mmccurdy

PMs were working when we were screwing around with this thing early on. When Mike gets back from his latest NASA mission maybe he can fix it. I think the PMs broke when we did the (nt) thing -- or something like that. Some needed board mod caused them to die for some reason. Maybe it was threaded view ??

Our domination of space always comes first though

Yeah, in my recollection I was actually close to fixing PM's before I got distracted with some other more pressing item. I can see someone else is busy tweaking things though... I just noticed the thread review at the bottom of this reply form.

I have three or four small-but-important tweaks I know about, and then there's always the big to-do list sticky. I've been super busy with work (and busier than expected over the holidays) so unfortunately I haven't had a lot of time to devote to the FAQ... I'll get around to it soon though.

I think a lot of Guest posts are folk who forget they're not logged in. If you are not looking it isn't always obvious if you are logged in or not. Well its not super obvious anyway

Yeah I've been thinking that this and a few other "common mistakes" can be avoided through some simple design tweaks (such as removing the big "New Topic" button from the top of the threads and just leaving it on the topic listing, thus forcing people to use the "reply" buttons).... I was telling steve (and I think you) that I should have some time over the next couple weeks while I'm on "vacation" to work on some of these things that have been bugging people. I'll keep you posted.

May I suggest that the default setting be hierarchical (threaded) and not flat.

The default setting for new people and non-logged-in people is threaded, but if you signed up before the threaded view was re-introduced, it's probably stuck at flat for you.

Not sure why the setting would not be sticking... I will try to reproduce it.

Look at the forum index page...it tells you exactly how many people are loged in and how many are view as guests.

And if you click on "Who is Logged In"? (the title for that section) you get a breakdown of what everyone is doing at the moment. Pretty nifty, eh?

One thing I've noticed is that if you see a lot of guests from the same IP range or very similar IP's, and you do a reverse lookup on those IP's, you'll find that many of them are bots for yahoo!, google, etc. We want those bots because they're what make the site searchable via google, but keep in mind that they're not likely to join you in chat any time soon

I don't post here much, but I lurk fairly often and I'm just now starting to warm up the redesigned site. We'll, maybe not to the logo, which reminds me of those typo-squatting "what you need, when you need it" sites... :-)

Anyway, the search screen could use some cleaning up. I used the search probably 50 times before I realized the second text box is for "search by author". The "Keyword" and "Author" labels should be somewhere near their boxes so this is more apparent and the help text should be separated for legibility.

Also, the "Forum search" button is kind of hidden down in the lower left. I usually just hit the enter key, but sometimes you might need to click the button... There are other nitpicks, so maybe I should just say the screen needs a general going-over.

I don't mean to sound all negative. The search works fine, once you figure out the little quirks. I see a lot of the issues are being resolved -- keep up the good work!

Steve

I have to admit to laziness on this one... I've only looked at the search page long enough to see that my other changes didn't massively break things. I know of at least a couple of other things I need to add -- like the fact that words less than 3 letters are ignored, but I haven't gotten around to doing it yet. This is an evening project I'll put on my list for some time in the near future.

In my effort to find the ad online, I stumbled upon this 22 minute 281mb video (dial-up users beware) entitled 'Evolution of an Icon'. It focuses a great deal on the 2002, and features commentary by David E. Davis Jr. and numerous others. Lots of great action shots and information about the history of our little cars. I believe it may have been shown on the Discovery Channel at one time.

http://www.bmwtransact.com/microsite/new3/Downloads/Video/3Series_Icon.zip

Thanks for the link! This video was "linked" from an ad for the new 3 series that popped up on my DirecTV/TiVo unit a while back (on the main screen where those "special features" appear). If I recall correctly, it was one of those "press thumbs up to learn more" kinds of things while I was watching the ad. But before I could re-watch the full length thing on my TiVo, one of my housemates deleted it! I did a quick search for it, but couldn't find it at the time. In any case, I remember it being pretty cool and 02-centric for the first 10 minutes (then into how great the new 3 series is for the second half). Worth a watch.

Thank GOD for this new style of forum! It's so much more organized and user friendly.

Now if we could only have the post apear like they do on:

bimmerforums.com

dtmpower.net

I would never leave

We had more of a table style layout on here when we first made the switch, but most people seemed to prefer the line style of layout (where the author name and date are just appended to the title of the post). Is that what you mean?

