Love the new look site!
Welcome to the new ZooChat
- Thread starter Simon Hampel
- Start date
It seems that this new post count only counts posts in the forums, and not those in the gallery.
I did wonder if it was something like that, thanks!
So another thing that I've found and that I though was worth pointing out here is that it seems I am no longer subscribed to any photos as the list here: https://www.zoochat.com/community/watched/media says "You are not currently watching any media items."
Though subscriptions to forum threads seems to be working fine and all the subscriptions are still there and I am getting notifications from them.
It seems that this would make it impossible to tell when someone has replied to one of your pictures.
Though subscriptions to forum threads seems to be working fine and all the subscriptions are still there and I am getting notifications from them.
It seems that this would make it impossible to tell when someone has replied to one of your pictures.
I'm currently unable to upload photographs... I have selected the gallery (ZSL Whipsnade Zoo) and the content I wish to upload, it loads the first one I select, saying it is 100% complete but then stops, the bit to the left of it doesn't show the photograph at all. 
EDIT: I have since tried this on my tablet (I didn't actually upload anything fully, as I don't have the photos on it), and using a random picture it seemed to work, but differently to on my computer (with a black box appearing), it got me to the stage of adding a description and titles.
EDIT: I have since tried this on my tablet (I didn't actually upload anything fully, as I don't have the photos on it), and using a random picture it seemed to work, but differently to on my computer (with a black box appearing), it got me to the stage of adding a description and titles.
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Fantastic to be back again. Definitely a great job on the new website.
For your own media items, a quick check of account settings indicates you can choose to be notified if they are commented upon/liked here: https://www.zoochat.com/community/account/alert-preferences
(it seems to be set to notify by default)
Yes, well spotted - because of the way we had to handle photo threads, they are now counted separately on the new site. I'm not entirely happy about it, but it was the only real choice for getting the migration done.
Basically, on the old site I had photos show up with their own thread and the description of the photo was the first post in the thread.
I've had to move each of the posts in those threads into a comment on the photo in the gallery which means they no longer count as posts. What's more, photo threads with no description actually lose a post because there was no comment added for empty posts.
I'll have to tweak the way we display some information and I'm disappointed with how unimportant comments on photos seem to be with the gallery - but I'll try and improve that (and I've made some requests from the developers for future versions).
The old site was really looking it's age, and while it held a lot of nostalgia for me - not just as a new member, but as a reminder of many old message boards I'd been on - I knew that it wasn't likely to last, or if it did, would probably start to hurt more than help.
The staff deserve a lot of credit for how great the migration has worked out so far though - a lot of XenForo upgrades I've seen felt like they robbed a website of some of it's sense of identity, or removed features as much as they gained. ZooChat still feels very distinctly like ZooChat shortly into the upgrade, and while I can see in the posts a couple features are lost, on the whole, it looks like a lot has been kept or gained, and the staff seems eager to regain what's lost.
Mostly, I'm just impressed the staff did such a good job migrating the site to new software without losing what it already was. Good work!
The staff deserve a lot of credit for how great the migration has worked out so far though - a lot of XenForo upgrades I've seen felt like they robbed a website of some of it's sense of identity, or removed features as much as they gained. ZooChat still feels very distinctly like ZooChat shortly into the upgrade, and while I can see in the posts a couple features are lost, on the whole, it looks like a lot has been kept or gained, and the staff seems eager to regain what's lost.
Mostly, I'm just impressed the staff did such a good job migrating the site to new software without losing what it already was. Good work!
Yes, it took a LOT of planning, preparation and several test migrations to get it all working.
I think I'm getting the hang of all the changes and there's a lot to like 
BUT I do have a tiny complaint: below each item in the Media is the instruction "Rate This Media:" with 5 blank stars.
Speaking as an old pedant who spent 35 years using hundreds of red pens to correct thousands of pages of student's written work, this phrase is so irritatingly wrong that it almost causes me physical pain each time I look at a photo.
I do so hope that it can be changed. 'Rate This Medium' would be grammatically correct, but inappropriate. Likewise 'Rate These Media'. Perhaps 'Rate This Item' would be best.
Please! Pretty please!
BUT I do have a tiny complaint: below each item in the Media is the instruction "Rate This Media:" with 5 blank stars.
Speaking as an old pedant who spent 35 years using hundreds of red pens to correct thousands of pages of student's written work, this phrase is so irritatingly wrong that it almost causes me physical pain each time I look at a photo.
