[Meta] Forum Tweaks

PeterJones

I noticed yesterday evening that the forum “look and feel” got tweaked a little bit – I think maybe the CSS and JS was updated. And now with the first post I am writing, I see that the editor panel has definitely changed. Hmph – the other changes, I was okay with, though it would take getting used to … but the editor is now narrower than it used to be… I’m not sure I like the “squished” feel. :-(

But the biggest change was this morning, when I received a couple of emails from NodeBB! Back when email notification was first mentioned in the settings, I narrowed it down so almost nothing had email notifications on, but apparently @-mentions were still enabled. And with the changes yesterday, apparently the email notification might have started working!

So now I’m running an experiment, and I’m going to see if some of the other regulars, like @guy038 , @Alan-Kilborn , @Terry-R, and @Ekopalypse, have also started seeing emails.

But it may be time for everyone to check their “notification” settings, and make sure that they won’t be getting too many emails, but that they’ve got emails enabled for things where they do want email notifications.

Michael Vincent

@peterjones said in [Meta] Forum Tweaks:

if some of the other regulars, like guy038 , Alan-Kilborn , Terry-R, and Ekopalypse

Hmm, I’m a little sad I’m not included in this group :-P . I may just uninstall “PerlScript” in protest! Who am I kidding, I’m NEVER uninstalling PerlScript …

No worries though, I don’t have any email notifications enabled so I wouldn’t have been any the wiser had I not viewed this thread.

Cheers.

PeterJones

@michael-vincent ,

Can I blame it on a lack of coffee this morning? ;-)

Alan Kilborn

Same for me as Michael, no email notifications enabled, so nothing of that nature received.

I’ve noticed that new messages in the “inbox” provoke a change in the Chrome tab signalling it, which I like. I seem to remember that long ago this used to happen but then it stopped. I’m glad its back.

Terry R

@peterjones said in [Meta] Forum Tweaks:

I noticed yesterday evening that the forum “look and feel” got tweaked a little bit

Yes I did “sort of” notice a change. Things started to show a bit of colour, if we can call the “pinned” icon changing to red, the same red as a lot of other new coloured icons. I haven’t got any notifications set to use email, possibly thank god as don’t need to be inundated with additional “stuff”. Maybe I might turn on some later.

Also interesting, at least for me, is the profile menu. Suddenly it shows how many posts you have done, upvotes, downvotes, etc.etc. I’ve used some to click on, but don’t recall seeing so many different “counters” before, nor with a number for each.

More interesting is that it seems I could if I wanted to remove any image uploads as there is a "wastebasket icon alongside each upload. Not sure that would be a good idea, if suddenly months down the tracks someone tried reading a thread and it refers to a “lost” image!

I also see I’ve given 22 downvotes, is that an acceptable number ;-)). Am I pulling “my weight” so to speak?

Terry

Ekopalypse

@peterjones I didn’t have any notifications enabled, so I didn’t get any, but now I’ve changed a few settings, let’s see how that goes.

PeterJones

@Ekopalypse ,

Left the @-mention, to see if that triggers with your changed settings, even though this is really just part of the whole discussion.

Based on these replies, I was the only “regular” who had left any notifications enabled (well, we still don’t know about Guy). I guess I was overly pessimistic, and assumed that notifications would never work. ;-)

But I have confirmed that changing those settings stopped the email notifications for me

We’ll see what happens after the “maintenance” in a few hours.

Ekopalypse

@peterjones yes, that’s what I left :-)

But at the moment there is an open “problem” for me. It tells me that I need to confirm my email and that an email has been sent, but so far I haven’t received one. I have also checked my spam folder. Maybe it needs some time.

guy038

Hello, @peterjones and All,

An off-topic preamble :

Sorry for being away since beginning of November ! I was going through all my photo folders again, changing the framing, orientation as well as the size of each photo by lowering their quality factor JPEG

Regarding the last point, read this very interesting article, from Jeffrey Friedl, the author of the excellent Mastering Regular Expressions book :

http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/jpeg-quality

So, practically, a folder containing 42 '.JPG' pictures, taken with my Panasonic DMC-FZ28, for a total size of 183 Mb, uses only 53,9 Mb, after diminution of the initial JPEG factor from 97/98 to 80, so 3.4 times less than initially, although no decrease, at all, in visual quality can be observed !

