Helpful Forum Hints

[MiniMpi]

The Admin Team is always looking for ways to enhance your Forum experience and make procedures clearer.

We will be posting a few topics here in General Discussion, where you can find them easily.

We will start with looking at how to use the Photo Attachment tool, which we recommend as the best way to upload photos. This is something a lot of members are unsure about, especially placing images "inline" and getting them in the correct orientation. Hopefully this will help.

Remember that full instructions can always be found in our "How to..." Section

[Amor Vincit Omnia]

Warning - Photo security

Users of this forum are reminded that photographs taken with mobile devices (such as phones or tablets) can contain information that shows the location of the picture, specifically longitude and latitude. Depending on the hosting site used, this information can remain embedded in the picture file, and thus is still present if the image is subsequently downloaded.

Photograph files that are uploaded directly to this forum (using the attachment option) are not edited or re-sized, and therefore, any embedded location data will remain in place. It is our understanding that any photo hosting site that does not re-size or edit the pictures will also retain the location data.

If you do not wish to allow other users to know the precise location of your pictures, please ensure you take steps to disable the location information on the camera of your mobile device.

Be advised that posts containing broken links to photos will be deleted.

You will quickly discover that we love photos, photos, and more photos. The obvious question we get a lot is.. How do I post photos?

We strongly recommend the use of our attachment feature. It is easy and permanent.

Open a new Topic or Reply to a Topic and the posting box will open. Or hit quick reply at the bottom of a thread. Then follow the arrows.







Using the "Place Inline" button, as in Picture #3 above, will prevent your photo from appearing in a white box that contains the word "ATTACHMENT"

Orientation

We have seen some people having difficulties with the orientation of photos. Sometimes you find that the forum software is rotating your photo through 90°.

The reason is to do with the format being portrait or square, which seems to confuse the software, whereas it happily settles for landscape. An easy fix is to make a very slight crop on the photo before attaching it.

This photo is in portrait format and the software doesn’t like it.





Make a duplicate of the photo and a very slight crop, and it works. Normally it isn't necessary make a duplicate; simply crop the photo on the device before attaching.




One more point: there is a preview button next to the submit button. It shows you what will appear on the screen so if it doesn’t look right you don’t have to keep hitting submit.

[MiniMpi]

How to edit and delete your own posts

When you have posted a message your post will appear with a group of little grey buttons near your avatar.




Apologies if you know this already, but some people don’t.

The little pencil on the left is the Edit button. You can go into any of your own posts at any time and edit them.

The [X] button deletes your post (after a Y/N confirmation). Once deleted you cannot recover your post. If someone has already quoted your post the quote will remain in the other person’s post.

Instead of deleting a post, people have in the past reduced it to a single full stop/period. No point really, when you can delete your post. You may be making the point that you wrote something and thought better of it, but if we see these posts we tend to delete them.

The [!] Is the Report button. You shouldn’t really need to report your own posts since you can delete them. Recently, however, someone reported his own duplicate post, unaware that he could just delete it. Using this on other people’s posts alerts the moderators via notification.

Finally, the speech mark is the Quote button. Normally you would use that on other people’s posts to comment on something they have written, preferably having taken the time to trim a long post down to the bit you actually want to comment on…please! You are of course free to quote your own posts, potentially useful if you want to refer to something you have written on a different thread.