I do so hope that it can be changed. 'Rate This Medium' would be grammatically correct, but inappropriate. Likewise 'Rate These Media'. Perhaps 'Rate This Item' would be best.
Please! Pretty please!
I agree, I've changed it to "Rate This Item" on my development server, will push it out to the production server with some other changes in due course.
It appears that one cannot attach images to posts anymore unless they are already in the gallery - although posts which already have images attached appear as normal; for instance, I am unable to attach any photographs to this post:
Alpine Zoo Innsbruck - The Alpine Adventures Of A Tea-Loving Dave - April 11 2015
If I try, I get a message saying "The uploaded file does not have an allowed extension."
Alpine Zoo Innsbruck - The Alpine Adventures Of A Tea-Loving Dave - April 11 2015
If I try, I get a message saying "The uploaded file does not have an allowed extension."
Yes, this was a deliberate move to discourage (prevent) people from attaching photos to posts rather than uploading to the gallery.
Unless you have a very good reason for needing photos attached to posts instead of in the gallery, I don't intend to change that. I'm prepared to listen to arguments though.
Well, the primary reason I like having that function is that it allows me to annotate my trip report posts with supplementary images which may not be to the standard one would prefer in the gallery or which are otherwise inappropriate for placement here, but which serve a useful purpose in terms of illustration. For the ease of reference I'll use examples from the thread I am working on at present, along with past threads, to illustrate this point.
In this post I have attached a number of photographs of the mountains, countryside and city surrounding Alpenzoo; this serves a useful purpose insofar as much as it gives a feel for the surroundings of the collection, but would be inappropriate uploaded within the Alpenzoo gallery itself; moreover, as scenery shots they do not really fall within the remit of any other area of the gallery. Similarly, in this post I have attached a scanned image of the Tierpark Berlin map which I have annotated with labels showing the route I walked around the collection; this serves an important purpose given the size and complexity of the collection in helping people to visualise my trip to Tierpark Berlin as related within my trip report, but due to the relatively low quality of the image and its origin as a third-party map it would not be appropriate for inclusion within the gallery. Finally, some images may be useful for illustration purposes - possibly being the only images of a given taxon or exhibit on the forum - but nonetheless too poor to merit inclusion within the gallery.
Moreover, being able to attach these images at the end of posts rather than having to link to the gallery means that the flow of the text is not broken up by images - as happens if one inserts an image into the text using the existing "Media Gallery Embed" tool as follows:
Can you imagine my trip report threads if something like the above appeared multiple times within every post?
No one would be able to read such an eyesore! The alternative - hyperlinking to the images within the gallery without actually posting the images within the text - rather defeats the purpose of providing supplementary images which can be viewed as one reads the thread, being as it requires one to navigate away from the thread or open the images in a distinct tab, even if one disregards the points I made above about the suitability of images for the gallery in the first place.
Finally, and least consequentially; having to completely change the style and method by which I approach my trip reports when I am half-way through a massive thread just feels *wrong* somehow, and will cause quite a jarring disconnect between the earlier and later portions in retrospect. But.... ....your place, your rules
PS: Out of curiosity, even if the above argument fails to sway you I'd be interested to know your reasons for disliking the idea of attaching images to individual posts
In this post I have attached a number of photographs of the mountains, countryside and city surrounding Alpenzoo; this serves a useful purpose insofar as much as it gives a feel for the surroundings of the collection, but would be inappropriate uploaded within the Alpenzoo gallery itself; moreover, as scenery shots they do not really fall within the remit of any other area of the gallery. Similarly, in this post I have attached a scanned image of the Tierpark Berlin map which I have annotated with labels showing the route I walked around the collection; this serves an important purpose given the size and complexity of the collection in helping people to visualise my trip to Tierpark Berlin as related within my trip report, but due to the relatively low quality of the image and its origin as a third-party map it would not be appropriate for inclusion within the gallery. Finally, some images may be useful for illustration purposes - possibly being the only images of a given taxon or exhibit on the forum - but nonetheless too poor to merit inclusion within the gallery.
Moreover, being able to attach these images at the end of posts rather than having to link to the gallery means that the flow of the text is not broken up by images - as happens if one inserts an image into the text using the existing "Media Gallery Embed" tool as follows:
Can you imagine my trip report threads if something like the above appeared multiple times within every post?
