I wonder why the site was revamped. Why was the shoutbox flushed out? I prefer the old version.

The site wasn't revamped. (As usual, it wasn't touched at all.) All that happened was an upgrade to the latest version of the forum software. My guess is that there was probably something over and above the upgrade process that needed to be done (that wasn't) to retain the stuff in the shout box.

So we'll get the shout box back agsin!

Good. I might actually climb this year since there is nothing more attractive!

The site wasn't revamped.

Thoroughly check out the site and see how it has changed. Also see revamp.

Intentional or not, I can only say that it's ugly.

Sorry. Other than some CSS styling in the forums, I don't see a single thing that's changed.

Ok (groan), I'll have to explain.

• The User List function displays users differently
• Active Topics has a different drop-down menu
• There are additional My Stuff items
• Active Posts is new
• The Topic Options tab is new
• The FAQ page works a bit differently and has some new items
• The Search drop-down menu has changed and the function works somewhat differently
• The Board Rules link at the lower left extreme of the page is new
• The Switch to Full Reply Screen tab below the Quick Reply field is new
• The Profile page is drastically changed
• There are new option boxes at the bottom of a post
• Recall that if you put the mouse pointer upon the Re: (user) field at the top of a post, you'd see the post number. This is no longer the case and now you don't know which post is replied to
• The IP address no longer appears in a post

Or is all this just CSS styling?

No. It just means you pay a hell of a lot more attention to the minutia of this place than I do. You mention a number of features that work differently that I don't ever remember using!

Minutia is what Gunks.com is all about.

A couple more changes noted:

• Members with non-standard titles lost them
• Moving the mouse pointer over the title of a post in a list of the same used to reveal the first three lines of that post; this is no longer true
• For some reason the Partners! rectangle near the top is highlighted
• Spoiler text option added (what's that?)
• The Discussion and Gallery webpages have a different color scheme from the others

Some of these are trivial; some old features are sadly missed.

Wonder if our venerable webmaster has even been on to see the changes...

"Who's Online" now shows spiders. It says 3 spiders right now. What's that mean? Webcrawlers/email-harvester-bots??

Webcrawlers.

EEEEW! Squish those little bastards!

The header is way too tall... and it's a winter scene??? Did I somehow miss summer and fall '09? The snide comments aside it's great to see work being done on the site again!

I hope some changes keep coming. Until I see some indication by the Webmaster that repairs are complete, I'll reserve comment.

Images rotate with each page load. There are at least 10, probably more.

Too tall would depend on your monitor and browser window size - at least it does the excellent photos justice.

I guess I mean taller than 99.9% of most banners out there. As for monitor... most new monitors seem to be wider and not as tall (especially laptops... it seems everything wants to be HD aspect ratio) so those tall pics take up way too much real estate (in my opinion). I guess it would be cool if it were a near unlimited mix of photos but I seem to see the same few all the time.

I'm hoping some of you folks will submit suitable photos.

Why complain when you can solve the problem yourself?

a)Submit where, exactly?
b)That still doesn't address the objection some users have about the scree real estate of the photo.

Really Marc, is it that difficult?

1) Go to your email program
2) Select \"create message\"
3) In the \"To:\" field, type \"webmaster@gunks.com\"
4) In the subject line, type \"photo submission\"
5) Attach a suitable image
6) Press \"Send\"

Do we really need to code a new page for you to submit a photo? Don't you think there's enough to work on at the moment? It will take the remainder of the year to address your current list of gripes.

Let's see....
We used to be able to submit photos directly to a photo gallery that was ostensibly one of the features of the site - now gone.

Existing photos in the gallery - either gone or inaccessible.

Existing content - gone or inaccessible, which already at least one user (<- over there, in the shout box) is asking about.

Other site features now broken/not working.

Apparently multiple accounts/login credentials needed for certain site features to work - a ludicrous requirement even 5 years ago.

Basic browser bugs that could have been caught with even cursory examination/QA.

You seem to want this to look and operate like a professionally designed site. You even had the gall at one time to suggest payment for access to a partner database.

And you call these merely "gripes". Interesting viewpoint.

My suggestion is that you decide what you want this site to be, then either put in the necessary effort to make it a realistic endeavor, or donate it to someone who cares.

