After a overnight domain propagation, this forum is now available worldwide, same in my deep Italian sea/countryside.
It was a delight to see all our categories up and running. Like we are used to.
Early March, when G+ will make the tools available to us, we will backup the full things from there.
We will see at that time, what we will be able to do with it. From a single Wordpress copy (K40.makerforums.info) or if we can extract and import here.
I will continue here to moderate, and keep the mood up, for all members to enjoy, as I did for nearly past 5 years, and I will be delighted if Don do the same.
Special Big Thank You to Anthony for having setting up our new home.
Discourse (the software that runs this forum), while having the noble aim of trying to serve people with either forum or email preferences equally, does have a few defaults that are somewhat annoying.
I’m certainly not going to seek out the irritations, but one that constantly triggers me is the encoding it uses for smileys / emoticons.
If someone wants to use them that’s fine with me. But be aware that even a simple grin will be rendered (for users on email) as ‘colon-smile-colon’ and there are many more, such as ‘colon-slight-smile-colon’. I can’t write them here exactly as they’re received as presumably they’d then be turned back into pictures for forum users, rather losing the point.
Is it possible to turn these irritating expansions off ? The most effective way would be just to turn off the emoticons altogether, but that’s probably a bit harsh. Ideally, it should propagate the simple ones in their traditional colon-parenthesis form that are readable in normal email, and either simplify or ignore the more complex ones.
Maybe there are other options. What do you think ? I just find it annoying to read text that’s scattered with ‘slight-smile’ and ‘detective’ words. It adds nothing to the readability and doesn’t even, I think, do justice to the writer’s intentions.
Note that many times when you are typing an intentional leading colon, it’s really in example text, so you can use backticks to mark it as such. You can type :) or :slightly_smiling_face: and when you type ` around text it will avoid the annoyance you are seeing.
That doesn’t solve your annoyance with reading the emoticons, but it at least gives you a typing solution.