Hey Guys,
As most of you know I’m a student. One of the best perks is summer break, a long period of time in which I don’t really have to do much. One thing I do plan to do though is run through the forum top down again to improve and fix issues similar to last year when I went 20+ plugins to make this site more usable.
I try not to make huge edits during school year since classes and homework don’t allow time for the necessary backups, implementation and testing.
If you have any suggestions or feature requests please let me know. I’ll try my best to implement them while keeping the site usable for others.
At this moment I think the site works fine as is. (being a long time registered user, that is…)
How about some more content gathering in whatever way. (more posts, more useful info, more members)
How about a course on calculating composites? Perhaps contact Al Horsmon abou tthat. (head of number crunchers at SP Canada). He did an online course earlier (back in 1998 or so). Preferably with online available books (ebooks), as that was the problem for many at that time.
Good suggestion but the problem is twofold. I’ve implemented Captchas on the registration which should stop computers from registering freely. Problem is once you get a human to pass the registration step they can pass the login info to a computer to post whatever they want. Unless I implement captchas for every post, which would be annoying for all users, I can’t verify someone is actually human.
Compounded with that is that human’s themselves are unsavory folks sometime. For the same reason we lock our houses and cars and never leave our wallets in the open, I have to have some trial period to ensure legitimate humans aren’t using this site for their own end. Companies like Decaptcha (http://decaptcher-reloaded.com/client/) and others pay humans to manually spam for pennies an hour.
I do do my best to make sure the system is unobtrusive and that legitimate posts get posted quickly. Also for established users like yourself you’ll find that none of your posts will be filtered and that you have all your options.
This is an aspect I’d like to improve on. Last summer I had some spare time so I posted those tutorials in the engineering section but there wasn’t much participation in them. I’m not sure what the cause was, if they were too basic, partially incomplete or maybe not intriguing enough. I myself am relatively new to composites and would have to pay someone with more knowledge to teach a course. Being 22 and never having made more money than I’ve spent in a year makes unfeasible at the moment. I can’t wait to get a real job and quit paying tuition bills :D.
I did go through the SEO again though to ensure this site stays on the top of the Google ranking. It looks like the number of posts is increasing although the useful information in those threads is another metric.
And even though I can’t add much information I’m hoping I can make it easier to find whatever is existing here. Hopefully the tag and search feature have improved information retrieval on this site,
Nonetheless I have planned to add some interesting content. NEI Nastran has been gracious enough to lend me a short license for their software. Once I learn how to use that effectively I was planning on posting a short tutorial on how to go about ply modeling. Also once I finished my research I was planning on posting my methodology and results.
I’m working pretty hard to become a composites professional and with that I hope I myself can contribute more to this site and I also hope I make more contacts that I can refer here too! The people here are some of the friendliest I’ve met in the composites field and it’s really neat being able to talk about our projects. Hopefully we can keep that going.
Hojo, thanks for the reminder! I completely forgot about that problem.
Changed to automatic database markers. Read markers are now stored in the forum database than locally on your computer. This is the most resource intensive method but hopefully Hostmonster won’t complain.
This is also the most risky option by far since the number of write and rewrites to the server increase but life wouldn’t be fun without a little danger :).
Right now all the posts will show as read since the database has no information on what you read and haven’t read. Use the Forum Tools menu on the upper right to mark the entire forum read. After a little bit though it should be much more accurate.
Canyon, As a new user myself I can give you input into what I am looking for when I come to this site and what I would like to find. Obviously, being a student yourself, there are limitations on what you can provide but I would certainly like to access as much of a database as possible. The pay per view area is something I would be interested in, but I am hesitant without a “sneak peak” in terms of content. So perhaps access to the topics and possibly one sample thread might be a good change to that section.
Hey Rob,
The Pay Per View should have been totally open for months. It’s a relic from the past admins of the forum and it never ended being complete. Instead I just consolidated the threads into one forum and made it open to all. Let me double check the permissions though since it seems as though it’s not what they should be.
Ok I realize what happened. I opened it up for forum donors but to be honest the material in there is somewhat sparse and nothing really worth paying for. It’s now open for anyone to look through.
Another quick note is that I have no plans to monetize this site and even if I was pressed I still likely wouldn’t since I wouldn’t want to disturb the friendly atmosphere we have here. If I ever do becomes a composites professional this site would remain separate from any commercial ventures. As always any and all donations go back into this website. It’s the least I can do for all the great people that frequent this place.
Another suggestion I would like (it is all about me after all ) It would be nice to either have regional sub-forums, or a way to locate members who are geographically close to you. I would gladly trade labor for knowledge from a forum expert but right now there isn’t really any way to find anyone close to me, or even see who might be willing to make such an arrangement.
This last feature can be solved with a google map addin. I recall having seen them somewhere, where you can access a page and all members are on that page, in a world map, so you can see who is near to you and who is not.
As for content:
I am about to side-by-side test 3 leak detectors (Inficon Whisper, Accutrak VPE and Sontech (the last one being expensive) and once I have written the report, I will also post it here. Should be good reading.
Thanks for checking up on privileges. I now can access all sub forums.
Obviously it was a mistake that we didn’t all have access to all areas, so please disregard my previous suggestion.
Having to make a few posts to prove yourself reasonably sane and legitimate, is a fine system as long as you can deal with the work load it causes.
I’m trying to think of ways to implement the locations feature. At the moment you can view the users location in their profile box on the right but you can filter users by location.
I’ve looked for the google maps locater Herman mentioned and I found it. However from what other users are saying it conflicts with the automatic Youtube embedding mod I put on here. I’m going to see if I can figure this out though and put it on. Hopefully it provides the functionality you need.
If not I was also thinking about setting up new forums for each region. What I dislike about this approach though is information being splintered across even more forums.
I have some regional sections (actually language based) on my forum (not composites related, check www.bugattibuilder.com/forum) but the use of these is very limited.
Perhaps it just works for the for sale / wanted section. But I do not feel this forum is large enough for this. Splintering information is something you should be very careful about.
I agree with Herman, this forum has a small userbase and most of our discussions fit nicely in what we have here.
I will be adding a Regional contact forum. Companies Corner once again is one of the most unused forum so what I’ll do is change that to In the Area, or some other clever title, I’m open to requests here.
If people are looking for someone in their area they can post in the forums. This way the two parties can choose to reveal their location. I do not wish to implement a method in which all users in this forum are forced to reveal their geographic location by IP or any other method.
If you’d like to meet someone in the same vicinity that will be the forum to post in.
Side-by-side is not there yet. 3 boxes are sitting nicely on my desk. I need a vacuum project in close proximity for them to test. Will probably have an opportunity on Thursday.
A lot, those damn spammers are persistent and frustrating. Looking at the ban list it looks like it was frustrating for Werksberg as well. He had banned many of the spammers with the reason “F*ck off spammer” and I can hardly blame him.
There’s a lot of software filtering that automatically detects possible spam and places it in a moderation queue. Periodically I have to check the queue and ban or approve as needed. Things with urls and pictures get filtered a lot.
New users have to go through the most hoops. As a user posts more non spam content the filtering is slowly lifted. It’s been pretty hard to strike a balance between free posting and moderating everything but it looks like things are starting to work. Not having spam gunking up this forum is really nice.
) It would be nice to either have regional sub-forums, or a way to locate members who are geographically close to you. I would gladly trade labor for knowledge from a forum expert but right now there isn’t really any way to find anyone close to me, or even see who might be willing to make such an arrangement.
