Housekeeping - This forum - performance, etc

[NewMarsMember]

test newmarsmember

In this test I started with the 40 address and the initial post went smoothly.

I suspect the problem may involve a change from the 40 address to the DNS address.

it seems possible that the cookie created for a session at login may be connected to the URL used.

This will attempt an update.

(th)

[tahanson43206]

testtest - This was a test .... GW Johnson reported a problem that I have seen...

GW logged in, opened a reply, and tried to submit the reply.

The system had forgotten he was logged in and asked him to log back in.

I just tried the same thing and lost the message I'd composed.

I've logged back in and this time I created a post with just one word "test" The system saved that and now I am editing that post.

I'll now try submit.

The system asked me to log back in. I found this edited message in a previous History page.

(th)

[tahanson43206]

For SpaceNut ... thanks for suggesting we use this site to hold images.

If we decide to do that we need to add a suitable location ... I think the Meta Category is a good place.

I'll create a topic for Images;

What this means is that those who want to save images here need to be able to log in here.

That would be fine.

(th)

[SpaceNut]

newmars is back up just need to fix the image server path

[tahanson43206]

This post is about the ToDo list coming out of the weekly Google Meeting...

I'm considering creating a formal topic for Todo items.

In the mean time, we have:

1) Back data base
2) Copy backup of database to external storage (local or Dropbox or both)
3) Copy backup of entire VM to external storage or verify that was already done
4) Investigate procedure to upgrade forum
4a) Install upgrade on local machine
4b) Restore database from Step 2 to local instance
5) Perform upgrade of forum (after success with test on local machine)

Other items .... install email send from forum
Other items .... investigate like feature for phpBB3 (it may exist as an extension?)

(th)

[tahanson43206]

For FOQ1 re split experiment....

First, thanks for your support of SpaceNut's efforts to provide useful information in the mirrors topic.

I am looking forward to seeing how that topic evolves! SpaceNut has been experimenting with CoPilot, and he and CoPilot often produce very interesting results.

Regarding your experiment with split ...

First, please continue learning about this environment, and just let us (SpaceNut and me, and possibly RobertDyck) know what you learned.

I'm pretty sure there is documentation on phpBB3 systems but I've not spent much time there because (until now) I was just trying to set up the phpBB3 system so forum members could evaluate it. It seems to me as though SpaceNut has done more experimenting with the Admin functions than I have.

Reminder ... we have the opportunity to think about the structure we inherited... that structure goes back to 2001 and it has a decidedly British flavor, because the founding Admin was (perhaps still is?) from the UK.

Please tell SpaceNut and me what to look at to see the split. It may be obvious, but I haven't seen it yet. I'll return here to report if I see it.

FYI ... I'm spending time on a robot arm project these days, in the middle of the forum support. The work shows up in the robot Category. I've been using the forum to move files back and forth between the forum development system and the robot development system. The two are not connected in the local area network. I'm making progress on the robot arm project. I have a robot from a company called LynxMotion, and a controller from a company called Cokoino, and I'm using a Raspberry Pi 2 system to interface the two. The robot arm is starting to move in useful ways, but I still have a lot of work to do to achieve the goal. I'd like to develop something that would be useful, but right now these are still early days. To give you a sense of the near term goal, think of being able to use a Dremel drill to poke a hole in the wall inside a tank. You can see the place where you want the hole by looking at the output from a webcam mounted on the robot, and you have a game controller (with all the buttons and joysticks you've probably used in games) so you want the Dremel to poke a hole at the precise location where it is needed. At the moment I have created command sequences that take the robot arm from "Home" position to "Ready" position, and I am working on a command to "Drill" by pushing the bit into the wall. It has been fun getting the robot to actually move in a meaningful way after long intervals trying to arrange the hardware and software to work together.

(th)

[FOQ1]

Regarding "Splitting topics",

I attempted to split the topic Shiny Parabolic Mirrors into a new one in Terraforming about turning Dust into Bricks. I chose the 'all posts after selected'. This took just two posts instead of 2 pages worth. I do not see an Undo button.

I wanted to explore what the tool did and it seemed that topic was no longer about what was in the topic title. Seemed lie a good place to split. Shall we continue exploring the split feature or abandon it at this point?

[tahanson43206]

FOQ1 asked about the software version. We are running with the test version from ca 2024.

There is a new version and this is a good time to update, while we are still (relatively) early in the rebuilding process.

I am hoping this link to the image will work:
OK ... that failed: Invalid file extension: 20260405Version.pdf
Interesting! FOQ1 saved image files that have the PDF extension.
OK FOQ1 ... how did you do that? I'll have to try again with a jpg or PNG extension.
Update: Apparently phpBB3 creates a PDF of images when it saves them for display.
The image created by FOQ1 is #112, and this one is #113 (using copy link).

Screenshot 2026-04-05 8.30.16 AM.png (208.83 KiB) Viewed 698 times

[SpaceNut]

the forum is a temporary backup to allow members to still communicate

user name is specific question and communications that could take a topic off the yellow brick road

I am happy to see quark here

[FOQ1]

What is the purpose of the Member Communications forum?

I find it a little disjointing that I am getting responses to my threads but not within the actual thread. Perhaps useful to me, but why would anyone else go to my 'other' location to read responses so a group conversation can take place? I mean, if you need to respond privately PM would certainly be cleaner and actually private instead of just tucked out of the way but still in view of the web-scraping bots.

Confused.