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Vans forum rant

GyroRon

Active Member
Okay, I gotta complain..... First off, thanks for the site. It is a good site with lot's of good info and some good regular posters.

My complaint is I want to be able to attach a picture to my posts and have figured out how you got to do that. It seems you got to have your pictures hosted somewhere else on the web and do a hyperlink here to attach a picture on your post. To me this is a pain in the butt, and not worth the effort.

My guess is the reason we can not directly attach a picture here is Pictures use up bandwidth and bandwidth costs money. Whoever owns this forum is making sure not to run up the bill.

Now I am not a computer expert by any means, and I don't know much about hosting forums and running them. I do alot of posting on a gyroplane forum www.rotaryforum.com and it is the same software as this forum, same options, screens, and so on. Just no ad's on the left side of the screen.

My first guess was since Vans RV airplanes are so popular that there is probably a hundred thousand posts on this forum and 10 thousand members. That if everyone here posted pictures directly onto the forum it would make hosting the forum too costly. So I compared some stats from both forums.

Vans Forum 3649 total threads, Rotaryforum 6500 total threads. Vans forum 20465 total posts, Rotaryforum 83370 total posts. Vans forum number of members 2345, Rotaryforum 1536. Vans forum high number of people online at any given time 197, Rotaryforum 366.

So the gyro forum has about 800 less members, but there is almost double the threads, and almost 4 times as many total posts. The gyro forum allows it's members to post pictures directly from the members computer onto the forum, no picture hosting site hassles. We ARE limited to posting pics that are no larger than 150 KB, but that is easy enough to do.

I am good personal friends with the owner of the Rotaryforum. He says the forum is paid for donations from the members. Once a year he asks for those that want to send in a donation to send it in. Those that donated get a special title under there name - Gold supporter, and this kind of encourages others to donate a few bucks. So far the owner says he has had a excess of money, more than what it costs to host our forum, pics and all. Not sure if the owner of this forum has asked for or just recieved donations.... But I do know I can't avoid the ad's off to the left side of my screen! ;)

Anyway enough ranting. Just disappointed that If I want to post a pic to this site I got to sign up to yet another site and then have to download my pictures there and all this hassle......
 
Hello, Ron.

I'm Doug Reeves and the www.VansAirForce.net site and these forums are mine (the forums have been online as of Jan 1st of this year). I operate them as a small business and you are absolutely right, I try to keep costs down as much as possible.

The instructions for inserting images are HERE and, because of this setup, you can use images of whatever size you wish. A link to these instructions appear as a 'sticky' in several of the forum folders (it is in the folder you posted your message in :) ).

Googling 'image hosting' returns over 41 million results: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=image+hosting. I personally prefer www.imageshack.us at the current time - as it doesn't require you to register and it automatically generates a thumbnail for you. You can even choose the option to have it auto-adjust the size of your image for the viewer's browser, so you don't have to resize the image beforehand. Maybe sometime in the future I'll allow picture hosting, but not at the current time.

I do sell advertising and accept donations. I talk about donations HERE.

To help avoid further confusion I will add a link to the image insert instructions in the bar at left under 'Today's Posts' this evening. I think that will help. Update 11/3/05 5:30pm CST: Link has been added.

I appreciate your comments.

Kindest,
Doug
www.VansAirForce.net

4.jpg
 
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Wow, it works. sorry only had a picture of my car available.

 
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Zilik

Zilik and other posters,

You are almost there...but it gets even better, as far as posting photos. You can make the photo appear automatically, without a viewer having to click your link.

When you go into Image Shack, do just as you did....Browse, select your photo, select 'HOST IT' (you will see an uploading message)...once it shows it is done, you will see multiple links. However, scroll way down to the bottom of that page....you will see a link that says "Direct Link To Image". This is the link you want to copy (by high-lighting the link and clicking CTRL and C). If so, the photo automatically appears within your post, without a reader having to click on the link. But, the trick is that once you do the upload to Image Shack, once back in these forums, you MUST click on the little icon above your post within these forums (at whatever point you wish to insert the photo) that shows the yellow background and the little mountain. This gives you another bar that shows on your screen, and this is where you post the link you just copied at Image Shack. Press CTRL-V within this bar and it will post in the link you copied from Image Shack. Much easier than it sounds! Give it a try! Hope this helps. Here is an example:

img04339vg.jpg
 
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Thanks for the tip. I am not windows user and I did not sleep at a Holliday Inn Express last night so I need all the help I can get when it comes to using Window's Explorer. My desktop here at work is running Linux and imageshack.us only works on windows explorer. Ok, I don't know that, I do know it does not work with Mozilla on Linux.

Thanks again. I'll try it with a RV related pick soon.

Gary
 
zilik said:
Wow, it works. sorry only had a picture of my car available.

http://img84.imageshack.us/img84/8081/sporsche2zq.jpg
Gary, to display the actual image (instead of the URL) make sure you paste the URL into the box that opens after you click the
insertimage6uw.gif
icon. That's the 'insert picture' button.