One not very controversial easy to do suggestion is to consolidate the threads below

Changed again
Gunks.com doesn't load on some computers
Photo Gallery gone??
Bug - Separate Login Needed?
The NEW gunks.com
Logging on...
The Site is Falling Apart

into one, consisting of all the praise and gripes apropos the recent chages.

Mark-
Since you're feeling generous with your suggestions, including that I "dontate the site to someone who cares", why don't you volunteer to do some actual work on the site? After all, you'd be getting paid as much as we do (more actually), and for once, you'd actually make a substantive contribution.

I find your suggestions so comical--like your comment about catching all the problems with some cursory Q & A. Well you're right! I'm going to go down to the 24th floor of the Gunks corporate tower and go rip those guys in QA a new one!

You'll pardon me if I don't respond to any more of your helpful posts, but there's actually work to do here.

EVAN PLEASE FIX THE COPY PASTE ERROR.

Or may I suggest option B, I'm more then happy to buy the domiain and forum user list along with archived data, that way you don't have to be bothered with these fixes or silly requests from the user base.

Thanks for the efforts


Mike

Care to elaborate on what the "COPY PASTE" error is? As for plan B, if you were serious, you would contact me in a more appropriate way.

If you copy to the clipboard from another source - web page, word processor, etc - and then paste that into a post edit panel on gunks.com, all the text after a certain set of characters will be truncated/removed/not appear - whatever you want to call it. I haven't tested it as extensively as oenophore et al, but it appears that this occurs after extended ascii characters. It's behaving like it's not using/respecting UTF-8 encoding. This may just be a setting in ubb threads or the content database may not be set up to use the full character set.

In any case, it's caused difficulty when trying to paste content into a post. The bug has been mentioned in this forum as well as others.

We weren't able to reproduce the error. Can someone give us a precise example of something they tried to paste in and we'll debug it from there?

Thanks.

See: http://gunks.com/ubbthreads7/ubbthreads.php/topics/43128/I_found_a_truncation_bug#Post43128

...for starters. Others have more experience with it than I. Oenophore, for one, has investigated it a bit.

You've got to see it yourself.
Cut some text from a webpage with " or ' or - . Paste the text into a post. It will look ok on the post screen. It will look ok on the preview screen. Submit it and see the text truncated at that punctuation mark. The same is the case for text cut and pasted from Microsoft Word.

Which strongly suggests not UBB Threads but something with the underlying mySQL db.

I suspect that the shoutbox spillover problem lies in this HTML source code:

<table width="100%" class="t_outer" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<tr>
<td>
<table width="100%" class="t_inner" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="1"><tr>
<td class="lefttdheader">
Shout Box</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="leftalt-1">
<div id="shout_box" style="height:300px; width: 100%; overflow:auto;">
<div id="shout_content" style="height: 336px;">
</div>
</div>
<form name="shoutbox" method="post" action="" onsubmit="shoutit();return false;">
<div align="center">
<span id="shout_field">
<input type="text" name="shoutbody" size="15" class="form-input" maxlength="255" value="" />
</span>
<span id="sending_field" style="display:none">
Sending...
</span>
<br />
<input type="button" name="shoutbutton" value="Shout" class="form-button" onclick="shoutit()" />
<input type="reset" value="Reset" class="form-button" />
</form>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</td>
</tr>
</table>

For the sake of sanity, we should probably have a separate thread for each individual bug.

I still think the banner is way too big. It goes against any sane site usability guidelines I've ever seen. The most popular resolution out there is currently 1024x768. the banner is 250 pixels tall. Even with the browser window full screen, this banner, plus the 150-200 pixels taken by the browser menu/tabs/status bar and the OS application bar means the actual content starts more than halfway down the browser window. The content is supposed to be the important part, not the picture. Host the pictures in a gallery for those that want to look at them. while nice, I really don't care about seeing any photo that often, and having to scroll past it on every page just to get to what I want to see. Minor effort, yes, but these little things add up to a poor user experience.

The big banner is less geared towards usability than having a snazzy looking page. A site should not hinder function for form.

Edit: Also, note that mobile devices are becoming more popular, and screen size will go down with those devices. I really don't want to see that banner when I am loading the site from my phone...