Earthwaves Earth Sciences Forum

Forum Structure Comments

1. Once again regarding the displayed board time,

The time is listed at the top right of each page. And I believe that this is the time as measured at 0 longitude, Greenwich, or UTC, or Zulu Time.

However, it says AM or PM. And that could be confusing to people who don’t know that it is being measured at 0 longitude.

There is probably a way to change the AM and PM settings so that UTC is displayed instead. Then people would always know what that time means.

2. Proposed Combined Forum Web Page

In notes posted to the previous EarthWaves board I stated that this new board format might be less attractive to many visitors than the old one as people need to jump around from forum to forum to see what is being discussed. And the relatively low number of visits to the board so far might support that argument.

The program that runs this bulletin board is probably sophisticated enough that there should be a way to create a new forum page that lists all of the posts to each of the other forums in chronological order of posting.

Specific forums such as the Administrator one might be excluded from that page.

There could also be an option with each of the forums Web pages that lets people specify that the note that they are posting should not be listed on that combined forum Web page in addition to the specific forum to which they are posting their note.

That way, people such as myself who want to see what everyone is posting could visit a single forum page and easily scroll down to see what had been posted in all recent notes.

My own download hookup is only a moderate speed. And when I move from forum to forum it takes a while for the page to display. Site visitors who have very slow dial-up type Internet links likely have a real problem with the time it takes to move from one forum page to another.

If this combined forum page is possible then you might ask current posters if they would like to have it added to the board. I expect that most people would probably agree, especially since they would still have the option of not having their notes listed on that combined forum page.

3. Finally, I recommend that you check on the following.

It appears that to log on to his or her account, a person’s Internet browser needs to allow “Cookies.” Mine usually does not. And several recent login attempts failed. However, when I reset my browser to accept Cookies the next login attempt was successful.

It that observation is correct and that forum Cookie policy is not absolutely necessary for logins then I recommend that it be removed. The less invasive Web site computer programs are such as forums, the fewer security problems people are likely to encounter over time.

(01-17-2014, 09:14 AM)EQF Wrote: [ -> ]Forum Structure Comments

1. Once again regarding the displayed board time,

Already discussed...

http://www.earthwaves.org/forum/showthre...e=threaded.

The board show UTC when you are not logged in.

If you log in, you can set your own time zone through your profile settings, "User CP".

I have not yet found how to get it to show the time zone.

(01-17-2014, 09:14 AM)EQF Wrote: [ -> ]2. Proposed Combined Forum Web Page

In notes posted to the previous EarthWaves board I stated that this new board format might be less attractive to many visitors than the old one as people need to jump around from forum to forum to see what is being discussed. And the relatively low number of visits to the board so far might support that argument.

And how do you know what the stats were on the old forum before the switch?

Yes, the hits are lower, because the spam bots are still trying to hit the old board. On both boards I am routinely dealing with false registration attempts. There's a lot going on behind the scenes that no one else sees.

(01-17-2014, 09:14 AM)EQF Wrote: [ -> ]That way, people such as myself who want to see what everyone is posting could visit a single forum page and easily scroll down to see what had been posted in all recent notes.

Easily finding new posts was already discussed, before we even switched...

http://www.earthwaves.org/wwwboard/messages/101498.html

Once you log in, top left corner, "View New Posts".

(01-17-2014, 09:14 AM)EQF Wrote: [ -> ]3. Finally, I recommend that you check on the following.

It appears that to log on to his or her account, a person’s Internet browser needs to allow “Cookies.”

On the help page (which was also previously discussed), there is a section on the use of cookies by the forum software.

http://www.earthwaves.org/forum/misc.php?action=help

Cookies are not mandatory. For myself, I have them set to expire when I shut down the browser, so that means every day ALL messages are marked as new. However, once I log in, the board software knows what I have or have not read.

Oh, and in Firefox 22 at least, you can turn off cookies and yet still have exceptions to allow cookies based on a white list of websites that you are willing to accept cookies from. Check whatever browser you are using to see if it has similar capability.

Brian

GENERAL INFORMATION

Plans are being gradually formulated for solving some of our world problems including forecasting earthquakes. A fair amount of progress has been made lately.

Those plans presently involve various combinations of my personal Web sites, Newsgroups, the White House Petitions Web site, the GitHub Web site, the Wikipedia Web site, and others.

FORUM TOPICS

Let's give some other topics another try to two. And I will discuss any remaining ones, one at a time.

The time at the top right of each page could be confusing to people visiting the board who are not posting notes and who do not know that it is for 0 longitude.

So, if it could be listed specifically as a UTC time such as

Current time: 2014-01-23 12:34 UTC

then that would make things clearer.

Or, It could say,

Current time at 0 longitude: 2014-01-23 12:34 PM

Or,

Current time at Greenwich, England: 2014-01-23 12:34 PM

Or,

It could say anything else that would let people know exactly what time zone was involved.

I have already address the time zone issue... TWICE.

I will change it as soon as I figure out the PROPER way to do it.

But it's NOT a major priority at the moment. The world won't end if I don't fix it right away.