No one would be able to read such an eyesore! The alternative - hyperlinking to the images within the gallery without actually posting the images within the text - rather defeats the purpose of providing supplementary images which can be viewed as one reads the thread, being as it requires one to navigate away from the thread or open the images in a distinct tab, even if one disregards the points I made above about the suitability of images for the gallery in the first place.Finally, and least consequentially; having to completely change the style and method by which I approach my trip reports when I am half-way through a massive thread just feels *wrong* somehow, and will cause quite a jarring disconnect between the earlier and later portions in retrospect. But.... ....your place, your rules
PS: Out of curiosity, even if the above argument fails to sway you I'd be interested to know your reasons for disliking the idea of attaching images to individual posts
There is a new feature with this gallery that we didn't previously have - personal albums.
This would be the ideal spot to put photos which don't really deserve to be in the gallery but you want to refer to in posts.
Don't forget, you have the option of including thumbnails instead of larger images (Edit: I'm not a fan of the way that's cropped though - will have to look into that):
... you can also just embed the image from the gallery rather than doing the fancy things with the tabs:
... as for the reason why - it's mostly technical reasons. The forums aren't designed to have hundreds of thousands of photos as attachments - they become impossible to manage.
With 280,000+ photos, managing the size and storage becomes non-trivial, indeed I've had to upgrade my server to one that's costing US$100pm more than I was previously paying - just so I can fit the photo galleries in.
I need to get a lot more paying members to help cover those costs, else it will start to become prohibitive. I want to encourage people to share more photos, but unless I can keep costs under control (or generate sufficient revenue to cover those increasing costs), I simply can't sustain the rate of growth in resource usage without controls.
The point is that in the gallery, I can do things like automatically resize photos you upload to a smaller resolution, allocate disk usage quotas to various groups of people, and I have access to all sorts of other facilities to help manage that storage usage.
I don't get anything like that for attachments. The system just isn't designed around having 280,000+ photos as attachments - it's unsustainable.
I think we can do everything you need using the gallery - we just need to learn the new way to do things.
This would be the ideal spot to put photos which don't really deserve to be in the gallery but you want to refer to in posts.
Don't forget, you have the option of including thumbnails instead of larger images (Edit: I'm not a fan of the way that's cropped though - will have to look into that):
... you can also just embed the image from the gallery rather than doing the fancy things with the tabs:
... as for the reason why - it's mostly technical reasons. The forums aren't designed to have hundreds of thousands of photos as attachments - they become impossible to manage.
With 280,000+ photos, managing the size and storage becomes non-trivial, indeed I've had to upgrade my server to one that's costing US$100pm more than I was previously paying - just so I can fit the photo galleries in.
I need to get a lot more paying members to help cover those costs, else it will start to become prohibitive. I want to encourage people to share more photos, but unless I can keep costs under control (or generate sufficient revenue to cover those increasing costs), I simply can't sustain the rate of growth in resource usage without controls.
The point is that in the gallery, I can do things like automatically resize photos you upload to a smaller resolution, allocate disk usage quotas to various groups of people, and I have access to all sorts of other facilities to help manage that storage usage.
I don't get anything like that for attachments. The system just isn't designed around having 280,000+ photos as attachments - it's unsustainable.
I think we can do everything you need using the gallery - we just need to learn the new way to do things.
As for photo storage space, I am surprised that you now allow very large images. It says pixels must be no larger than (rounding down to even numbers) 2000x3000 pixels. This is huge and seems unnecessary. Just my opinion.
On the plus side for my fellow Outlook/Hotmail users, we are now getting email notifications again.
On the plus side for my fellow Outlook/Hotmail users, we are now getting email notifications again.
Yeah, I thought I would experiment with the settings somewhat.
I currently run a 2560x1440 monitor, and 4K monitors are becoming fairly common now. I basically set the maximum allowed image size to allow a 4K image (technically, it is UHD - 3840x2160 where full 4K is 4096x2160).
Even UHD is probably a bit too high really, but I needed to set it to something and I wanted to go a bit higher than regular FHD (1920x1080).
It's a matter of finding a balance between what looks good versus what's going to consume all the space.
I'm hoping that the next major release of the forum software supports automatic shifting of media to cloud storage - which is how I managed the space requirements for the previous version of ZooChat, but which came with its own set of challenges (we'd lose the ability to rotate/flip photos), and it's not exactly low cost either (although possibly cheaper than the alternative).