Forum Features & Updates

Even more Brill!

Saving & Retrieving posts

As I'm sure we all feel at times, computers are either your best friend that you couldn't live without - when they're working as they should.... or your worst enemy and a pile of waste material when they're not.... but there's not much in between the two! I'm also aware that many members have, from time to time, lost a post that they were in the middle of painstakingly typing out, because of some sort of glitch or internet blip. And I'm sure, like me, the next post you type will be a lot shorter - just in case you waste all your time again? Well, I'm hoping that I've now helped to stop that happening. When you're next adding a post, you'll notice that the "Preview" button has slightly changed to 'Preview / save message'... and it's accompanied by a partner labelled 'Retrieve saved message'. Whenever you press the "Preview / save" button, it will save your post in a cookie that is set to last 7 days, so if it works as I intend, you can close your browser, go to bed, have a power-cut, come back a couple lf days later.... then retrieve your post and carry on as if nothing had happened! But.... if you type out a load of stuff.... be careful not to press the "retrieve" button before saving first, or who knows what you'll be dredging back up in place of what you just typed !

Very posh, Rob-thanks!

Nice one Rob, on the ball as always, that is why this is the best site - 3 for Rob

Good one Rob. Several times I have typed my comment in and then realized I hadn't selected a new image ready to insert.

Can now use your email address to log in

We all get forgetful at times, and sometimes members forget their usernames and end up taking several attempts to log in. In an attempt to alleviate this, I've now made the login screen recognise your EMAIL ADDRESS as well as your username. I hope this helps a few people.

Those of you who have made a post since this afternoon will probably have noticed an extra button to choose from when submitting your message. Well, TonyS thought of this great idea, and it should work like this.... When there's a long thread (and there are a lot of those!), most of the posts will usually be responses or answers to the various questions that are asked. So, when we're looking back over a long thread wondering if we can help in some way, it's sometimes difficult to pick out the questions that get a bit lost among all the other posts. Well, next time you ask a question that you'd like to get noticed, instead of the usual "Submit response" button, try using the "Submit question" button instead, and it will put a mark in the corner of your post to make it stand out, like this.... Question .... which ought to make it nice and easy to find in future. Have fun!

OK then, for those who need to make alterations to their images, there are a couple of new toys to play with. 1. Flip. Occasionally, if you've scanned a negative or slide, it's easy to put it in facing the wrong way and end up with a mirror-image of the original. (I did it myself recently, as Dutchman noticed!) You can now "flip" an image left to right to correct this. 2. Sharpen. If a photo looks a little blurred or soft, I've created a sharpen function with five levels from subtle to very sharp. Some photos will look daft with too much - it gives almost an embossed effect - but some can benefit from a little sharpening up occasionally. Any of these new or existing photo-effects can either be applied as soon as a photo is uploaded, by selecting "Edit" afterwards - or to existing images by looking in Your images. Have fun! Rob

Keyboard navigation

I've been having another play, this time with (hopefully) handy keyboard shortcuts. For those on PCs or laptops, you might find the following keys a quick way to navigate through the longer threads.... Left arrow = Goes back a page Right arrow = Goes forward a page The 'F' key = Goes to the First page in a topic The 'L' key = Goes to the Last page in a topic The 'R' key = Goes to the most Recent post in a topic Also, when viewing photos in our Members' Gallery, the left and right arrow keys will take you to the previous or next image, while the 'Home' and 'End' keys will take you to the first or last image respectively. Enjoy playing - and let me know if any of these new toys causes any unforeseen issues, as it's not uncommon for new features to have unwanted consequences!

A quick little extra addition: While browsing through the threads.... The 'N' key = Goes to the Next topic The 'P' key = Goes to the Previous topic So you can now quickly step through each thread to find the one to want.

The new formatting buttons are much appreciated Rob. They save me from having to type a lot awkward keyboard strokes while saving other posters from having to learn basic HTML

Just worth mentioning, for anyone not familiar with this new feature, the easiest way to use the bold, italic or centre formatting buttons is to highlight the word or phrase first (if a single word simply double-click it) then click on the relevant button and the respective code will be placed either side of whatever is highlighted

Thank you, you're very kind and I'm glad they're useful. On "normal" word processors, of course, it would be usual to also see an "Underline" button along with the Bold and Italic, but with online text anything underlined is easily mistaken for a link, and I've been caught out myself trying to click on underlined words thinking they were going to take me somewhere! (Oh, believe me, I need to be taken somewhere - by men in white coats!) If you think any other particular features would be handy though, please let me know your ideas.

This may be a tall order Rob but the ability to turn signatures on and off for individual posts would be extremely helpful. There are times when a signature is totally inappropriate such as in a message of condolence but the only way of turning it off at present is to delete the signature entirely from all posts in the forum.