Brian

You have to be CLEAR with your comments.

That was, I believe, the first time you CLEARLY stated that you recognized that something might be done to improve the date feature.

Why would anyone ask you again if they knew that you were already aware of something like that? Plus, how many other posters are asking you about these types of things? I am certainly not taking up an excessive amount of your time (humor intended).

Anyway, as I have been telling Roger, I have several projects that need to get done immediately. An important one has a "next Tuesday" deadline. After that I can post more notes regarding possible ways to make additions to the site that might increase its usefulness to posters and visitors.

Some future projects will likely involve the use of the GitHub Web site resources. Most people are probably not aware of that site. As a programmer you yourself might be interested in the site. I am going to list it twice here to see if the html type link works.

http://github.com/

<A href="http://github.com/">http://github.com/</A>

(Apparently it doesn't work. Your page editor doesn't properly format html code. The old EarthWaves board did.)

(01-24-2014, 09:54 PM)EQF Wrote: [ -> ]You have to be CLEAR with your comments.

That was, I believe, the first time you CLEARLY stated that you recognized that something might be done to improve the date feature.

Perhaps you can use that lesson as well? You often write large tomes that don't seem to get to much of a point. Just sayin...

Quote:http://github.com/

<A href="http://github.com/">http://github.com/</A>

(Apparently it doesn't work. Your page editor doesn't properly format html code. The old EarthWaves board did.)

Don't use HTML. It's disabled (for security). Just type out the link. The board software is intelligent enough to automatically turn it into a link.

The software does use something called "MyCode" which is a simplified version of HTML. You can read all about in the help section.

http://www.earthwaves.org/forum/misc.php?action=help

Additionally, you see all those icons above the box you type in? There's one for inserting links, as well as many other features. If you move the mouse cursor over them, a pop up will appear telling you what it is.

Brian

Okay. Things are starting to get clearer.

As I said several times, this version of the board is sufficiently complex that people won’t understand it and likely won’t be attracted to it at first as much as the old board. For example, none of us that I know of could determine how to add links etc. And no one visiting a board wants to go through the trouble of reading through endless help files. Things work best when they are obvious when you simply look at them. I now see how links are added after you explained that.

There is probably an option with the board setup that lets you specify that all html links are automatically underlined when they are typed in. I couldn’t see that html links are active when I posted the original link. And I doubt if anyone else did or is even aware of that right now.

If possible you might want to activate that feature.


Regarding my lengthy posts,

That is deliberate and something that I have learned from many years of posting notes and sending advice to government officials around the world.

It is very difficult to explain things clearly using E-mail and board notes. There are multiple ways to interpret short notes. And some people do interpret them in the wrong manner and start heading in the completely wrong direction.

The only way to deal with that is to post lengthy, detailed notes. Then even if they are boring and no one wants to spend a lot of time actually reading them, they do contain enough technical information to be sufficiently clear. And the people who are actually interested in the subject matter then know exactly what is being said.

I myself work on disaster mitigation projects all the time. And it is my belief that people’s health and lives can often be at stake. So when I provide technical information to people that they might use to make important decisions that information needs to be clear and unambiguous.

Finally, who else is posting board structure notes (humor intended)? No one that I can see, not even Chris or Roger. So you can certainly afford to spend a few minutes extra every few days reading my postings though they might sometimes be a little lengthy.

Plans are to start widely circulating information regarding the following Web pages fairly soon. The addresses are duplicated here so that I can see how the html format works compared with the address by itself.

Department of Science and Technology

http://www.freewebs.com/eq-forecasting/DSAT.html

Science Organization

http://www.freewebs.com/eq-forecasting/S...ation.html

These are personal opinions.

Hyperlinks were already differentiated by use of a different color of text, but I agree it didn't contrast well.

They now contrast well, and are underlined.

That was actually an easy fix.

Still haven't found the darn template for the date/time.

You think the board itself is hard to use? Then you'll never want to install this software on your own because the back end has a couple orders of magnitude more complexity. (But I personally like that)

These kinds of edits are not a simple matter of clicking a switch box or editing an html file. Primarily because there are no html files to edit. Everything is controlled through the use of CSS templates, and there are thousands. And to confuse things further, templates nest within templates within more templates.... ad nauseum. So, I'm still a little lost in how things are structured.

Whenever you view a page in this forum, the html code that is sent to you is dynamically generated AT THAT MOMENT based on all the settings and templates and contents of the database. It may seem a convoluted way of doing things, but in the end it gives you maximum flexibility, once you figure it all out.

BTW, I'm aware of only one other forum that is similar in format to the old Earthwaves. All other forums I see are more like this one. (discounting usenet, of course, but who uses that anymore?)

Brian

(01-26-2014, 09:40 PM)Skywise Wrote: [ -> ]Hyperlinks were already differentiated by use of a different color of text, but I agree it didn't contrast well.

They now contrast well, and are underlined.

That was actually an easy fix.

Still haven't found the darn template for the date/time.