As a matter of fact, you could go back and edit your post if you wanted to (look for the 'edit' button at the lower right), making the picture appear. Like this:

sporsche2zq.jpg
Gary Zilik's Car...​

B,
D
 
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As long aas folks are ranting. One request. Can folks please size the image before posting. It's really a pain in the neck when someone posts a 2400 pixel wide photo, because all subsequent text also scrolls all the way over and off the screen.

I'd say about a 700-800 pixel width should suffice.
 
Ditto!

Bob Collins said:
As long aas folks are ranting. One request. Can folks please size the image before posting. It's really a pain in the neck when someone posts a 2400 pixel wide photo, because all subsequent text also scrolls all the way over and off the screen.

I'd say about a 700-800 pixel width should suffice.

You can say that again. I have a 21" Monitor and I still have to scroll over on alot of these posts. Makes it hard to read sometimes.
 
resizing picts

Gil in AZ helped me out with THAT.

he said, right click and open the pict with "Paint" program, and then up under edit (IIRC) Stretch and skew" resize to 40 or 50 percent; and then save as.... FWIW

edit== I haven't found the auto sizing at Image shack. ??
 
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zilik said:
Thanks for the tip. I am not windows user and I did not sleep at a Holliday Inn Express last night so I need all the help I can get when it comes to using Window's Explorer. My desktop here at work is running Linux and imageshack.us only works on windows explorer. Ok, I don't know that, I do know it does not work with Mozilla on Linux.

Thanks again. I'll try it with a RV related pick soon.

Gary

Gary, I'm a linux user both at home and at work and using Firefox found no trouble posting my update in the RV-4 forum. Let me know if I can be of help.

Philip Mercier
RV-4
Abbotsford BC.
 
Gosh, see even a bitchy post can result in positive outcomes! :) Sorry for the Rant, even though it still sounds like alot of trouble just to post a pic of my bird......
 
Doug,

I understand the bandwidth concerns, and the ongoing cost concerns. The only drawback to posting somewhere else is the longevity of the hosting site and how that will play on the archive-abilty of the VAF forums for the long term. Will imageshack be around in five years, ten years? While the Matronics list didn't have images, you can still get the full posts from the archive. When imageshack or whatever site people use goes under or disappears, we will lose a powerful portion of these forums.

If you intend to move away from the email lists (and I do like the forums better), that would be my only long term concern. Pictures add so much, but if the disappear from the hosting site going down (people do use other than imageshack), so much is lost.

Just my $.02. Thanks for everything you have done for the community.

Take care,

Jim
 
I'd imagine when the Yahoo Groups eventually do go away I'll be hosting images by then. Always growing, always improving....just taking my time to make sure it's done right and is robust enough.

Best always,
Doug
 
Doug, the gyroplane community had a fellow in Florida named Norm who was a computer guru, who set up the first real gyroplane forums. It was www.Rotorcraft.com. He had his own servers and everything there at his place. This dates back to the mid to late 1990's.

At some point in the very early 2000's he and his wife divorced and it was a nasty divorce. He knew it wouldn't be long before he would have to pull the plug on the forum, so he offered to sell it and the servers and everything to whoever would pay a fair price for it. For months it seemed as if one person after another was going to step up and buy it to keep it going. But no one ever did step up and we had to deal with several spells where Norm had to turn the server off for hours, sometimes days and once over a week.

Another person who felt like he had learned alot about gyros through the forum decided to look into doing something to keep us gyroheads together on the net. He decided to open a new forum, much like this one and slowly people came over to his new forum. Once Norm pulled the plug on his for good, everyone came over to the new one.

He has used 2 or 3 different forum formats before finally settling on the same format your using here. I am not sure what or how he has it set up, but do know he is using a special hosting service for the forum as the other company he was using would sometimes overload and we would be down for hours or more on occasion.

Talking to him, it doesn't cost much to run the forum, and like I said we are allowed to download pics and files directly to the forum. Matter of fact, some people had started posting pictures they had taken in flight and other people liked it so much a new section was added on the forum just for flying pictures. There is THOUSANDS of pictures downloaded to his forum, and from what he tells me the donations alone pay for all the bandwidth and he has change leftover. He also has some T shirts he sells to support the forum, but he gives away more than he sells!

Anyway, I don't know if you would like to talk to him or not, but I am sure he would love to chat with you. His name is Todd Powell and he lives in Spokane WA. Call him at 509-939-9262...... Or go over to the forum www.rotaryforum.com and drop him a email. No matter if you decide you can let us download pictures directly on here or not, perhaps talking to him, he can find a way to help you save some money here with yours.
 
Some Info.

I'm not suggesting anything and certainly not the forum software mentioned as I have not tested it long enough. Only trying to add some info. in case it is not known.

FUD Forum allows file attachments (image and documents) to be uploaded. Image files can be inserted in-line with the text in a posting. However calendar is an add-on. :(
 
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