Not really off topic

For the discussion of matters not relevant to Study Group mailings. idle chit chat, rants and raves - whatever is on your mind or care to share about.
John Whitley
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Re: Not really off topic

Sat May 12, 2018 8:38 pm

Brian wrote:
Sat May 12, 2018 3:09 pm
I can host a forum, so I created one working to display it. Once I have it worked out and ready to migrate I'll let you guys know and add you in as moderators.

Here is the direct link:

https://brianholcombewoodworker.com/community/

This plugin allows one to migrate another forum over, so I'm curious to see what that process involves.

and there is easy access through my main page, which is an option in my overhead menu.

https://wpforo.com/community/migrate-to ... #post-9769

I think probably best if Chris and John, if you guys become members on my site and I will make you moderators of the forum.

Hi Brian,

I signed up, and a few things jumped out:

First, I had to effectively register and/or login twice, once to your WP site, and then onto wordpress.com again. ??? Then, I get a notice along the lines of “this site requires two-factor authentication”, and please go jump through more hoops on wordpress.com to turn that on and enable it. I’m very familiar with that space, but a lot of people aren’t. While I’m all for site security, spam prevention, etc. I have to wonder if this setup is going to prevent a LOT of interested people from even completing registration. Particularly the peculiar double-login thing, which seems like a misconfiguration. It’s strange that this is harder to register and log into than any banking site I’ve used.

Next, once on the forum there’s no clear way to post images. I can’t imagine that arbitrary HTML is allowed, but there’s no guidance one way or another, and none of the toolbar icons seem useful. It’d be really nice if the successor forum lowered the bar to sharing images of our work.
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Brian
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Re: Not really off topic

Sat May 12, 2018 9:34 pm

Interesting, I was not aware that two factor ID was required of the people who join my site. I’ll see if it can be removed.

I don’t have many answers at the moment, basically WP supports this type of forum and one other so it is possible that the other type is better and easier to use.

I’m all ears as for input however. Id like to make it easy as possible.
John Whitley
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Location: Seattle, WA
Posts: 148
Joined: Sun May 04, 2014 8:56 pm

Re: Not really off topic

Sat May 12, 2018 10:07 pm

Brian wrote:
Sat May 12, 2018 9:34 pm
Interesting, I was not aware that two factor ID was required of the people who join my site. I’ll see if it can be removed.

I don’t have many answers at the moment, basically WP supports this type of forum and one other so it is possible that the other type is better and easier to use.

I’m all ears as for input however. Id like to make it easy as possible.
I’ll look around and see if there’s any documentation in the forum that may clarify things. Still, if it is possible to add images, it’s not great that it’s not obvious.
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Chris Hall
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Re: Not really off topic

Sat May 12, 2018 10:08 pm

You'll want the new forum to have some sort of good system for keeping the spambots at bay. The current system I use here, that of requesting admin for a password, has been effective, though I do get regular emails from spambots, on a nearly daily basis, which spam me via the forum :x

Hopefully it will not be a technical headache migrating from phpbb to wordpress's format - have you looked into this issue?
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Brian
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Re: Not really off topic

Sat May 12, 2018 10:51 pm

The image thing is actually easier but strange and non-intuitive.

you simply post a link and the image appears in the post, rather than using img tags as you would in most forums. I think that can be explained in a sticky and people can on-board.

I added a package for embedding youtube videos and images from flickr and instagram. $11, so cheap enough to bother with it.

It's definitely not as advanced as this forum, but it can become as advanced with a few packages. Only thing I find really annoying is that if I want it full screen than my site needs to be dedicated to it, rather than just full screen when you click on 'forum' which would seem to me to be a simple thing.

Anyways, if there is continued interest in moving in this direction, we can migrate the forum.
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Brian
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Re: Not really off topic

Sat May 12, 2018 10:53 pm

I think it's technically difficult and I"m not especially tech savvy, so hoping to have John's help on migrating.

My understanding is that you have to migrate twice, once from phpBB to BBpress to WPforo.

Two-step ID will definitely keep the spam bots at bay. :lol: I don't see an option for eliminating two step ID. Personally I use it on everything so maybe it's just worth keeping and getting used to.
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Brian
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Re: Not really off topic

Sat May 12, 2018 11:01 pm

John Whitley wrote:
Sat May 12, 2018 10:07 pm
Brian wrote:
Sat May 12, 2018 9:34 pm
Interesting, I was not aware that two factor ID was required of the people who join my site. I’ll see if it can be removed.

I don’t have many answers at the moment, basically WP supports this type of forum and one other so it is possible that the other type is better and easier to use.

I’m all ears as for input however. Id like to make it easy as possible.
I’ll look around and see if there’s any documentation in the forum that may clarify things. Still, if it is possible to add images, it’s not great that it’s not obvious.
John, it may be possible to add code to bring the option into the panel in a more obvious way. I surfed around a big on Gvectors (the maker) forum and saw some mention of that being a possibility. Not sure where to add it, except maybe in my website editor?
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Brian
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Re: Not really off topic

Sun May 13, 2018 8:47 am

I'm starting to get a better handle on this:

Chris, I found the anti-spam setup yesterday and looked it over briefly. The wordpress anti-spam works pretty well in my experience with the occasional commission request going into the spam list :x

I put together a basic layout mostly so that it doesn't look so weird to have a 'forum' on my site and then basically nothing except an example category since this may take a while to migrate.
John Whitley
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Location: Seattle, WA
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Re: Not really off topic

Mon May 14, 2018 5:25 pm

FWIW, I don't mind TFA for login. But the whole thing where it makes me login to the forum and then again to wordpress.com is ... bizarre and annoying. It's the whole package of double-login plus TFA that gets to be a bit much.

I'll give the image posting a spin and see how that works. Brian, will the video plugin also accept Vimeo links? I've got a Vimeo Pro account, so it'd be convenient if I could post from there.

I should note that I've done custom site development on Wordpress. While I'm not a full-on WP specialist, I have nontrivial experience and can pitch in to help if there's anything that we'd like to customize/tweak/etc.
John Whitley
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Location: Seattle, WA
Posts: 148
Joined: Sun May 04, 2014 8:56 pm

Re: Not really off topic

Mon May 14, 2018 5:53 pm

I just tried the image posting, and ran into a frustrating problem: the image URL parser doesn't handle URL queries. E.g. a Dropbox share link will have the form:

Code: Select all

https://www.dropbox.com/s/30ub1hbwyfh1595/sumitsubo-1.jpg?dl=0

The query suffix can be easily modified to present the image directly on a website, vs. browsing the file on Dropbox:

Code: Select all

https://www.dropbox.com/s/30ub1hbwyfh1595/sumitsubo-1.jpg?raw=1

But the "?raw=1" part is incorrectly dropped by the forum's image URL parser, resulting in a "broken image" icon followed by the unparsed "?raw=1" text. :roll:

I can work around this by modifying the Dropbox URL to another form... but that's still sub-optimal.

Related: I don't see any way to edit or delete a post, so I have no way to fix the above problem. Since there's no post preview function in this forum software, I just had to submit it and see that it was broken... so another :roll: for that.

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