Announcement - Site Development Underway

There is a bit of furniture removal happening at the moment so please feel free to join in if you feel like it. We are compressing a few forums, moving stuff from one place to another, deleting things, joining forums together and looking for suggestions. If you feel the earth move under your feet, here is what has happened this morning -

for those of you i.e. me, who use the Machine Nation forum - the science/engineering stuff - the 6 forums that were there have been compressed down into 4 with Energy, Transport and Infrastructure as the new forum instead of all three separate forums.

Later on we will take The Laughter Lounge from the Vibes and Scribes forum and put it in Welcome which someone suggested might be called "Welcome and Social" ? The Welcome forum as it is might be rejigged a little and The Betting Office moved to Places ... The Betting Office is our futile attempt at a sports forum but thanks to johnfas we might have at least two threads to go in there - the Olympics one and the Fantasy Football one which I'd recommend having a go at even if you are a football illiterate like me and keep asking "Why don't the english just handle the ball like us ffs ??" and you haven't a clue which is bigger, the League of Ireland, Scotland, England or Wales and couldn't name more than three players from any sport let alone football ... Have a go - you might be asked to give €10 to charity at the end of the year (please someone tell me it's end of year and not every Saturday )

Also Edo asked for a Travel forum cos he's off on holidays to the far abroad and would like to keep in touch. This is a good idea and we'll see where we could fit it along with the moving around of other forums so that the whole thing is as intuitive as possible. We think the Politics forum and the Machine Nation forum are pretty complete but the others are resting on fault lines which are presently on the move.

Any comments on this will be most welcome.

I'm putting a few buttons under the newspapers so please hold onto your hats. Looks ok to me so far - please let me know if your browser is showing odd stuff. I'm using Firefox 3.0 with my screen resolution at 1280 x 1024.

The Examiner button is giving me the eco links.

There's no site development going on rather the 'drafts' function has been switched on. This only applies if you use the Post Reply button, it doesn't appear in the small quick reply box.

Try it. It means you can write a draft which will be saved in your account here and will be accessible later from the profile button. To write a draft you will have the option of a new button alongside 'Preview' and 'Send' called 'Draft'.

It might help those of you who are having problems with losing long posts. I've never been logged out automatically by the site btw - has anyone else experienced this? I know this happens on boards very quickly, on the Property Pin after several hours and on p.ie after a few days.

This might also help people who get automatically logged-out:

http://help.forumotion.com/administration-panel-problems-f44/can-anyone-help-me-its-about-automatic-logout-t22749.htm?highlight=logout

It's a thread about getting automatically logged out, strangely. It's not possible to set the time after which a person gets logged out on this forum but they offer cookie advice up there if you're interested. It concerns your browser and how it is switched on for site cookies.

It might be quite useful, but will it work if it thinks you've logged out. It's ranked with the other two buttons who are quite fussy in that regard.

I have to say, I tried it and had a little trouble getting my post back. It just takes a little practice I suppose.

905 wrote:

It might be quite useful, but will it work if it thinks you've logged out. It's ranked with the other two buttons who are quite fussy in that regard.

I have to say, I tried it and had a little trouble getting my post back. It just takes a little practice I suppose.

The thread above might be helpful which says this:

Quote :

Hello. You guys know how i can change the time a user have to be inactive before he/she automatic logs out?
Thank you!

Quote :

To my knowledge you can't, but you can check the box "Log me on automatically at each visit" when logging in. Now you should stay logged in when refreshing the site, even if your current session ends and you became inactive. This requires cookies though and that your browser allows this for your site - check the browser options.

Quote :

Thanks.
so where you find "Log me on automatically at each visit"? under what tab?

Quote :

You can find this when loggin in - below the username / password forms. Wink

I've Firefox and I've done all sorts of weird acrobatics with it. I edited a post badly recently then went back 7 or 8 screens to find the version I had before I edited it and found it there and stuff like that. I wonder can you try the above - it might help you.

Have you still got Windows 95 or something?

Anyone ever experienced this? Happens to me periodically.

Yeh. Every so often. It's machine and browser independant too.Just some quirk in forumotion I think.

EvotingMachine0197 wrote:

Yeh. Every so often. It's machine and browser independant too.Just some quirk in forumotion I think.

It used to happen me a lot more but hasn't been doing so recently. I don't recall it ever happening to me on IE but then I don't use it that much - Microsoft turns me into the German kid

Next time it happens I'll grap the page source and compare it with a properly refreshed page.

