Suggestions for Improving This User Forum

[John Donovan]

This user forum supports both our *free* CalcZAF distribution and our "flagship" Probe for EPMA and Probe Image products.

Please post any suggestions you have for improving this user forum here!

[John Donovan]

We have heard from a number of you that the topic specific tutorials posted on this forum are very helpful. A few examples of these software tutorials, posted by myself, Karsten Goemann and Julien Allaz, are listed here:

http://smf.probesoftware.com/index.php?topic=81.msg292#msg292
http://smf.probesoftware.com/index.php?topic=151.msg632#msg632
http://smf.probesoftware.com/index.php?topic=106.0
http://smf.probesoftware.com/index.php?topic=86.0
http://smf.probesoftware.com/index.php?topic=186.msg803#msg803

That brings me to my question: is there a specific EPMA method, procedure or technique that you would like to see posted to the forum as a software tutorial?

[John Donovan]

Today (July 3rd, 2014) I converted the forum database to UTF-8 (ISO-1859-1) to avoid problems when people post with non-ASCII characters, e.g., "smart quotes" from Word.

Hopefully this change did not affect any existing posts, but if you see anything amiss please let me know right away!

[John Donovan]

I thought of something to improve the forum.  It's a small thing, but the default SMF software setting is to have the link associated with the logo image at the top of the main forum page, set to itself. That is to link back to the forum itself.  That is, when someone clicks on the forum logo as seen here:



it just sets itself to the current main forum page.  But it would probably be more useful to set the logo link to something else, such as our main company page.  And after some research and some trepidation, I actually edited the forum theme php script and voila, it works.

Try it out by clicking the logo at the top left on this forum page.

[John Donovan]

We need some help from our forum members.   

Some time ago we transitioned from an http:// (insecure) site, to an https:// (secure) site. Apparently for a period sometime before this transition, the Gallery feature in the forum produced embedded image links that included the http:// port number ":80" string. This string produced some broken links when the site was eventually transitioned to https:// as seen here:



To fix these broken image links one needs to edit the image link text as seen in the following embedded image link:

Code Select Expand

[img width=512 height=94]http://probesoftware.com:80/smf/gallery/1_08_03_18_5_00_10.png[/img]

and delete the ":80" string as seen in this properly edited image link:

Code Select Expand

[img width=512 height=94]http://smf.probesoftware.com/gallery/1_08_03_18_5_00_10.png[/img]

This editing fixes the embedded image links so the inserted image so it will now be visible again in the forum post.  So why do we need your help?  Well there are a lot of image links in the forum and most of them are fine, but if you come across a post that contains a broken embedded image link, please contact me by personal message (using the forum messaging system) and send me the link of the offending post so I can fix it.  Of course if the post is one of your own, please feel free to edit the image link yourself!

Thanks to everyone and hope you are all well.

[John Donovan]

We need some help from our forum members.   

Some time ago we transitioned from an http:// (insecure) site, to an https:// (secure) site. Apparently for a period sometime before this transition, the Gallery feature in the forum produced embedded image links that included the http:// port number ":80" string. This string produced some broken links when the site was eventually transitioned to https:// as seen here:



To fix these broken image links one needs to edit the image link text as seen in the following embedded image link:

Code Select Expand

[img width=512 height=94]http://probesoftware.com:80/smf/gallery/1_08_03_18_5_00_10.png[/img]

and delete the ":80" string as seen in this properly edited image link:

Code Select Expand

[img width=512 height=94]http://smf.probesoftware.com/gallery/1_08_03_18_5_00_10.png[/img]

This editing fixes the embedded image links so the inserted image so it will now be visible again in the forum post.  So why do we need your help?  Well there are a lot of image links in the forum and most of them are fine, but if you come across a post that contains a broken embedded image link, please contact me by personal message (using the forum messaging system) and send me the link of the offending post so I can fix it.  Of course if the post is one of your own, please feel free to edit the image link yourself!

Thanks to everyone and hope you are all well.

Whew!

OK, I think I found and fixed all the broken ":80" (http://) image links in all the posts on the forum.  Just a few thousand! Anyway, if you do see any posts that seem to contain any broken image links just let me know.

Ben Buse has some stale Dropbox links that he is fixing now, but other than that I think we're in pretty good shape on the "broken image links" front.

[John Donovan]

Benjamin Wade just confirmed that he's fixed all his TinyPic broken image links.

Thank-you Ben!

For those wondering what this is all about, you should be aware that the best way to link to in-line images in your posts is to utilize the "Gallery" feature in this user forum.

https://smf.probesoftware.com/index.php?topic=2.msg4040#msg4040

That way you'll never lose your images because someone, somewhere decided to delete them all!   
john

[John Donovan]

Here's an odd request.

Recently since moving our forum to a new host we've been getting a lot of spam requests for membership.  We've installed the "Stop Forum Spam" modification and requiring reCAPTCHA verification but still we are getting lots of bogus membership requests.

One of the SMF forum support people suggested we use "Verification Questions" feature to prevent non specialists from requesting membership.  They suggest "You should choose questions which relate to the subject of your forum. Genuine users will be able to answer these questions, while spam bots will not."

So we're looking for suggestions for questions that only users of our forum should be able to answer. Don't post the answers obviously, but can any one suggest some good verification questions for this purpose?