No thanks to like buttons. I hate Facebook for them.

yes poll no reddit

I'd be in favor of a poll function as well.

maxtherabbit wrote on 2020-01-02, 00:48:

yes poll no reddit

How can I like this post 😂

+1 for poll, and thumbs up to the above posts 😀

keropi wrote on 2020-01-01, 22:27:

this is a means of saying "nice/wow/I like it" without cluttering the thread with posts that serve nothing other than showing appreciation

I assume you're talking about all the "wow, such a nice build" comments? I love them, please don't take them away 😀

I've been active here for four years already, and one thing remains true to me — this is an extremely friendly community. Every build/project gets appreciated here, and that is really awesome. When someone posts "this is a nice machine" you know that person made a bit of effort to support you in your hobby. Doesn't work that way with "like" buttons.

I've instantly liked the new design, but I did have some issues with text presentation. It's slowly growing on me, though.

However, I was a bit disappointed that 2MB limit for photos remained intact. I think a default photo made on an iPhone is like 7-10MB, so a 2MB limit is really sad. Right now there are two options:

- compress the photo and lose smaller details like the text silkscreened on chips/motherboards/etc;

- upload the photo to imgur (or anywhere else) and embed it here. More involved, but this is what I do.

I'm pretty sure people ask about this quite often, so I'm just wondering if anyone has ever tried to estimate how expensive it would be to remove a photo limit on Vogons given that the site isn't astronomically huge in traffic/userbase/amount of content. I assume it's just a question of adequate amount of storage after all.

I’m fine with the smaller limit for images. The man went to the moon with a computer using 4kb of RAM. We can perfectly fit a good image in a < 2mb image. Plus storage in web servers isn’t cheap these days.

jheronimus wrote on 2020-01-02, 01:35:

<...> I think a default photo made on an iPhone is like 7-10MB, so a 2MB limit is really sad. Right now there are two options:

- compress the photo and lose smaller details like the text silkscreened on chips/motherboards/etc;

- upload the photo to imgur (or anywhere else) and embed it here. More involved, but this is what I do.

If Amazon-product-reviews and Google-location-reviews required users resize and re-compress their photos before uploading, I would wager we'd see a 95% fall-off rate in photo uploads. So both of the above act as encumbrances to participation (that's one way to cut down on disk usage!).

A third option is manage it server-side and inform the user that photos above 2MB will be 'adjusted' to fit: assess the bits-per-pixel then scale and mozjpeg to fit. For extra protection the upload could still be capped, but at modern photo sizes (say, 20MB/photo). I think this approach would remove the effort barriers to participation.

jheronimus wrote on 2020-01-02, 01:35:

However, I was a bit disappointed that 2MB limit for photos remained intact. I think a default photo made on an iPhone is like 7 […]
Show full quote

However, I was a bit disappointed that 2MB limit for photos remained intact. I think a default photo made on an iPhone is like 7-10MB, so a 2MB limit is really sad. Right now there are two options:

- compress the photo and lose smaller details like the text silkscreened on chips/motherboards/etc;

- upload the photo to imgur (or anywhere else) and embed it here. More involved, but this is what I do.

I'm pretty sure people ask about this quite often, so I'm just wondering if anyone has ever tried to estimate how expensive it would be to remove a photo limit on Vogons given that the site isn't astronomically huge in traffic/userbase/amount of content. I assume it's just a question of adequate amount of storage after all.

Compressing is fine. Below is a 14.3 MB photo taken on my phone and compressed using Lit Photo on Android down to just 425KB - you can perfectly see the smallest silkscreened text on the PCB:

Or set the phone's picture resolution to a smaller size, such as 800x600

If I want to share something on here that I bought at a thrift store or online, I take a picture with my phone and upload to Imgur. Otherwise, I use my Sony Mavica FD-88 to take pictures and upload from there.

Most of the photos that come from my iPhone SE are less than 2 megs in size.

If they aren't I just use jpegoptim to shrink them a little bit.

I use a 21-inch CRT monitor and the new design is VERY fatiguing on my eyes after only about 2 minutes. And I used to read stuff sometimes for hours on here on the old format without issue. I changed the color scheme and that helped somewhat.

IF you can add more themes for users to choose from once logged in, one I highly recommend is called "Flat Style." Another php-bb-based site I have visited for years also recently updated their theme to this one, and it is far easier on the eyes. See here - https://www.mibuzzboard.com/

The notifications page for topics I am following is incredibly hard to discern between things I have read and unread.

