The text editor should now again work with client device spellcheckers.
We went through a period of a few days when we had another text editor, which had some very nice features (e.g. double-clicking a word would highlight just the word, not the word and the space after it which is what just about all the others do) but it prevented client side spell checking.
We will now leave things as they are for a while to settle down.
If you have any great ideas for making EuroGA more usable / more accessible, feel free to feed them in 
A couple more tweaks…
The home page display of active threads now shows only distinct discussions so a given thread will appear only once. More logical.
For better visibility, links within posts are underlined.
In an continuing effort to make the EuroGA site safer and faster, we’ve now enabled a global CDN and DDoS protection service, through Cloudflare. This should be transparent to you when you’re using the site, i.e. you don’t have to do anything different, nor should you notice anything different. We use similar things for sites large and small these days and haven’t experienced any issues, but do let me know if anything weird happens.
@Peter: Is there anything you can do to change the ‘X wrote’ handling at the front page? It is sometimes challenging to see ‘X wrote:’ followed by the answer to the ‘wrote:’ without seeing anything from the original ‘write’. Giving the impression a comment is coming from the original poster instead of the commentator confuses.
Could you post some screenshot showing this, and which device are you using?
There was a thread recently asking to make this feature selectable under Preferences, to optionally disable it completely.
Personally, I don’t use it because I see little value in attributing a quote to a person.
Peter wrote:
Could you post some screenshot showing this, and which device are you using?
Frontpage shows this:
Thread post is:
So, on the front page it looks as if arj1 wrote: ‘My guess’, but actually it was Noe.
This is standard WebKit on MacOS Mojave 10.14.3 and Safari 12.0.3 (14606.4.5).
Addendum: and this thread shows like this on the front page:
OK; I get it. Thanks.
In the longer term I am looking for a Ruby on Rails programmer who can do these sorts of mods. Unfortunately they are extremely rare, and for obvious reasons I can’t just let anybody loose on the server. But we have some donation money now
The home page banners are generated (what appears) quite simply and for example I cannot promote a thread to the banners if its first post contains a large graphic. So e.g. most trip reports cannot be thus promoted. There is no doubt a way to produce a defined-finished-size snapshot of the first post which would fit in the column width, and with a length limit, but it would be a bit of work.
It is something I will look at getting someone to improve at some stage because it is really clear that promoting a thread to a banner brings far more people to it.
This has now been fixed. The “X wrote” text has been stripped out, on the home page banners.
I am sure it will have side effects but it’s not that critical.
This is a general question on what improvements people would like to see on the EuroGA website.
Since I took it over near the start of 2019, the appeal for donations has produced a really generous response. I also added a fair chunk myself.
Some of the money has been spent on background improvements to the site. Some issues which while not security related (unlike practically every aviation forum, we have never knowingly been hacked since we started in 2012) were nonetheless irritating. For example it was possible for anyone to join up and immediately post or PM and since 20-30% of signups are spammers, this led to a steady stream of fake passport sellers, etc. Fortunately most are stupid but some are quite clever, waiting for a week and then getting down to the job… So now there is a manual approval step; normally I get around to this pretty quickly. We have also implemented various anti bot, anti DOS and anti " general wind up " measures. And there is a comprehensive backup system. Various minor issues were also fixed; for example the post/thread merging functionality is now way slicker than other forum software has and this helps keeping it all nicely organised. And you can drag/drop in not just image files but also PDFs.
The site was originally written in Ruby and while this is a very robust language, few programmers use it today so getting any work done in it is expensive
With the main stuff done, there is still money left, so some smaller stuff can now be looked at, so I’d like to know what further improvements people would like to see.
Work is in hand on an airport database. This is being done by a very kind volunteer in PHP (and thus will be much easier to develop and maintain) and for security will run on a separate server. We are welcoming any input (in the aforementioned thread) on what kinds of data fields ought to be in there.
