.msg2872#msg2872
Additionally, the Probe Software user forum is a place where questions regarding our Probe for EPMA, Probe Image and CalcImage software (including our free EPMA utilities CalcZAF and Standard), can be asked and answered, so that all benefit from the questions and answers. Because the forum keeps a complete thread of the topics with pictures, attachments and links for future reference, the more questions and answers that are posted on the user forum, the more that information will be available to the forum's search capabilities. This helps our technical support specialists and myself improve our responses, provide more examples and further explain things, instead of just repeating ourselves, and this method delivers the information more readily available to our other users. Time spent on the forum then becomes a part of not only Probe Software's technical support and but also in building scientific understanding and community.
Other Probe Software user forum uses include bug reports and bug fix notifications, new feature announcements, new feature requests, sharing features and ideas that folks are finding helpful and the posting of software tutorials. These step by step tutorials are created, by Dr. Karsten Goemann and available only on the user forum, to highlight particular functions and features in the software, in somewhat more depth, for new and experienced users alike. The forum is also a place where those interested in what Probe Software has to offer, can easily find out for themselves. See the PFE "wish list" topic here:
http://smf.probesoftware.com/index.php?topic=71.0
Please let us know how you feel about the Probe Software user forum. We most certainly welcome any suggestions on how we can make the Probe Software user forum even better. Take care and thank-you all for your time and support!
Regards,
The Probe Software Users Forum Team.
http://smf.probesoftware.com/index.php
Wow, over 3000 posts as of today! And only about half are mine! ;)
(https://smf.probesoftware.com/oldpics/i62.tinypic.com/qzj0uv.jpg)
I am very pleased to announce the new Probe Software User Forum Image Gallery feature as seen here:
(https://smf.probesoftware.com/gallery/1_09_02_16_9_37_54.png)
Please login and try it out for yourselves. Please try and keep your image categories organized!
Once the image is uploaded to the gallery, simply browse to the last page of your picture gallery and click the image you want to insert, select and copy the BB Code link at the bottom of the image page using <ctrl> c, and paste that link using <ctrl> v, into your post at the appropriate location in the text.
Some of you may have noticed a "hiccup" in the image hosting of the image links, but that is now fixed. We had a "glitch" getting the old TinyPic image links transferred to the Probe Software SMF site. All is working now.
Sorry and thanks for your patience. Remember to use the built in image gallery on Probe Software so you don't have to endure those TinyPic ads and popups:
http://smf.probesoftware.com/index.php?topic=2.msg4040#msg4040
Sorry about that!
As some of you may have noticed, the Probe Software forum has been off-line for about 4 days. It was a database connection issue after updating the forum software.
However, I note that we are not "out of the woods yet" as the Gallery link does not appear. I will get our tech guy to work on that.
john
OK, it looks like we got the image Gallery link back again!
I'll see how this works for a day or so and if it looks good I may try to update to 2.0.14 of SMF tomorrow or the next day.
Thanks for your patience but I am simply not a PHP server expert!
Brian Gaynor was able to update the user forum software to the latest version, so it looks like we are good to go.
Thank-you Brian!
john
Hi John,
Gallery seems to have gone,
Thanks
Ben
Quote from: Ben Buse on September 06, 2017, 05:15:20 AM
Hi John,
Gallery seems to have gone,
Thanks
Ben
Yeah, I see. Brian is fixing that. Thanks.
john
OK, it looks like uninstalling and re-installing the Gallery software brought it back.
Images still seem to be there. :)
john
We just wanted to thank all the members of the Probe Software forum for making this site an active and interesting place for EPMA and SEM science.
It is through your membership and participation that we can have an informative and collegial place for these many ongoing discussions. Thank-you again!
The Probe Software User Forum Team
We're converting the forum (and the probe software web pages) to secure https, so if you had problems viewing the forum or logging in today, that is why.
It seems to be mostly working now however, but you might need to re-set your password if it is not 8 characters or more. If your login attempt fails a number of times it will allow you to enter your user name or email address and re-set your password.
Sorry for any difficulties you may be experiencing during this conversion process to secure web pages.
I think there might be a problem with the link from the front page - I had to manually alter the address.
Quote from: JonF on August 10, 2018, 03:46:01 AM
I think there might be a problem with the link from the front page - I had to manually alter the address.
Hi Jon,
Thanks. Which link on what front page?
john
The User Forum link from the front page of probesoftware.com. I assume index.html
Quote from: JonF on August 10, 2018, 10:24:21 AM
The User Forum link from the front page of probesoftware.com. I assume index.html
Huh. Works for me. Try refreshing the page from your browser.
john
So Owen Neill pointed out that many of the old links in the forum posts that linked to another post in the forum don't work and one gets a 404 Page Not Found error in the browser. It's weird, because the https:// conversion process was supposed to handle all of this stuff by automatically redirecting http:// links to https:// links.
