2014 Site Upgrade

Thanks everyone for your kind words, both here and on Facebook! This makes it so worthwhile.

@Smurfatefrog: thanks for finding some of those bugs. All the broken links you mentioned are now fixed (I hope!). And it seems even the error page had errors! The site should be running on GMT+2 time now. When I launched it yesterday evening it was still defaulted to GMT and the first two or three posts had that time stamp on it.

There will definitely still be more broken links as it is really difficult to maintain existing URL structures sometimes with these upgrades. And a lot of old links are still sitting in the forum content, I did manage to correct a lot of them, but not all.

About the wider/flexible width: I know by using a fixed width it solved certain issues but cannot cater for certain preferences and for this I do apologise. Its a tricky call in web development as I have learned recently, as both options never fully satisfy all needs. Incidentally only version 3 of this site had a flexible width (we are now on version 4). I will look into some sort of template switcher to make at least the forum wider, but can't promise a solution on this. What I can tell you is that this version will have a relatively short lifespan as it is part of a "hop, skip and jump" to a newer platform - this is possibly about a year away. With that newer platform will come slightly more intelligent templates that respond better to various screens sizes and devices.

For now the following is on VE's timeline as far as the site goes:
- yet another upgrade (minor) which will possibly spice up the profile pages a bit
- experimentation on a new wiki-like / catalogue feature
- the launching of a totally new and specialised site (stay tuned!)

Thanks Andrew.

The preview window problem is a known issue. Its due to an internal software conflict between two different components that seems to get broken and re-fixed with the progression of versions. I can make the preview appear but only at a loss of other functionality. Not sure if its fixable right now but am looking into.

andrew r wrote: ps: If you do decide to not to pursue a fix, it may be helpful to remove it as an option (remove or grey out the button) or alternatively add a note about it in the "how to post" guide (thinks: maybe you've already done this and I didn't check to see )

I'm waiting to see what happens with an upcoming update. If it still doesn't work then I will remove it.

I have bumped it up to 10 now. I will have to monitor if there is any major impact on performance and resources if more is allowed. I would avoid attaching 10 really big photos in one go anyway. If your attachments/photos are really big its better to upload less at a time by editing the post to upload more.