New forum tricks

Joe,

Yeah, maybe just typing fingers that do not go where the brain tells them to go. But then I did try it several times without success. Tried again and it worked. I have an aversion to intermittent faults.

Fonts and highlighting work fine for me. OK, I don’t claim to be an artist or graphics designer. Just playing around.[}:)][:-^] Aorta have a preview of the smilies on the dropdown menu though.

Worked again this time.[tup]

Has anyone noticed that with the new website if you click on an embedded link it no longer spawns a new browser window but instead takes th existing browser focus to the link ? It was nice to have both windows up so you could respond in the original window to where the link took you.

I have a question for you Joe, since you seem to be quite knowledgable in how the new forum works already.

I tried to upload an animated .GIF avatar…It browsed and uploaded it, but it seems that when they are uploaded to the Trains server, they are converted to .JPG.

Despite the conversion, is there anyway to upload an animated avatar?

Jeff,

It is probably working around something we do not like. Nevertheless, try right clicking on the URL then selecting “open in new window”. That might be peculiar to MS IE that I use. However, most likely other browsers have similar facility. Don’t know, I am not a computer freak.

Actually, Joe, you don’t need to use those codes to get colours. Just type in the name of the colour you want. Like this : (replace the * with the name of the colour you want; and, yes, there is a space between “font” and “color”). That’s how I got my signature to work after moving to the new Forums format.

The colors and font sizes only work in the signature box on your profile. If you want different font sizes and colors in the message posting box, you need to use the drop downs at the top of the posting window.

You use a sneaky trick, that’s how. [swg]

To get a tag to show without actually doing anything, you need to insert another tag pair inside it’s brackets so it doesn’t look like code. The b tag works well for this. For example, if I want the image tag to show, without rendering, I type it like this:

[img[b][/b]]

To make it bold, I just highlight the string and go up and click the B for bold button in the message posting header, and I get this:

[img[b][/b]]

But as you can see, it doesn’t have to be bold. So to do an entire string of code, I type it like this:

[img[b][/b]]blah.jpg[/img[b][/b]]

And I get this in my message:

[img]blah.jpg[/img]

Hey! It works.

Joe, I also have that problem. At the old forum I just copyed the img tag from photobucket and pasted it, that does not work for me now. It seems that the forum changes my img tag. Example: img tag directly from photobucket. Can you see the picture, I can’t! But I’m sure you can see a tag that is not a img tag. Same thing happens when I try to quote a post. The forum changes everything so the result is a big mess.

electro:

It is common practice these days to turn direct HTML posting off on community forums.

There are very good reasons for this. If you have ever seen a forum that’s been hacked you will see what happens if the forum allows direct HTML posting.

My own forum has been hacked twice and it gets old real fast. As a result, I locked down my forum much more and put severe restrictions on allowing direct HTML posting.

Long story short, you will have to just paste in the URL and add the image tags around it yourself, like this:

[img]my_photo_url.jpg[/img]

I know it’s more of a pain, but you can thank hackers for that. [B)] It does make the forum less suseptible to hackers if direct HTML posting is severely limited, and Kalmbach is wise to take this step from a security perspective.

Ok, I will try it once more.

Joe, Let me explain what I did in the post above. I pasted in the image url like this: http://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a79/vigour/angle.jpg Then I added the img tag as you said. But the result is not what I typed as you can see. I did not write src and border. That’s added by the forum. It worked at the old forum but not now. And I can assure you I typed exactly the same thing.

Since I had a custom sig block, I tried Joe’s instructions and they work for me. I am using XP and IE 6.

I am trying to figure out how to make a external link within the body of the message to open in a new window. Seems this worked fine with the url … /url tags before.

Regards,

I tried it again this morning and now links are opening up in new browser windows again. Not sure if anything changed but I prefer this option.

I’m using Mac OS X and Safari

It seems to work for me.

are you sure you you typed [img] [ /img] ?

Yes I’m sure :slight_smile: But the forum changes my code.

Trying once more, now with my windows 2000 emulator

A little better but the forum still changes my code.

So I think that the forum can’t handle Mac’s.

maybe, we use mac’s at work, so I will try posting from my work computer and see if thats the problem.

What’s cute here is if you quote the original message it DOES show the proper tags, btu the original message just has an tag around the whole thing.

OK all I did here was copy the IMG section from a photobucket picture and paste it here. NOT the URL one - the third reference which INCLUDES the img and /img tags. Looks like it works. I am a memberof another forum that uses software that works the same as this one. One of the very popular open source BB programs.

–Randy