In general, the goal here is to keep the site a lot cleaner than some of the other forums out there (I just mean visual clutter, not content).

Am still getting used to the new site:

- really miss seeing a 2002 logo or car on the website itself; and

- mostly miss not seeing a little icon on each message telling me if there is a pciture attached to the message.

Good luck and thanks,

Peter

Someone else reported this also. There should be a picture of a car at the top, and you should see an icon when there's a file attached. I will attach a screenshot to this post so you can see both what the site is suppose to look like at the top, and so you can see the little paperclip icon which means there's a file attached. If you don't see either of those on your browser, please reply here and I can try to figure out why not.

I'm having a problem resizing a picture to be used as my avatar. The original size of the image is 759 x 381 pixels and 332KB. I'm using Photoshop to resize the image to 120 x 90 pixels but I can't get it under about 18KB! Anyone have any suggestions?

Save it as a JPEG with higher compression (lower quality). Somewhere around the middle of the scale should do fine. In the photoshop "Save As..." dialog, it will tell you the resulting file size right there.

I saved the list of K'fischer rebuilders:

http://www.bmw2002faq.com/talkshop/forum/messages/259663.html

but now can't access it. Any ideas or help?

TIA!

Here you go:

http://www.bmw2002faq.com/component/option,com_forum/Itemid,57/page,viewtopic/t,259604/

Unfortunately, if you don't know the ID of the topic (as opposed to the individual reply) it's difficult to find the exact post by number. If you do know the topic ID, you can just replace the "259604" in the URL above.

If other folks are in this predicament, I can add a special feature to enable this. We can probably do a poll or something about old bookmarks and see if people would think it useful.

um.. yes googlebot would.

~Vroomer

I've thought about turning away searchbots, but I think it's in our best interest to let google and others crawl the site -- that way the archives, etc. will be googleable eventually. I don't think it hurts performance too much.

You made some kind of change today, or something was changed not by you, but the speed is about how it was on the first day of the new board. What's going on?

We did not change anything, so right now I suspect something on the ISP side. We are investigating this right now -- sorry for the inconvenience.

Not just mine, but others too.

Gil (again)

We're way under the board-wide quota... can you give a specific example of a post that used to have a pic but is gone now?

Just paste the link here.

Thanks for helping us track this down...

I know there are a few different lists out there relating to 02s in the movies. I have one on my site, but since it doesn't get a lot of hits I figured we could put it here so more can see it and submit to it.

http://www.lovingeveryminuteofit.com/bmw2002/02movies.htm

Mine just lists the Titles, but maybe we could have a description and where to find the 02. Also break them up into movies, TV shows, commercials and others, ie music videos.

What do you think?

There was actually a thread on the OT board on this a few days ago. The upshot of it was this:

http://imcdb.org/vehicles_make-BMW.html

... which I found to be pretty impressive. Not just 02's but pretty much any car you can think of, with nice screen shots also.

The now linear structure makes it impossible to reply to a message in a thread. Does the reply relates to the first post or to a subsequent reply? We can't say. It makes commnucation difficult.

Sometimes we want to comment to a specific reply to a question. Now it is linear and not possible to be specific.

The new version of the site has a lots of nice gizmos, they only need to be properly managed. Like I do not like the huge boxes with all the data when we post a picture. is it really needed? I believe that the old format was quite good in its presentation and only neeeded a few tweaks to be up to date. I like the "Keep it simple" way.

But I am thankfull for all your hard work.

Click on the "Thread View" button (upper right) and it will display the forum or topic as a tree like the old board. You can also set this in your profile so it displays that way by default.

We could definitely trim down some of the picture stuff... we've been trying hard to "keep it simple" since the upgrade -- we've trimmed out a ton of fat from the default installations. Thanks for your feedback!

Has anyone actually tried this stuff? From the description it sounds like the same kind of material as that "retro reflective" high visibility tape you can buy, also the same material that road signs are covered with. I have a theory about that stuff, and I think it might actually have the exact *opposite* effect than the one you want in a tail lamp reflector. I haven't tried it to prove it out though... that stuff is expensive

Basically the theory is this: think about at night when your headlights hit a road sign. The sign gets really bright for you because you're very close to the light source, but for someone standing say 90 degrees to the sign, it doesn't light up very much. The material is designed to maximize the amount of light bounced back to the source of the light.

