Small Improvements for Forum ???

[Black396]

Brad,

I think the forum is a great tool so I've been playing with it and found a couple of small things, if when you find time.

Under My Profile...
There is a way to manage/watch threads but the user account has to be activated for it to work. I select the LINK "Activate my Account" and it sends me to another page. (blank page) It finally sends me an email with a URL and an activation code. When I go to the URL I get another blank page.

When I try to add a Watch, it says that my account has not been activated.

Searching...
It doesn't appear to be working.

[tdad]

As a dial-up user (and we are still in the majority) I am concerned that the site will be overwhelmed with avatars and signatures. I can barely navoigate the Corvette forum any more because so many users seem to need a full Hollywood production to post a short e-mail message. Are there limitations on this siteor am I a lone voicein the wilderness on this?

[Black396]

I know what you are saying George about the dial bandwidth. The avatars are limited to about 150 pixels square I believe. That gives a very small foot print and should be cached in your temporary internet cache once you've downloaded them the first time.

Normally it is the large images that are included in the topics and the signatures that eat up the biggest majority of the bandwidth.

All things considered, I don't think we will have problems for the dial-up users like the Corvette Forum has.

[bsneade]

Black396's post is correct about the image size an cacheing. But we'll try and keep dial up users in mind on future site design..

As for the updates to the forum:
The forum is a package developed by a third party. The forum is open source, so I can update parts as needed, but would rather not, as they are still working diligently on the product.
We are actually already a release behind, we are using 1.0.0 RC 1_01 and 1.0.0 RC 2 dev already has the following fixed/implemented. We will upgrade when RC2 is out of the dev cycle.


- When view thread that has been edited, also show the time of last edit (Suggested by KenCochrane)
- [i18n] localize to Arabic language (Thanks Mohammed Al-shake)
- Add getter method for MVNForumInfo
- Add the cookie's path to value "/" (visible to all url in the domain) (thread 430)
- Add new sql script for Interbase Unicode (max VARCHAR size = 80) (Thanks Pavel Av)
- [i18n] localize to Dutch language (Thanks Everest)
- In listonlineusers, all members come above all guests
- Add new class AbstractAction which provide basic support of interface Action
- Admin can view the IP and UserAgent of online users in listonlineusers
- Change all remaining printStackTrace to common-loging
- Refactor some classes for better name convention
- Support customizing forum title name in all jsp files in User Zone
- Fix all warning about unused import in eclipse (thanks skoehler)
- Upgrade JavaMail from version 1.3 to 1.3.1
- Change the logging info in ForumUserServlet and
ForumAdminServlet from INFO to DEBUG (less logging in INFO level)
- Support DB2 database
- Enable mvnCode for signature in MyProfile
- Show homepage/coollink link as clickable link in MyProfile
- Filter all url in member profile
- Support 2 remained tags : [img] and [url=mailto:]
- Fix bug cannot attach file with Vietnamese locale