You know I ( finally ! ) purchased a Win 10 laptop with SSD storage. However, as I read that SSD’s have a limited lifetime number of writes ( may be I’m too paranoiac ! ), I still use my old laptop to manage all my photos, before moving this whole list, sorted by year and theme, on my recent laptop !

One said :

“Backup now & backup often.” It’s YOUR digital life - protect it with a backup. Three things are certain: Birth, Death and Loss of Data. YOU control the last !

So, don’t worry, my 30 Gb amount of photos are saved, in three locations ( on two external hard drives and on a USB key, too ) !

Back to this topic, I also noticed the recent changes of the NodBB forum. Trying to connect using my GitHub login, I received this e-mail :

Hey guy038!

A third-party OAuth application (Notepad++ Community) with user:email scope was recently authorized to access your account.
Visit https://github.com/settings/connections/applications/ followed with a range 20 hexadecimal digits, for more information.

To see this and other security events for your account, visit https://github.com/settings/security-log

If you run into problems, please contact support by visiting https://github.com/contact

Thanks,
The GitHub Team

And, after confirming this e-mail by clicking on the concerned link, I could be normally connected to our NodeBB forum, keeping my moderator rights.

However, note that the NodeBB site seems functional, only on my recent Win 10 laptop with Microsoft Edge Premium. Lot of functionalities stop to work when joining our site, with Firefox ESR on my old Win XP laptop !

I also modified some of the notifications’ parameters, in my profile, adding the Email notification. Now, I’m waiting for possible e-mails from NodeBB forum. I will keep you informed…

BR

guy038

P.S. :

In Jeffrey Friedl’s blog, a lot of articles concern photography, color management and pictures. So, is there a specific interest in these matters, from all people involved in regular expressions, like me ??

artie-finkelstein

@guy038
Just my 1/50 of a greenback:

With a decent backup strategy (1:2:3 comes to mind) being actively applied, I believe your paranoia is depriving you of the wonderful speedup a SSD can give any machine and the user’s workflow.

The wear leveling algorithm used in the current SSD controllers does a superb job of spreading out the write load across the individual flash memory cells. It’s not like a particular cell is always being erased and rewritten when a file is modified. But, unlike spinning rust, there is rarely any warning of impending failure (and putting the SSD in the freezer does not help with drive recovery <grin>), thus the policy of backups.

One other point, the wear leveling gets pretty useless if the drive is close to being full; I aim for at least 25% headroom and rethink drive assignments when I hit 90% full (but that’s just my rule of thumb).

artie-finkelstein

@guy038 said in [Meta] Forum Tweaks:

http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/jpeg-quality

I have to differ with Mr. Freidl’s overall assessment IF his conclusions are used outside of the area of direct/immediate application of a fixed image size. His suggested size reductions most certainly are counter to the fundamentals of digital preservation (a key one being: first do no harm) and things like ‘someday I may want to blow this image up to poster or billboard size’, at which time you’ll need ALL the spacial resolution you can get out of a JPG (which in and of itself, is the wrong format, i.e., lossy, to use for such eventualities).

I consider file size to be the LAST thing to worry about as long term storage capacities will keep increasing faster than the ability to recover any deleted information. Example- you wouldn’t need to buy Blu-rays if DVDs had stored much more data per unit of playback time.

BTW: Flash drives (thumb or SSD) are most certainly NOT archival as they use stored voltage levels in microscopic capacitors, which will degrade much faster than spinning rust (disk) or streaming rust (tape), which are still both giving consumer optical storage (DVD-R or BD-R) a good ‘run for their money’ for archival purposes.

guy038

Hello, @artie-finkelstein and All,

Yes, your different points of view are quite sensible ! It’s just that I still used to think about a laptop as a limited storage device ( My old Win XP machine had two partitions : C: of 10 Gb and D: of 30 Gb, only ! ). So, let me a couple of weeks to fully realize that my new Win 10 laptop has 415 Gb of free space !!

I first considered to recopy all my 30 Gb pack of photos ( already saved on two different external HDD and on a 64 Gb USB key ) on the SSD disk of my HP machine. But, you’re right ! This operation is useless : I just have to keep the USB key and the tiny 2 Tb HDD, recently purchased, in my laptop bag, for any further photo session !

Cheers

guy038