Also, for whatever reason 90% of my thread subscriptions do not seem to have carried over or for some reason or another I do not get notifications until I go into the subscribed thread and out at least once.

On the "Like" matter, I am on the fence. On the one hand, Like-chasing is a plague and that potentially turns any subject into unnecessary attention whoring, on the other hand threads where the only contributions are one or two word encouragement posts are cancer to read so I'm not sure which is the lesser evil here..

Likes on a forum isn't anything like likes on a social media service though. It's more of a soft compliment that'd keep a thread tidy of thankYou.postCount++'s, and most forum software hides the likes from guests so there's some confidentiality.

Things change, and ppl will get used to it.
The old skool theme is not much different from the previous vogons theme. Its purple with dark text, same thing. I’m already used to it.

leileilol wrote on 2020-01-01, 12:59:

While the forum's getting changes, all I can suggest right now is collapsable quotes. Some are chronic big quoters that leave tiny posts (not naming names)

+1, this drives me nuts.

Also +1 on the 'like' button, it doesn't feel right to me posting "wow nice work!" so I don't, but I'd like to express my appreciation.

krcroft wrote on 2020-01-02, 02:56:

A third option is manage it server-side and inform the user that photos above 2MB will be 'adjusted' to fit: assess the bits-per-pixel then scale and mozjpeg to fit. For extra protection the upload could still be capped, but at modern photo sizes (say, 20MB/photo). I think this approach would remove the effort barriers to participation.

Good point, actually. I agree — this would make it easier for users without actually increasing storage requirements.

jheronimus wrote on 2020-01-02, 10:27:

krcroft wrote on 2020-01-02, 02:56:

A third option is manage it server-side and inform the user that photos above 2MB will be 'adjusted' to fit: assess the bits-per-pixel then scale and mozjpeg to fit. For extra protection the upload could still be capped, but at modern photo sizes (say, 20MB/photo). I think this approach would remove the effort barriers to participation.

Good point, actually. I agree — this would make it easier for users without actually increasing storage requirements.

I would also like this. Now I take pictures from my phone (via Google Photos), upload them to imgur and then link them from here. But imgur will die someday and those pictures will be inaccessible.

Now that I think about it again, I should upload them here as attachments from now on, even if it's inconvenient.

I'd argue strongly against a "lazy option" for uploading photos. If you can't be bothered to pull your pic into Photoshop and do some basic editing as needed (crop it to show what you want, adjust the brightness / color balance, rotate it into the right orientation, check it's not in smear-o-vision, make sure your exposed junk isn't visible in any reflective surfaces, etc.) maybe you shouldn't upload it at all. Not saying every pic has to be an art piece, but I've seen some unbelievably awful pics uploaded here where you can barely even tell what's being shown despite it being about as big as the current board allows. There's a limit of 5 pics per post so it really doesn't take that long to make sure they're decent ones.

A 1600x1200 or 1920x1080 image easily fits into 2MB and IMHO there's no rational reason to upload anything larger than that. That's the size limit for Ebay listings, and that's a commercial service where money is involved and detailed photos of an item are absolutely critical. If that size is good enough for actual trade, it's good enough for our purposes here.

I browse threads like 'bought this hardware today' on my phone a lot, and I have a 512MB monthly data cap. If the average photo starts edging up towards 10MB that would obliterate my bandwidth in like three page loads. Even just loading & re-saving a typical camera pic at a lower jpeg quality level (I use 9) can shave about ~80% of the file size off while keeping the compression imperceptible.

Regarding auto-resizing uploads: that's how vcfed.org works and it's a clusterfuck of poor implimentation. Until, like, a month ago, it would brutally resize pics so small (to like 400x300) that any text on them became impossible to read. They FINALLY upped the resolution & size limits after a bunch of complaints, but whatever software the board uses still re-"compresses" black & white PNGs with huge solid color bands to lossy jpeg at some garbage quality level, which manages to make them look worse and increase the file size at the same time. (That's not a hypothetical example - I was trying to upload an info sheet scanned as a B&W PNG a while ago, and it just would. not. let. me. do. it. in any way that kept it readable. I eventually gave up.)

Granted, it wouldn't be hard to do a better job implementing the resizing feature than that board does, but it's not trivial either & I'd still rather force the poster to make choices about how they want their uploads trimmed down.