EvotingMachine0197 wrote:

Next time it happens I'll grap the page source and compare it with a properly refreshed page.

I doubt there'll be a difference - the most likely thing is something incompletely loaded, probably the CSS.

ibis wrote:

EvotingMachine0197 wrote:

Next time it happens I'll grap the page source and compare it with a properly refreshed page.

I doubt there'll be a difference - the most likely thing is something incompletely loaded, probably the CSS.

I agree on the difference. But why would something not load ? The browser has to load the .CSS file to get the various style and formatting parameters ? Would we not expect a browser error report ?

johnfás wrote:

Anyone ever experienced this? Happens to me periodically.

Níl, buíochas le Dia.

I've gotten it at least once the last few times I've been here, johfás - you are not alone.

Kate P wrote:

I've gotten it at least once the last few times I've been here, johfás - you are not alone.

You were using firefox and Ard-Taoiseach wasn't I'll guess.

No. IE most of the time...

Auditor #9 wrote:

Kate P wrote:

I've gotten it at least once the last few times I've been here, johfás - you are not alone.

You were using firefox and Ard-Taoiseach wasn't I'll guess.

I use IE 7 and have no problems with it. I don't see what all the vilifying is all about, IE is a perfectly good and sound system with which to surf the net and Firefox isn't much different, I tried it for a few weeks and couldn't see what all the fuss was about. From what I read here on the site, Firefox seems to cause all sorts of troubles since many of the technical troubles occur while using Firefox.

Ard-Taoiseach wrote:

Auditor #9 wrote:

Kate P wrote:

I've gotten it at least once the last few times I've been here, johfás - you are not alone.

You were using firefox and Ard-Taoiseach wasn't I'll guess.

I use IE 7 and have no problems with it. I don't see what all the vilifying is all about, IE is a perfectly good and sound system with which to surf the net and Firefox isn't much different, I tried it for a few weeks and couldn't see what all the fuss was about. From what I read here on the site, Firefox seems to cause all sorts of troubles since many of the technical troubles occur while using Firefox.

Fair points - whatever fries your rasher I suppose. I don't know IE enough now to compare but while using it today all the little icons disappeared and I had no idea how to get the refresh button back on up there so I nearly freaked and wanted to throw my Bill Gates Autobiography Collection through the windows. Luckily I calmed down enough to realise that I had firefox also installed. And then Media Player started being too smart ...

I like the firefox tabs which I find easier than the IE ones. I also like the manner in which I can have shortcuts to my favourite sites across the toolbar and get rid of the words leaving only the icons - mmmmm...

I would show you but perhaps demonstrating one's favourites is a step too far.

Auditor #9 wrote:

Ard-Taoiseach wrote:

Auditor #9 wrote:

Kate P wrote:

I've gotten it at least once the last few times I've been here, johfás - you are not alone.

You were using firefox and Ard-Taoiseach wasn't I'll guess.

I use IE 7 and have no problems with it. I don't see what all the vilifying is all about, IE is a perfectly good and sound system with which to surf the net and Firefox isn't much different, I tried it for a few weeks and couldn't see what all the fuss was about. From what I read here on the site, Firefox seems to cause all sorts of troubles since many of the technical troubles occur while using Firefox.

Fair points - whatever fries your rasher I suppose. I don't know IE enough now to compare but while using it today all the little icons disappeared and I had no idea how to get the refresh button back on up there so I nearly freaked and wanted to throw my Bill Gates Autobiography Collection through the windows. Luckily I calmed down enough to realise that I had firefox also installed. And then Media Player started being too smart ...

Well, I'm not saying IE is perfect, but I find it's grand for looking up stuff on the web, accessing Machine Nation, checking the ISEQ and going on the CSO site and so on. I don't see the percentage in hanging around for ages waiting for Firefox to load and install though I might install Chrome with which to play around.

If the scrolling text of rocky's post is crippling your processor/memory please let me know and I'll either switch it off or shorten it. The link to the post will be left above it.

It's quite unreadable therefore largely redundant. But my PC does not seem to mind.

EvotingMachine0197 wrote:

It's quite unreadable therefore largely redundant. But my PC does not seem to mind.

Here's a trainspotting question: any idea off the top of your head of the hex colour value of the menubar buttons you made? The scrolling one is bgcolor="#000080" which i'd like to change to match the menu bar buttons.

If you know this value off the top of your head ...

Could rocky's little ticker tape display be lengthened - it would be more readable then ?