Just put in expected ones, then...

Is it possible to link an image to the gallery, rather than uploading it?

If it is, I can't see how.

And if it isn't, and you're forced to upload, then although it'll be fine for competitions, where you can only enter once, it won't be fine for non-magezine subscribers on threads where they might want to have several images in a thread.

And what if we don't want to have to upload images to yet another server? What if we're perfectly happy with the online image host that we're using?

I just get the impression that a lot of this hasn't really been thought through properly.

I'm not a luddite, I'm not the wrong side of 50, my eyesight is good, and I usually take to new and changed technology very quickly. And as such, I am acutely aware of the difference between real issues, and the "comfy slippers" syndrome that has been alluded to.


There are always big egos involved in IT projects, and doubtless a lot of time and effort has been put into a change this large.

But nevertheless, I'm disappointed by the defensiveness I'm picking up. If they want to go 'big bang' like this, with a huge change, they need to just suck up the feedback, as I said before.

So did I.

At which point I was presented with a completely unrelated FAQ to confirm that I'd read, and that I still wanted to submit the report.

Well obviously it has to download an image in its entirety before it can resize it.

But even if what you say is true, a minute or more is MUCH longer than it used to take.

It used to open, and download the images more or less as fast as I could scroll down through them. Sometimes it would stutter, but it was usually pretty good, since it depended not on the forum server, but on the image server, which hopefully has been optimised for serving images.


I'm sorry, but if it takes a minute to open a competition page, I think it's very unlikely I'll be looking at them in future. I'm simply not organised enough to click the link, go and do something else for a bit, and then remember to come back.

God knows what it'll be like on Monday mornings when everybody wants to read the comp results and look back through the images.

I'm finding that threads with a large number of images are taking an extremely long time to open.

So if I look at page 1 or 2 of any of several of the competitions, it's more than a minute before the page even begins to open.

It seems that this response time is roughly proportional to the number of pictures in the page - a thread from 'Your photos' that has several images takes up to about 10 seconds, while one with no images at all opens almost instantly.

I wonder if it's because of the work that the server has to do to do all that resizing?

Where are these?

I decided against applying to become a beta tester, because I was put off by the way the request was worded. They weren't interested in replies via the thread, and I would have had to justify why I'd make a good tester.

I simply wasn't interested in justifying my skills in order to have my 'application' 'accepted'.

However, if they'd said that they were planning a major change to the forum (rather than to the Pentax User site, which I rarely use), I might have realised that I had a vested interest in providing some feedback.

However, the response to the one report I've now raised makes me think that I was better off not getting involved.

By the way, I raised a report, like they asked. I think the response deserves to be in the public domain, since I don't want to end up having the same discussion twice:

[quote="I"]Fixing the forum content width and enforcing a 550px inline image size is a really bad decision, I believe.

The content should resize with the browser, for a start, and if there has to be an image size limit, it should be 800px at least - preferably 1000px.

People have mostly learned not to post enormous images, so it's not an issue.[/quote]The response:

[quote="They"]Have you considered those on resolution of 1024x768? Believe it or not, we receive quite alot of traffic to the site on this resolution.[/quote]To which I replied:

[quote="I"]And have they been complaining about not being able to see the images? I'd have expected to see this in the forum itself if they had been.

As it is, we've had endless discussion about this very subject on the forum itself over the last year and a half.

This is why the weekly competitions are subject to a max size of 800px on any dimension - and it seems to suit pretty much everyone, or at least be the best compromise.

Even outside the comps, mostly people now post 800px as a max.

So why you need to summarily change it - and in a way that completely ruins a lot of the images when they're resized, I'm at a loss to understand.[/quote]

And how would you have known to fix the things that were wrong, if people hadn't complained?

You just have to suck it up if you want the right result.

Sadly, this isn't a typo.

http://www.magezinepublishing.com/

(sic)

I think it's a 'clever' play on the word "ezine" - "electronic magazine".