You think the board itself is hard to use? Then you'll never want to install this software on your own because the back end has a couple orders of magnitude more complexity. (But I personally like that)

These kinds of edits are not a simple matter of clicking a switch box or editing an html file. Primarily because there are no html files to edit. Everything is controlled through the use of CSS templates, and there are thousands. And to confuse things further, templates nest within templates within more templates.... ad nauseum. So, I'm still a little lost in how things are structured.

Whenever you view a page in this forum, the html code that is sent to you is dynamically generated AT THAT MOMENT based on all the settings and templates and contents of the database. It may seem a convoluted way of doing things, but in the end it gives you maximum flexibility, once you figure it all out.

BTW, I'm aware of only one other forum that is similar in format to the old Earthwaves. All other forums I see are more like this one. (discounting usenet, of course, but who uses that anymore?)

Brian

---

That other post resulted from my clicking the wrong button.

I can now see why moving from forum to forum takes a while on my computer. My download speed is medium rather than fast. And the main Web page contains much more information than the older board.

My attitude regarding the board program is that any protected bulletin board is better than no bulletin board at all.

So far I have not had time to consider what might be done to make it attractive for people that I talk with to discuss earthquake forecasting research on a public bulletin board. The one thing they will not tolerate is criticism. And a single response posting by Roger could drive them all away (humor intended).

I don’t really have time to monitor a bulletin board myself. But that might eventually happen. Or it is possible that this board will evolve to a point where other forecasters will start posting notes.

This comment will not make any difference. And I am not suggesting that the board should move back to the older software. But I do have to say that in a single day you could have learned enough Perl programming to modify the other board program any way you wished. It isn’t that difficult. However, I don’t know if it would have been easily possible to add the picture display feature to the board’s Perl language program. And that important addition is present with this program.

You might consider creating a help page that is specific for people who are posting notes. For a start, instead of having all of the information in different help files, one file would contain information regarding how to change the Windows cookie permission area, how to add links to a note, how to add a picture to a note, how to underline, use bold text etc. I can’t think of too many other things that are important to a science oriented bulletin board. Then you could just add additional information to that Web page as various things are discussed. And instruct new posters to read that help page to learn how to add links etc. to their posts.

Anyway, it appears that the links matter has been solved without any problems although I believe that links are normally displayed as dark or light blue. Actually, that really doesn’t matter. The underlining is usually the most important thing. I thought that that would probably be a fairly easy adjustment.

(01-27-2014, 03:52 AM)EQF Wrote: [ -> ]I can now see why moving from forum to forum takes a while on my computer. My download speed is medium rather than fast. And the main Web page contains much more information than the older board.

I don't know where you get that idea.

The new main page is 19k in size.

The top post of this thread is 27k.

The old main page is 428k, nearly 10 times bigger than both of those other pages combined.

BTW, DSL is about the same or just a bit more than dialup. I'm sure it's available for your area, unless you're in the middle of Siberia.

(01-27-2014, 03:52 AM)EQF Wrote: [ -> ]My attitude regarding the board program is that any protected bulletin board is better than no bulletin board at all.

So far I have not had time to consider what might be done to make it attractive for people that I talk with to discuss earthquake forecasting research on a public bulletin board. The one thing they will not tolerate is criticism. And a single response posting by Roger could drive them all away (humor intended).

You are beyond overly critical of criticism, and this has been hashed for years. It is my opinion (and of others I'm sure) that anyone who can't handle criticism quite frankly needs to get out of the kitchen.

Criticism is central to science. If something cannot be criticized and debated, then progress of knowledge stagnates and may even become a rotting cesspool. Remember your history? The Dark Ages?

Here's a suggestion: set up is a blog. That way you can have all the say you want and you can control if comments are allowed or not. I think it would be the ideal format for the type of postings you seem to want to make.

I have a blog, although it's not used much. I found it pretty easy to install. It runs WordPress and is free.

http://en.wordpress.com/

And my blog in case you are interested: http://www.skywise711.com/blog/

(01-27-2014, 03:52 AM)EQF Wrote: [ -> ]But I do have to say that in a single day you could have learned enough Perl programming to modify the other board program any way you wished. It isn’t that difficult. However, I don’t know if it would have been easily possible to add the picture display feature to the board’s Perl language program. And that important addition is present with this program.

Adding pictures is probably the biggest reason I did not want to tackle modifying the WWWBoard code. I would not want to implement something like that while also trying to master PERL. It would not be a simple task to implement, and I suspect it would have taken much longer than a day. But another factor is that I did not want to take the time to learn PERL for the sole single purpose of modifying a decades old piece of software. I'm much more enjoying learning C++ because it has much more potential for me. (I'm progressing quite well, btw)

(01-27-2014, 03:52 AM)EQF Wrote: [ -> ]You might consider creating a help page...

The help pages that exist come with the board. I'm sure I could add or edit them. But then, I'm also happy to help people when they just ask a question.

Although you and others here may be having problems adapting to the new software, this style of board is really very common. Any new users that may come along will very likely find this forum and its features quite familiar.

I just looked up the market share of WordPress software. It is by far the most popular content management software with a 60.1% market share in that category, and 21.3% of all websites.

http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview...gement/all

Brian