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recent changes to the chat forum

Posted: Thu Jul 12, 2012 12:35 pm
by solarchat
Well, we now have over 350 users and have topped 30,000 posts. Time to put the brakes on it a little in order to maintain the integrity of our little community and not have it filled with scammers and low life computer hackers.

We come up first now in all the major search engines and have developed a great little community.

I have still been removing several fake accounts weekly and have had a lot of issues with trying to maintain security while still being as open as possible. I purchased an add on for the Kunena forum that was supposed to make it more secure and easier to log in but it turned out to be $100 thrown away and about 3 days of headaches trying to get it to work. So, just to make it 100% secure I am going to just go to the admin approval method only until I find a better way. If you know someone who wants an account just have them email me their email address, username and password and I will create it myself. If anyone is a Joomla expert out there and wants to overview the site, let me know.

INVALID TOKEN
Several people have been getting invalid token messages when logging in. I am sorry about this. Cant be helped. If you go up and put your cursor on the end of the web address in your browser navigation bar and hit enter again it should take you to a log in screen where you can then sucessfully log in. This has to do with the secondary domain name solarchat.solarastronomy.org. Probably best if you use solarchat.natca.net only. That experiment was meant to be the new home where I was going to move the entire forum but the finances just didnt work out. They wanted $500/yr to expand my hosting package to one that would accept Joomla based forums and I just cant afford that.

IMAGE UPLOADS
This forum is not really intended to be a repository for massive image files. You are welcome to upload what you want here and I appreciate it but it functions much more effectively if you use this forum to assemble links to images published on your webpage or Facebook, etc... I personally upload all of my images to my Facebook page first and then copy the direct links to these images and insert them into my posts. This precludes the NATCA SECURITY WARNING error messages when trying to upload several massive images into a post. It also allows you to share your images on two different forums or as many as you want by just uploading them to Facebook. The Facebook image uploader will accept any size image of many formats and automatically resizes them to hi resolution images of a certain size. It is really wuite convenient. For those that dont use Facebook you may want to as I have a massive group page over there where people share their images daily and we reach millions of viewers.

It doesn't make any diffrence if you upload a 72dpi image or a 1200 dpi image here or anywhere else, it will always display at 72dpi as this is the browser standard for images. So, if you upload a 4MB image at 600dpi, it will display at a maximum 2600 X 2600 at 72dpi here and generally MUCH smaller anywhere else on the net but always at 72dpi. The only difference with a hi res image is that you can zoom in much more closely because as you zoom in it still displays at 72 dpi to a much deeper level. So, remember that when uploading.

Also, hit the "insert" button when uploading iomages so that they will be embedded in the post for all to see. There are several media items that can be embedded in the posts directly if you take a little time and examine the menu bar above the new post entering box. Give them a shot.

MODIFICATIONS FORUM
The mod forum is the most popular forum on here. These nerds debate back and forth all day long and add a rich environment of information not found anywhere else on the internet. I am happy to host you guys but lets not get too crazy over there and make sure what you post is reasonably safe...:) You guys are also welcome to show your appreciation for your unfettered mod posting ability only seen here by hitting the donate link at www.charliebates.org ocassionally and helping to defray the expenses of the forum. I have no interest in modding and have been warned by several people "in the biz" that this is a dangerous thing to have on my forum but whatever, Ill take the risk to allow for such off the wall ideas and increased participation. I think it is pretty cool, just not interested in doing it myself. As you know, my forte is outreach but I welcome all types of posters here.

SOCIAL MEDIA LOGINS
I added the capability to just use your twitter or facebook accounts to log in here. It will make you a username and let you just hit one button to login anytime you come here. Works pretty good.

As always, the purpose of this forum is to spread the hobby of solar astronomy and to share your appreciation of the wonderful beauty and ferocity of our nearest star. Thank you for all of your support and I appreciate each of you taking the time to come here.


Stephen W. Ramsden
Head Nerd in Charge