this is a test

[GoldOxide_imp]

Gold , you are right about constant changes to make things "better and easier" ; we have sold probably over a 1000 things on eBay over the last 10 years and they change all the time and not for the better in my opinion. It gets sometimes too complicated , all right for nerds setting up these programs but not for the average user. Many people now complain about the complexity of the info systems on the new cars of today.
The programmers make it too difficult , who reads a 1000 page manual , just 20 pages for setting up your radio ! I am getting older and perhaps soon I do not have to worry about this anymore . As long as I can open a bottle of beer I will be ok !

" ... puh-thistt ... Congratulations! You have just won a prize from your favourite brewing company. This is not a real bottle of beer, however, listen carefully to the code we will read, and then go to http://www.NotYourAverageBeerAnymore.com and see what prize you actually won. Maybe it is a bottle of beer! Maybe, it is a brand new CB1100! Just fill out the form, include solving the jigsaw image (so we know you are not a robot), add a creditcard account secured by a 40-character mixed symbol passphrase, answer a few security questions, solve a mathematical time-limited question, use the latest Chromium browser, ensure your Java Virtual Machine is up-to-date and then follow the instructions. You may be on your way to that free refreshing brew you were reaching for. Good luck! ... "




Stay thirsty for zero calorie knowledge my friend.

[Houtman_imp]

Instructions like the above is enough to drive me to drink !

[j3gq_imp]

From the perspective of other forum users, it's much kinder to use a photo hosting service as, for some reason, the forum software is able to manage the display size of photos it links to. It can't seem to do that with photos uploaded to the forum. That avoids the phenomenon of really wide photos that you need to scroll across the page to see and that make the text on the page unreadable.

Until someone like photobucket pulls there free service and ten years worth of threads lose all semblance of clarity. I shall try harder to shrink any uploads.

I know this was discussed before, but I can't remember the upshot.
-> All the photos ever posted on the forum would easily fit on one free cloud drive/account, and if we all agreed to use one and only the same one - all the time, this could easily be backed up on one single, obsolete HDD once a week. The hard drive I would happily donate.
So why was it again that we all accept to loose these photos over and over again ?

[Houtman_imp]

I wish that you could just email pictures to the Forum but ONLY for members , probably will never happen as it could be misused by others.

[Cormanus]

I’m not clear what you mean, j3gq. How would it work?

By the way, I’m only aware that we ‘lost’ photos due to external interference once: when Photobucket shut down access to non-susbsribers’ photos. They’ve since relented, although the photos of non-subscribers are watermarked. There are workarounds for that using browser extensions in Chrome and Firefox. The other reason photos have disappeared is that members have deleted them or closed their accounts.

[j3gq_imp]

I’m not clear what you mean, j3gq. How would it work?

By the way, I’m only aware that we ‘lost’ photos due to external interference once: when Photobucket shut down access to non-susbsribers’ photos. They’ve since relented, although the photos of non-subscribers are watermarked. There are workarounds for that using browser extensions in Chrome and Firefox. The other reason photos have disappeared is that members have deleted them or closed their accounts.

If problems are really that rare, there was of course no need to change anything. But the risk remains.

A simple solution is this : a Nextcloud account, at a trustworthy provider. Everybody, and I mean everybody uploads his or her photos to that same account, and photos are automatically trimmed to say 100kB during upload. The owner (or you, or me) syncs this cloud folder with a local hard-drive (HDD) once a week, and ideally from a fast ADSL home network. This keeps the photos and all files names. Should that cloud ever go down, or require ransom, all we have to do is create a new account with another operator, and upload the contents of the private HDD to the new cloud. In the worst case, one directory name change might be needed on the server which hosts the CB forum.

Within your / our posts, all photos are linked to the very same nextcloud account. It might be worth a good trial (and error) session before you all stone me.
Some number crunching :
forum posts so far 270,000
est. # of pics per each 1000 posts = 100
est. # of pictures in the forum = 2700
allowed size of any picture uploaded = 100kB
total size of all forum pictures (GB) = 2700 x 100 / 1,000,000 << 2GB
2GB is the standard "free" size of a nextcloud provider account (private cloud)

[Cormanus]

It seems good idea, j3gq. Can I check that I understand what you’ve said?

When a user wants to post a photo, she uploads it to the forum’s cloud account and that process somehow trims the file size to 100 kb. Can she then embed a link the file in the post in the same way that one can embed a link from Imgur, or does she have to download the smaller image and upload it to the forum’s storage? She would then have to post a reference to the location of the file in the cloud storage.

[j3gq_imp]

It seems good idea, j3gq. Can I check that I understand what you’ve said?

When a user wants to post a photo, she uploads it to the forum’s cloud account and that process somehow trims the file size to 100 kb. Can she then embed a link the file in the post in the same way that one can embed a link from Imgur, or does she have to download the smaller image and upload it to the forum’s storage? She would then have to post a reference to the location of the file in the cloud storage.