General site updates

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Hey gang.....

The max attachment count for images for a post has been bumped up to 25 now. Hopefully that will help with some of the big trip reports. Those are great to see! The session timeout has also been bumped up to 2 hours. Hopefully that helps as well. I believe hitting Preview from time to time also typically helps extend your session should you need that.

Thanks gang!
Cheers!

Kyle...

[FuzzySideDown]

Hey gang....

Not long ago I added a forum extension that I found that temporarily stores what you are posting in your browser's local storage in an attempt to help restore your lost post text in cases where there is some sort of loss of text. I've been hearing of cases where it's almost the reverse of what it was intended for and it was restoring your previous post into your new post, which isn't right.

So for the moment, I've removed that forum extension and will do some looking into it to see if I can see what it's doing and why. Hopefully in most cases, with or without that extension, most people won't have noticed, but if you have any experiences, good or bad, that you'd like to share with me, feel free.

I'll update again as I know more....

Thanks!
Cheers!

Kyle...

[FuzzySideDown]

Hey gang.....

I have an update on the forum extension for avoiding loss of posts prior to it being saved.

The short update is there should be a new and hopefully improved extension that will be getting deployed once it goes through more testing.

The long version of this update is this....

While the original extension was helpful, it seems kinda glitchy, so it got a good sized overhaul.
This extension is unrelated to the Captcha response message of "The solution you provided was incorrect". If you are still getting this message, let me know.

So this extension involves Posting and PM'ing. It stores what you type into your browsers local storage, so if something happens before it's saved to the board, it is not lost. Examples being if your browsers session expires, if you accidentally close your browser or tab or click a link to a different page before you are done, or your browser just crashes. Regarding session timeouts, we did bump the timeout to 2 hours, but it can still happen, and this should help with that.

What was done to improve it over the original extension?

Improved key accuracy. There should now only be 1 key for your specific post or 1 for your PM. Previously, if you hit Preview, you got a different key which meant if your session expired, the recovery would look for the non-Preview key, which is bad, because you wouldn't get your latest version recovered and an old key and content was left behind to possibly be inadvertently be recovered later when you didn't want it to be. This should be improved.

Timer removal. Previously, it had a timer to update what you had typed into your browsers local storage every 10 seconds. I'm assuming this was done for efficiency. I think it may have inadvertently caused some occasional random cases of writing the key back in, in the very short window after the submit button had been pressed and but before the next page started to load, which would cause your message to be available to be restored later when you didn't need it to be restored. The timer has been removed.

Accidental message storage removal. Previously it was too aggressive at clearing your storage out and could leave you with no message to recover when you thought it was available to be recovered. It now only attempts to clear your local storage out only when you hit the Submit button AND after it confirms that your session is still active. It wont stop your session of timing out, but if it does time out, your message will still be available to be restored automatically so it's not lost.

How can you help? Testing it out... I've tried to test it under the scenarios I could think of, but before I release this new version back out, I was hoping to see if there might be a couple of people willing to also try it out where you may do something I wasn't thinking of or have a setup I wasn't considering to make sure it's good to go, or still needs a few updates. If you would have time to try it out, Thank you! You can head over to the Dev site at https://dev.nationalparkschat.com If you do go there, just be aware which site you are on at all times as they look the same but are different. One note: The session timeout on the Dev server is currently set to 2 minutes to test recovery after session timeouts. Please let me know if you have a chance to try it out and what your experience was with posting and PM'ing and your session expiring or browser closing. It would be most helpful!

Thanks gang!
Cheers!

Kyle....

[FuzzySideDown]

Hi gang....

I have updated and re-deployed the Post Local Storage extension with some updates so your pre-submitted posts and PM's should be able to survive a session expiration or a browser closure while typing or submitting now. It should be a little more robust to handle Preview better as well.

Note: It won't restore added attachments yet, but at least it should restore what you typed in the main text box.

I would welcome any feedback you have on this regarding your experience. While it should be better than before, there may still be scenarios I did not expect. Let me know if you have any questions..

Thanks!
Cheers!

Kyle....

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Hey gang....

Trip Dates
I was reminded that the Trip Dates forum category used to be visible only to logged in users. It is now that way again.

Thanks for pointing that out!

Email Notification Templates
I'm working on cleaning up a few of the Email Notification Templates to try and make them easier to scan quick and still understand. If there's any specific ones bugging you format wise, that are just too much text, let me know which ones and I can look at those first.

Thanks gang!
Cheers!

Kyle....

[FuzzySideDown]

Email Notification Templates

The email engine got a bit of an update to better support custom email templates. I kinda hated to edit their default templates and lose the edits in an update, so fingers crossed, we should be ok there now. There are a bunch of individual templates for emails that can get sent out. For the moment, I updated 2 of them to test it out.

topic_notify and forum_notify ... They are what gets sent out if someone replies to a topic or forum you are subscribed to...

The topic_notify should be going from something like this....

Screen Shot 2024-03-23 at 4.45.41 PM.png (175.9 KiB) Viewed 262 times

To something like this.....

Screen Shot 2024-03-23 at 4.46.15 PM.png (104.36 KiB) Viewed 262 times

So there's less text to scan through and be more to the point. Hopefully it's easier anyway...

Yell if you have issues....

Thanks!
Cheers!

Kyle...

[FuzzySideDown]

A quick update here....

There's a new main category called Non Park Related Topics. The existing forum of Non Park Related Topics (and it's posts) was moved into the new category so it's not actually in a park category since it's not park related. I also added a forum called Trail Foods and put that in the new Non Park Related Topics category. Hopefully that all made sense....

Some of that came about because I was going to post about a trail snack I was thinking about cooking up and I wasn't quite sure where to put it.. heh... If there's any other things that might need shuffled around or added, just let me know.

Thanks!
Cheers!

Kyle....

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Hey gang. Just a heads up. The site is getting beat up real bad at the moment by claudebot. . I have a real distaste for bad actors… anyway, just want to let you know that I’m aware and will be looking into it once we are back from our Grand Canyon trip though that will not be till Sunday night or Monday.

In the mean time, please hang in there.

Thanks!
Cheers!

Kyle.