Now imagine putting that stuff in your tail lamp buckets. In that case the light source is actually the bulb. So my theory is that the maximum amount of light would get bounced back to the bulb and not out the lens, like you want it to. In fact, it may decrease the effect of even a simple silver coating.

It was enough to stop me from pulling the trigger on the $5/foot tape anyway. Anyone tried this out?

So a few people have complained that the board will "forget" them when they leave and come back. This has happened to me occasionally and I realized it might be related to bounding back and forth between two different machines.

For the people who have this problem, do you have a laptop and a desktop or a work/home machine, etc. that you check from?

Why do you all continue to insist on pleasing 100% of the people who visit these forums? I don't get it.

I'm pretty sure we won't hit 100%

... but I like to think that what sets this board apart from the other options out there is that we genuinely care about the people that use it. As soon as people stop coming around because they don't like the board (find it too cumbersome, etc.), we're dead. With sites like this, the community *is* the board -- we're just trying not to forget that.

text for Views/Replies/Last Post and also the month should be numerical to shorten the line too. Right now on my 800x600 (and a lot of people use this res, especially outside the USA) I can't even read the dates of the posts as they spill to the right so far, and depending where I am on the site I don't even have an option of scrolling to the side. My '02 cents.

Yeah, I know I need to support that res, I actually just added back the date so I could debug the bumping code. For whatever reason it's actually hard to force the date to be smaller, since this is a user-settable preference. Go in to your profile and put this in the "Date Format" box:

n-j-y h:i

So, not a good solution (I love that phpBB exposes "The PHP date() function" to the user!) but maybe a temporary fix until I can work it out.

The default behavior of the topic listings is now chronological by when the thread was started as opposed to when the last reply was written.

This mimics the behavior of the old forum.

If you like the thread "bumping" behavior (when a new reply is added, the thread is moved to the top of the list), you may enable it in your profile.

To do so, log in and click on the "Profile" link at the bottom of the forum, find the option called "Topic Sorting (Thread Bumping)" and select "Last Reply Date (Bumping ON)."

We've implemented this option since people feel very strongly on both sides of the issue. The default was chosen because it mimics the old site. We appreciate everyone's continued feedback, and as always feel free to leave comments and/or questions in the Site Suggestions forum. Thanks!

Also when I start a message, change my mind, there is no option to reset and start over? Minor inconveniences... I have gotten around them, but the mechanics are different on the new board.

What do you mean by "can't go back to edit"?

When you hit "Preview," you should see the preview appear above the text entry box. You can just edit your text and hit "Preview" as many times as you want until you're happy with it, then hit "Submit." Are you asking for a sort of "back" button to get rid of the preview text?

For the second thing, are you suggesting something like a "Reset" or "Clear" button that would just wipe out the text box contents?

I can probably add whatever you need -- just trying to get a better idea of what you're describing.

I definitely like the ability to post as a guest -- when we were discussing/piloting the upgrade, several people mentioned how much they hated the registration requirements, and I'm inclined to agree.

First, If you just stumble on the FAQ looking for a random answer, it's a pain to have to register, and you're more likely to stick around if it's a quick and painless process to fire off a post.

Second, it is probably very easy to add the ability to see IP addresses -- moderators and admins already have that ability. It's not a simple flip of a switch, but I can make the mod if we require it.

This has to do with some debugging we're doing. I have (hopefully) fixed it for now, change should take effect in 5-10 mins.

Can't we get this changed soon or a least make it a user option? The way it is now sucks and lots of others agree. Thanks..steve

I'm working on this at this very moment. I hope to have a fix in place this weekend.

I go to the index page (it remembers me) and it shows that there are new posts. When I click to that forum (General for instance) Nothing is highlighted showing new posts. I'm using Fire Fox and older iMac with DSL.

Others have reported a similar problem. I think I have an idea -- can you try something for me? Go to the forum (where you say nothing is highlighted) then use the menu at the *bottom* of the screen to log out and log back in. Let me know if those posts show up as unread now. This is obviously not a permanent fix (even if it does work), just something to help me debug. Thanks!