The image links work fine and links to the web pages are redirected fine, but the pasted links in posts to other posts in the forum do not. So for example, if you see a post that has a link like this:
http://smf.probesoftware.com/index.php?topic=239.msg2763#msg2763
and you click on it, you get a 404 Page Not Found error. But if you edit the link to this:
https://smf.probesoftware.com/index.php?topic=239.msg2763#msg2763
it now works again. I trying to find out if I can do a global search and replace for this in the forum, but if you see a bad link in one of your old posts, please feel free to edit it by changing the http:// to https://.
In the mean time I am editing some of the more popular posts by hand.
It appears that the .htaccess file needs to be modified. So much for a "seamless" conversion to secure pages! Looks like that won't happen until next week some time. But feel free to post as new posts are automatically referenced properly using the https:// secure links. It's just some old links that reference other posts within the forum that aren't converting automatically.
I've also noticed that some of the in line images (particularly the old images from TinyPic that are now locally hosted) don't show up until one clicks the refresh button on ones browser. Not sure if this is related to the https conversion, but probably.
Also, just in case anyone else has the same issue, in modifying some access files I discovered that I could no longer load the forum pages, and then found that I had to "clear the cookies" by doing a <ctrl> <shift> <del> to clear the cookies, which fixed that problem.
So much excitement for a Friday!
Ok, it appears that our web host has fixed the http to https link automatic re-direct for the links posted in the forum.
So if you see any http links that don't automatically re-direct to https please let me know.
Thank-you for your patience.
Will the Probe Software user forum hit 1 million page views (per year) by the end of this year?
(https://smf.probesoftware.com/gallery/1_15_09_18_1_03_19.jpeg)
Could be...
OK. We hit over 1 million page views per year of the Probe Software User Forum around September 22nd this year:
(https://smf.probesoftware.com/gallery/1_22_09_18_11_25_51.png)
That's a record number of page views per year since we started the forum in 2013.
To see these (and other) forum stats simply login to the forum and click on the [More Stats] link at the bottom of the main forum page.
Thank-you to all members for your support and interest in EPMA and micro-analysis.
Wow, almost 1.5 million unique page views of the user forum in 2018!
(https://smf.probesoftware.com/gallery/1_19_01_19_12_03_45.jpeg)
See the [More Stats] link at the bottom of the main user forum page for more forum statistics (you need to be logged in as a member to see the link).
john
Over 1.7 million page views of our EPMA user forum in 2020:
(https://smf.probesoftware.com/gallery/1_27_01_21_1_43_31.jpeg)
Hope you all are well and staying safe.
Our forum is getting inundated by a slew of spammers these last few days, so if your membership registration is seemingly ignored, please contact me directly by email and let me know what email address you are trying to register under and I'll try and keep an eye out for it.
Thank-you for your patience.
Last year we had about 1.5 million page views on our EPMA user forum. Not bad...
(https://smf.probesoftware.com/gallery/1_01_01_22_12_36_44.jpeg)
Thanks to everyone for your support and Happy New Year to all!
The next post will be the 10,000th post of the EPMA user forum!
In the spirit of old-time Slashdot, "10,000th Post!"
(I realize I'm probably too late...)
Quote from: NicholasRitchie on April 08, 2022, 11:08:23 AM
In the spirit of old-time Slashdot, "10,000th Post!"
(I realize I'm probably too late...)
Too late for what? You were indeed the 10,000th post!
(https://smf.probesoftware.com/gallery/395_08_04_22_11_49_32.png)
Remember, you must be a member and logged into the EPMA user forum to see some "hidden" boards, attachments and other forum information. For example this new job posting by Ben Buse under the Laboratory Management board:
https://smf.probesoftware.com/index.php?topic=3.msg12843#msg12843
OK, it appears that the new forum hosting is all working:
https://smf.probesoftware.com
We also upgraded to SMF v. 2.1.4 so you will notice the "theme" is somewhat different now.
(https://smf.probesoftware.com/gallery/1_14_10_24_1_51_29.png)
Please let us know if you see any missing images or links.
The EPMA user forum login or signup is in a slightly different location:
(https://smf.probesoftware.com/gallery/1_10_10_24_3_39_40.png)
I did some poking around on the Internet and found this list of new features when upgrading SMF from 2.0 to 2.1:
https://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/SMF2.1:Features
It's apparently not a complete list, but it does look like some significant changes.
Once a year (or so) I post the updated page views per year plot:
(https://smf.probesoftware.com/gallery/1_05_03_25_1_44_25.png)
Note sure if the uptick last year is from humans or bots...