The FORUM is Back!

[La Reine Margot]

The Forum is returning back to normal and beyond.

This work will not end yet. It will continue until everything is back and the new vision for the world of GIMP is realized.

Lots of work, but I'm sure it will bring its rewards.

[frog]

Margot,

You deserve a resounding applause and the gratitude of all of us here. I was starting to have severe withdrawal symptoms and I am very happy this unique place is back in full force.

No tengo palabras suficientes para agradecer lo que has hecho. . .

[Edukator]

Thank you for the hard work and keeping us posted about your progress...

Two small questions to help me participate (or not) in the reconstruction:

1) Is the open discussion board open to new threads (topics) or should we wait for some green light to come before starting a new thread ?

2) Did you already made a final decision about reposting the old threads or not, or is this still pending ?

[La Reine Margot]

Thank you for the hard work and keeping us posted about your progress...

I'm glad it's working out. It was a lot of work, particularly the migration of the site to the new server. But it was worth the trouble.

Two small questions to help me participate (or not) in the reconstruction:
1) Is the open discussion board open to new threads (topics) or should we wait for some green light to come before starting a new thread ?

Yes, all the boards/forums are open to new threads. I mentioned that in a post before but not everyone reads all my posts.

2) Did you already made a final decision about reposting the old threads or not, or is this still pending ?

That's a more complicated issue. When we moved the domain/site to the new server, we first tried to simply upload everything, as it was before, and make it work. But we encountered problems because we could not make a backup of the Database from the old forum. The reason, we didn't have access to the forum itself to do that, it was out, completely.

We have all the files, sure, 31 gigas worth, too much, but since we don't have the database backup, we can't reconnect them automatically and I think that if we did it, maybe we would overwhelm the system again.

We have unlimited space in the server; but apps have their own limitations, as we found out, and php forums need limitations to perform.

Before we decide to reconnect the old files, not all of them, we have to monitor the behavior of the Forum as it now.

It's growing very, very fast, and we need to make sure that it wont grow too large to handle. That's the reason why we set limitations to the number of pictures per post and size of images. We didn't set those limitations before and we ended up with posts that were 96 mb in size. Way too much.

The limit now is 1mb but we recommend to keep them under 500k

We will be experimenting with some of the old posts, to see if we can reconnect them, but not right now. We're engage in migrating other websites to our new hosting plan and that's giving us plenty of headaches.

So, be free to post, create topics, and so on.

[vladdt]

Is Mr. Hide bot? Cause I can see ever growing posts with auto-generated random "bdsm" images and gif's. I doubt any database, except only if you Amazon or Google can hold this spam.

[Edukator]

Thank you for your very complete and detailed reply.

I allways read all your posts carefully but the "Breaking News" announcement at top of the discussion board with the following message:

DO NOT CREATE NEW POST
You may use the quick reply if you wish.
We're working on this... still.

Is a little bit confusing and should be updated or deleted if creating new threads is now allowed.

Re. attachments, the max. size limit of 1Mb per picture is more than enough for fair quality pictures and more than allowed on many other forums. Any photo editor program has a resize function to compress the size of the picture to fit any size limit with minimum quality loss.
However, I allways found the 3 pictures per posts limit annoying and I think the best compromise would be to limit the TOTAL ATTACHMENTS SIZE PER POST (to 1 Mb), this way members could manage their attachments and decide to post either many smaller pics or only a couple of bigger ones while remaining below the limits. I have no idea how and if this could be technically implemented but it would be a nice feature.
I noticed that the posts on the GIMP forum(s) were about 80% pictures oriented, thus some way must be found to prevent the same issue reappearing in the future. Hopefully I know you're currently working on it and I thank you (and your technical team) for all your efforts.

[La Reine Margot]

Is Mr. Hide bot? Cause I can see ever growing posts with auto-generated random "bdsm" images and gif's. I doubt any database, except only if you Amazon or Google can hold this spam.

We're looking into this because the red flags have been raised.

[La Reine Margot]

Thank you for your very complete and detailed reply.

I allways read all your posts carefully but the "Breaking News" announcement at top of the discussion board with the following message:

DO NOT CREATE NEW POST
You may use the quick reply if you wish.
We're working on this... still.

Is a little bit confusing and should be updated or deleted if creating new threads is now allowed.

Re. attachments, the max. size limit of 1Mb per picture is more than enough for fair quality pictures and more than allowed on many other forums. Any photo editor program has a resize function to compress the size of the picture to fit any size limit with minimum quality loss.
However, I allways found the 3 pictures per posts limit annoying and I think the best compromise would be to limit the TOTAL ATTACHMENTS SIZE PER POST (to 1 Mb), this way members could manage their attachments and decide to post either many smaller pics or only a couple of bigger ones while remaining below the limits. I have no idea how and if this could be technically implemented but it would be a nice feature.
I noticed that the posts on the GIMP forum(s) were about 80% pictures oriented, thus some way must be found to prevent the same issue reappearing in the future. Hopefully I know you're currently working on it and I thank you (and your technical team) for all your efforts.

The announcement is gone. Thank you for pointing to that.

As far as setting up limits to number of posts based on size is something the system does not include. We can set a limit to the number of attachments per posts, links do not have a limit number but too many can be annoying or fall in the category of spamming, or we can limit the size of the attachment.

This Forum is image oriented, which is different from most forums, that's why there's the danger of overwhelming it.

We're monitoring the behavior of the forum. We can "prune' it from time to time, which means, some posts can be deleted automatically. But we don't want to do that and it tends to be a mess because not all deleted posts are pruned and not al pruned posts are deleted.

The magic word then is 'moderation'.

[wulf]

Moderation is good for most everything in life. I certainly have no problem with it here.

[gamblers1000]

are we getting a story section back i enjoy stories a lot