Fix the forums now or tell us why not !!!!!!!!

It's been way too long. No reasons why. It sucks not being able to help others with pictures. Fix it now... Nuff said.

You've seen http://blog.secondlife.com/2009/02/13/coming-soonthe-good-ol-days/#comment-622299, right?

But even with this current punchcard version of vBulletin, it's possible to "help others with pictures" if that means embedding images. A la:

I use images in my replies all the time, no idea what you are talking about

If the person can't copy paste, then they honestly don't deserve help! "help me help you"

coffee nose keyboard gah

Please & thank you never hurt anyone.

http://cranky.no-ip.biz/serveimages/btb.png][url=[url="http://cranky.no-ip.biz/serveimages/btb.png]http://cranky.no-ip.biz/serveimages/btb.png[/url]"][url=]http://cranky.no-ip.biz/serveimages/btb.png[/url][/url]

[/php]http://cranky.no-ip.biz/serveimages/btb.png[/php]
it's an ugly hack
Please and thank you.

Lol.

But yes I agree with Kornscope. There is much more wrong with the forums then just picture posting.

Don't believe me then take a look at these two words:

from & select

Take and use them in a reply here, no matter how many sentences apart you use them but in reverse order. sel*ct followed much later by fr*m and you will not be able to post your reply.

And that blog post is meaningless. In August (I think it was August) there was a blog post stating that the blog and forums were going to be updated in October of last year. Then there was and is the huge forum upgrade thread by Robin. And this was also supposed to have been one of Katt's jobs which they never even let her start on. Actually she was supposed to have turned the forums over to an outside company.

So there have been a lot of statements, posts, threads and blogs saying that the forums were going to be fixed and yet here we still are.......................................................

And if I remember correctly, how many times have you heard in meetings that the forum is being worked in in the last few months Qie? (I reserve the right to have compeltely screwed this up and it wasn't you that posted that a few times

A great many large, reputable message boards disallow direct postings of graphics (allowing only links, instead).

It's fairly standard, really.

I just followed the link and read the response to my question about this vbulletin forum:

Here's the response:



This gives me the impression that this forum will be closing. Readable, but no more posting. That's just my take on that comment, perhaps influenced by my jaundiced disposition.

I agree. These forums were set up for residents to get help and to provide feedback to Linden Lab. When the new blog channels are introduced for this purpose then here is not going to be here for much longer.

That's great. I'm glad we can do that! Somehow . . .


The last time I tried it wouldn't work for me. I tried the little landscape icon, tried putting "img" in brackets around the url. Tied puttjng "url" in brackets around the url. I did not try standing on my head naked in the middle of the interstate in rush hour traffic. Maybe that's what I was doing wrong.

tsk tsk.... didnt you know...
Linden only does things unannounced and anything announced takes up to 5 years to play catch up (see havok)

Oh, it was I alright; and I bring it on myself because I ask Lindens at every plausible opportunity: "So, how's that Forums upgrade going, eh?" (Well, the "eh" part only since I moved to Canada.) I know, I know: time means nothing to the gods, but with Wednesday the just-announced blog cut-over date, and the long claimed linkage between the new blog and the new Forums software, I figure this particular halting problem has some better chance than before of resolving in finite time.

It's a fair guess that when it arrives, the new Forums software will be something other than an updated vBulletin, and that many of us will wince when we first see it. But I don't think they're going to expect their shiny new blog software to carry all the water of the Forums. I'm just not hearing them say that.

(Wes, maybe I've just been lucky, but embedding an image link between img and /img tags has always worked for me. It's one of the very few markups that still function, at least for me.)

I've made no secret of being peeved about the state of the Forums software for well over a year, and it's gotten progressively worse with the introduction of the SQL filters, for example. My patience, too, is running thin. It's just that I see in Blue's post some hope of a near-term improvement.

Yeah, that.

I don't know why people keep whining about this forum. Apart from the SQL problem that Jesse mentioned, there's nothing wrong with it. It works perfectly well.

Firefox.
Linkification.


...or many other options out there.

Firefox?

Linkification:
It works perfectly well. If the owners don't want the users to include links, they prevent it. It doesn't need "fixing" unless the "no links" effect was an accident. They disabled BBcode by choice. It doesn't need fixing. It works perfectly well. It isn't to the satisfaction of all users, but that's different.

Hmmm. I gather that with Strife's greasemonkey script, most of the bbcode markup works, but I've never used that on the premise that new users who come here for help won't be using it. Without it, there's no way to insert a directly clickable link that works on all browsers. (The img tags will make the embedded URL itself clickable on some browsers, but even then, all you get is the URL, not link text.)

But that's a minor annoyance compared to the eyesore that is code stripped of its formatting. (There's a hideous kludge-around for that, too, but it requires the reader to first pretend to quote the tagged post.)

And now the hide-and-go-seek game to discover where a post is using one of the forbidden word pairs and to devise some alternate wording that won't offend the sql filter's arcane sensibilities.

It's one thing not to have updated the software for ages, but quite another to keep running a version with known vulnerabilities by dint of nerfing standard features and even introducing failure modes that erroneously tell new posters that they're not authorized to post. That's not just sloth; it's passive-aggressive behavior.

I agree about the SQL problem, but everything else is intentional, as far as I know, and doesn't need fixing. Users may find inconvenient at times but that doesn't mean it needs fixing. The owners chose to turn the use of BBcode off, so it's not broken. I didn't get the impression that the OP only meant the SQL problem.

Welcome to SecondLife

I dunno about the Firefox thing... vBulletin forums display just fine on my setup.

However, I simply do not understand the rationale behind disabling nearly all of the vB code. Certainly there are a few that could be potentially harmful; but what harm could POSSIBLY come from disabling italics, bold, ordered and unordered lists, and other simple, straightforward text-formatting codes? That's just plain idiocy! I can possibly understand disabling tags, even though doing so serves no useful purpose, because URLs still show up, and can still be copy/pasted. The extreme disabling of vB codes here is nothing more than LL inconvenience with no clear benefit for anyone.

Unless there's someone here still browsing the Internet with Lynx.

I run a phpBB forum and I don't know the admin options for the vBulletin forum, but I imagine that they don't include the turning off of individual bbCodes. It'll be either all or nothing.

I can understand them turning it off though. It's not unknown for someone to post links in forums to malicious websites and, since LL don't involve themselves in moderating here, but use powerless users instead who are unable to edit posts, I can understand them just turning it all off. After all, we can post perfectly well so what's to moan about.

Yeah, gotta keep them uppity cats in their place.