Upon further review ... Maybe the best moderation in a case like this -- people willingly engaged in dialogue irrelevant to hotspringing -- is to move it to another forum. Free for all, basically. That's pretty much what I'm thinking of doing. Rather than enforcing "no religion" and "...

Religious discussion is outside the scope of this forum, even in the free-for-all section. Since it looked like it wasn't going to stop, I have edited the topic to delete all the religious references. We now return to our discussion of Strawberry Park, already in progress...

The best way to get a specific question (such as "Is going to Granite Hot Springs on May 16 a good idea?") answered is to start a new topic with the nature of your question in the title. Even if a general topic like "Granite Hot Springs" exists, nobody should ever feel like they ...

this restructuring would, over time, enable this site to become the one comprehensive source for US hot springs information. That definitely was not my intention in starting this site up. We needed a way to continue the casual conversation that had been going on for a number of years at Soak.net bu...

Seems to be behaving OK now. Occasionally servers have glitches, something as simple as the power going out at the server location. The company I'm using for hosting has its servers located in Houston, TX, so we'll see what happens when a hurricane is heading into town. I'm pretty satisfied with the...

I've mentioned this a number of times on various forums, but the best way to boot obnoxious Internet advertising from your life is to install and use the Firefox browser, make sure pop-up blocking is active and install the Adblock Plus add-on to Firefox. That combination really does make the Interne...

There are no ads on this forum. Your pop-ups are coming from somewhere else.

I know that Windows Messenger used to be the source of a lot of these problems. I disabled it years ago.

Eric

Yes, mikel, I got your message. The issue above was that the person had deleted it from their outbox before I read it. On the subject of private messages, a few of the e-mails that the software automatically sends out (such as to notify you that you have a private message) are bouncing back to me un...

Hello everyone. A couple of times recently I have received the automatic e-mail saying I have a private message. Then when I log on to the forum to look for it, the message isn't there. Reasons could be: 1. There's something wrong with the forum software and the private message isn't being delivered...

As Bruce says, we're relying on providing good information about picture postings to users, rather than imposing restrictions via the forum software, to keep the threads with pictures easily viewable. I think this will always be the preferred solution, although I'll look at the software options agai...

The phpBB software is free, being open source. The hosting account is not free but it isn't expensive enough to make it necessary to get contributions.

I do accept free beers when we are soaking together, though.

Eric

The personal messages are not quite the same as e-mail. When you compose a PM and hit "Submit", the message goes into your Outbox, but it does not go from your Outbox to your Sentbox until the recipient reads it. While the message is in your Outbox, you (the sender) can edit it or delete i...

So if we have 40 posts per page, wouldn't that just make each view longer? Seems to me it should be less than, not more than. --bruce... Are you talking about the time it takes to download the thread? If someone added 20 more pictures in the 16th comment on the thread, then yes it would extend the ...

In this thread, 15 posts appeared before 'page 2' was started. I assume administrators have set the max number at '15' in some box of options? Yeah, I was thinking 15 was a little too low. Increased to 40 posts per page. Eric P.S. One offhand comment making an analogy between dial-up and TV antenna...

My thinking is that on-topic posts generally should not be edited by the site admins or moderators. On the user's side, there are some common-sense guidelines to follow. 10 to 20 pictures in a single topic does not seem excessive, but 70 to 80 pictures is a lot and really should be broken into sever...

Hi Tim: I'm new to this administration and moderation business, so learning as I go. I'm definitely moving toward the side of minimal to no moderation of users' on-topic posts. It sounds like your trip report is best posted as one topic. As stated in the other conversation you referenced, the consid...

I made a small change in the forum software. Until now, when you visited the site and then left, the software would assume that you had read all the posts made since your last visit and would mark them off as read. Now, only the posts you actually look at are marked as read, so on your next visit, n...

Eric- thanks for the tip about Adblock Plus and Flashblock. I love the Firefox browser and use it almost exclusively. I can't imagine why anyone running the Windows OS would choose to use Internet Explorer anymore. Firefox with Adblock Plus makes the web experience so much more pleasant with the el...

OK, let's try this. I have increased the maximum allowed dimensions of avatars to 125 x 125 and the maximum file size has been increased to 20 kb. So you should be able to get a decent quality picture in there and 125 x 125 is about 56% larger than 100 x 100. The animation...as I said I've seen this...

The answer to your question is yes, the maximum file size can be increased. What I've run into on other sites is that some people find animated avatars as annoying as flashing ads. Tim's avatar is a good example of what you would see. If anybody has thoughts about that one way or the other, please c...