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Site Improvements (merged)

This is beginning to look like the scenario on a aeroclub I know of. They bought a brand new Aquila a year ago. The interesting thing was that there were a lot of complaints.

“What’s wrong with the Cessna 152 we are flying?” “I am not going to fly in that plastic!” “Does it have a variable pitch? You know I don’t fly complex machines!” “I don’t like the low wing” “etc….”

It was a much welcome upgrade for the aeroclub, but somehow people always seem to look at the things that are going away in stead of things they gain.

Bushpilot C208/C182
FMMI/EHRD, Madagascar

Where has “Read new” disappeared from the list of posts? I can see it on top of topic chosen but it was convinient to have it clickable directly at list of topics.

Last Edited by Emir at 07 Nov 14:55
LDZA LDVA, Croatia

Peter,
I suggest you make the title of the post in the overview either a little (!) bit bigger or maybe bold.. The way it is now it is a litte confusing. Otherwise: Nice job!

Last Edited by Flyer59 at 07 Nov 15:33

Nice from a PC, will it work on a smartphone?

It certainly should, because the new layout auto scales to the client device.

It even works on my Nokia 808 with auto reflowing between portrait and landscape and no need for manual zooming – even though I did not need anything beyond the most basic functionality on that, because Symbian is now a tiny user base.

It is not always possible to provide a URL link to a document or graphic. It would be a nice to either be able to upload documents or graphics in such cases.

That’s a very good topic, but a tricky one.

Hosting graphics, PDFs, etc increases the server bandwidth by perhaps 100×. While bandwidth is “cheap” (I have just seen 2TB/month for $20/month) it is not cheap enough for a free site i.e. a site without adverts. For example my own site runs up to 30GB/month and that is after I have moved all larger objects off it, into my ISP’s free webspace (cheeky, but they are obviously not metering that space). And EuroGA is not big enough to make any money from adverts. I would say it is at least 10x too small to make even pocket money for sweets.

Adverts bring big issues…

Firstly anybody with the slightest IT knowhow is going to be blocking them, which is trivial in say out of the box Firefox. So one has to serve them from the same server. They can still be blocked but you need something like the Adblock plug-in with custom expressions. There is a huge demand for this on facebook which is continually changing the site code to keep ahead of this. But if you serve them from the same server (instead of a 3rd party feed) you jack up the server bandwidth perhaps another 10x to 100x, and then you really need to focus on making money out of the adverts. One owner of a site that carries ads explained this to me not long ago, when they changed it so I could no longer block their ads

Secondly you have to run the site so that lots of people visit and click on the adverts! It’s no good having ambitions to run a site which is nice, polite, moderated, contains good to the point posts which people take time to type up and which is rewarding to read. No… you have to moderate it for maximum activity. That means e.g. tolerating some pretty aggressive behaviour, because threads where people are having a good fight generate several times more clicks. I know you are familiar with the big US forums (as I am, and to some extent EuroGA is “styled” on those) where fights are very rare, but here in Europe that simply doesn’t happen and forums rapidly descend into fights, trolls, you name it. If you carry adverts you have to tolerate all that crap. One probably draws the line just before there is a real risk of litigation for libel, and that is basically where every other English language forum I know of (and one big German one I hear about) is moderated. I don’t want EuroGA to go down that route. Also I am the only mod and I am not up all night The bigger sites sometimes employ ATCOs to mod them so they get H24 cover from nasty postings at night.

I know the US forums tend to host images on their server but they all also carry advertising, and none of them AFAIK display the images unless you are a registered user and are logged in. That then fails to “draw in” new members, but America is big so they don’t mind.

The solution for users is to find an easy way to upload graphics. I use imgur.com which makes it really easy to do. Also I use Hyperdesktop which makes it absolutely trivial to screenshot a bit of the PC screen, automatically upload it to imgur.com, and paste the URL to that onto the windows clipboard Like this

Hyperdesktop makes it so easy to post an image appearing on your PC that most of the time you don’t need to upload the image file anywhere. If you are looking at it on your PC screen – click and job done!

You can’t do it with documents e.g. PDFs and that remains a fair point. I am happy to upload (to a suitable place) any PDFs that people email me, for which they can’t supply a URL.

Last Edited by Peter at 07 Nov 15:26
Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Hugely unhappy with certain changes

Always nice to read such a positive response when one has put lots and lots of effort in, for free.

I do most of my postings from an ipad. No more access to all previous buttons like quote, underline, link, preview.

It was a concerted effort to reduce the download size for users of mobile devices. Tablets are tricky because some people use them with cellular data where such things matter, and others use them on wifi where it doesn’t. I think the only way to handle this is to give people the option to turn on or off the enhanced editor when using a tablet, so that that’s what we’ll do.

the layout on the iphone is very inefficient in terms of vertical space. Lots of space is “wasted” by the avatars and user details at the end of every post.

This is inentional – earlier today I received a comment that the demarcation between posts wasn’t siginficant enough. The point is, it’s really very hard to please everyone. I’ll look at maybe shaving a small amount of vertical space off when the layout has flowed in to a vertical style for use on small screens, but given the ease with which one can scroll I’m disinclined to do much with this.

Administrator
EGTR / London, United Kingdom

Nice upgrade – thanks.

You’re very welcome.

Any chance of tweaking the contrast? When writing a post, everything black, but reading what’s posted is greyish.

This is a tightrope. The writing isn’t black because some people find that too stark and the contrast makes their eyes ache when reading it. The difficulty is catering for different people’s screens and tastes. We’ll edge a bit closer towards black and see if anybody complains!

Administrator
EGTR / London, United Kingdom

Thanks for the update!

I like the new colours and the post posting/formatting controls.

Excellent.

The only bit that I don’t like is the new home page. I find it harder to scan which topics have new postings. Of course they are all there, but the amount of space for each one means its harder to scan quickly (as my eyes news to move all over the screen rather than on only a small section like before).

I thought long and hard about this but was eventually led by the usage data. The previous home page worked well for returning users, but not so well for new users who hadn’t been to the site before. The “home page” for existing users was actually the Recent Threads page, because most returning users want to get straight to the nitty gritty. We’ll see how the new home page works for new users over the next days and weeks. In the meantime, to address your own issue, perhaps you could consider using the Most Recent Posts or Most Recent Threads pages as your first port of call, by bookmarking or whatever means you prefer?

Someone else commented that the new post/thread listings were harder to scan and that is actually a mistake – I’ll make a change so that the thread title is more prominent than the topic to allow for easier/faster scanning down the page.

Administrator
EGTR / London, United Kingdom

Where has “Read new” disappeared from the list of posts? I can see it on top of topic chosen but it was convinient to have it clickable directly at list of topics.

It remains on the Most Recent Threads listing. For Most Recent Posts it makes less sense, because the link to the post takes you to that specific post.

Administrator
EGTR / London, United Kingdom

the layout on the iphone is very inefficient in terms of vertical space. Lots of space is “wasted” by the avatars and user details at the end of every post.

Hmmmm…. works well on mine (iPhone 4s). You can also just hold the iPhone horizontally, gives you more space.

David,

love the upgrade and it runs fine on both PC as well as Andriod devices I use.

One request if I may: The section “threads I posted to” seems to start with the earliest thread rather than the latest. I’d prefer to be able to either choose latest on top or to have it that way permanently like it is in the other sections.

Are you by any way looking into making this place tapatalk compatible?

Other than that, very happy camper.

Best regards
Urs

LSZH(work) LSZF (GA base), Switzerland
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