Forum software changes

I made a couple of small changes to the forum that hopefully will make using it a bit easier.

<ol><li>http and ftp URL's will be auot-magically turned into a clickable links without user intervention. This feature is fairly dumb, and doesn't currently work if there are any spaces in the URL even if you quote it. I'll work on that. For now, if you have a URL with a space inside, you will have to manually enter it the old-fashioned way with the <xmp></xmp> tags for it to work, or post it as a 'Text' post, which will leave things alone. Also note that you need to have at least one space or end-of-line both before and after the URL to be sure the reference does not include any punctuation. See eample below.

<li>The default posting type has been changed to HTML to facilitate this change. This does not effect posts with no HTML in them--they are posted as is. The only good reason to use the 'text' format is if you have an embedded URL that the automatic feature mangles for some reason.
</ol>
If you need to show HTML code in your messgae, use the 'Text' posting type.

<h3>Examples</h3>
A bare URL typed in without any HTML tags: http://www.largeformatphotography.in...ic/499752.html

A URL with manually entered 'a' tags:
this is a link
which I entered as:<xmp>this is a link</xmp>Be sure that you do not put any space before or after the URL in this situation.

The bottom line is that you should take a good hard look at the Preview page to check you post for valid URLs, if you included any. If they show up mangled in the preview page, you should use the Back button to change the post type to 'Text' or manually create an HREF for it.

This will not help posts made in the past. It only works going forward.

I can remove this feature if it proves to be a big problem for people. I just had a few requests for this and thought I'd try out this solution. Let me know if you have difficulty (email the 'moderators' address at the bottom of the page). Follow up to this thread if you have questions or comments.

Nice addition Tom.

Thanks!

E xcellent!

Tom,

Thanks to all involved in keeping this thing running, and constantly improving it. It is greatly appreciated.

Is it possible to insert photos on this forum?
It would be nice if we could have image discussions

Members cannot currently upload photos to our server, but it's a feature that others have asked for and I'm investigating how to go about it.

If you just want to display a photo with your post, you can always link to an off-site photo with HTML. See the help page for more info on that.

Tom

The software now seems to remove embedded linefeeds, even when posting in text mode.

Leigh, surprisingly, I think it has always done that&mdash;at least it appears that way judging from some old versions of the software I looked at. I made a small change to fix it. If it turns out to have bad side-effects then I may turn it back off again. I presume there was a good reason why I did that, but I can't think what it was!

I'll fix the post you are probably referring to.

Thanks for pointing that out.

Yes, that was the one. Thanks Tom.