Tips for using the forum

[John Donovan]

A few people have contacted me at my donovan@probesoftware.com email and said that they never got "approved" to join the user forum.

I am very sorry about this, but we get about a dozen attempts to "spam" the user forum every day, and sometimes from the email address alone it is difficult to determine who the "bad guys" are.

So, if this has happened to you, either please try again to register on the forum, this time using your professional email address, or contact me directly and let me know who you are and I will approve your membership right away.

Thanks.
john

[John Donovan]

This is just a reminder that members should utilize the built-in picture gallery for "in-line" images when posting on the Probe Software user forum.

I originally used TinyPic for image hosting on the user forum, but I found that even with a "registered" TinyPic account, these images occasionally got overwritten by some other TinyPic user's random image, e.g., someone's pet dog!

I've detected that at least two images in the user forum are hosted on TinyPic (see attached images below so you'll know who you are!), so please move them to the user forum gallery as described here:

http://probesoftware.com/smf/index.php?topic=2.msg4040#msg4040

The other reason to move your on-line images from TinyPic is that some labs (e.g, Idaho National Lab) are blocked from TinyPic, so those users will not be able to see your in-line images if they are hosted on TinyPic.

Thanks!
john

[John Donovan]

I should mention that all registered members should feel free to create new topics on the appropriate board whenever they want to.

That said, we should all probably check using the search field in the upper right, if the topic already exists!  With over 400 topics on the user forum, it is very possible that someone has already created a topic for your post.  If a search of the user forum does not reveal a closely related topic, then by all means, please feel free to create a new topic for your new post.

[John Donovan]

Bump...

A few people have contacted me at my donovan@probesoftware.com email and said that they never got "approved" to join the user forum.

I am very sorry about this, but we get about a dozen attempts to "spam" the user forum every day, and sometimes from the email address alone it is difficult to determine who the "bad guys" are.

So, if this has happened to you, either please try again to register on the forum, this time using your professional email address, or contact me directly and let me know who you are and I will approve your membership right away.

Thanks.
john

[John Donovan]

Some new forum members have asked why is it that when they join the forum their status is listed as "Student".   Mind you, there's nothing wrong with being a "student":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student%27s_t-distribution

I still consider myself a student, because I am always learning something new!  In any case this forum profile listing merely reflects your forum status, not your real world status!  Note that your forum status ("Student, Graduate, PostDoc, Professor and Emeritus") are based on the number of posts you make.

Right now you need 5 posts to get to "Graduate" and 10 posts to get to "Post Doc"!   



This is only a friendly way to encourage more posts by everyone.

[John Donovan]

Just a reminder for those that didn't know.   When you use the search field in the upper right of the forum page, please note that you are not limited to a single search term.  For example you can type in:

TDI incubation glass

and you will get hits for all those terms, and the results will be sorted by number of hits.  Once you have search results, one can type in more search terms to narrow down the results further.  One can also start ones search in a specific board or topic and only those results from that board or topic will be returned.

http://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/search

There is also an "Advanced Search" option available that you can access by just clicking the Search button with nothing entered.
john

[John Donovan]

The Internet never stands still.

When we first started using this user forum, and someone wanted to display an in-line image in their post, they had to host the image somewhere on the Internet and link to it from their post. Many of us utilized the site TinyPic which offered a free image hosting site. And yes as with most free things it turned out to be "too good to be true"!

The first problem I had with TinyPic was when I started noticing that some of the TinyPic images that I had posted previously seemed to be getting randomly replaced by an image of someone's boyfriend or cat.  This was really irritating as you can imagine!  I had even gone to the trouble to make an account on TinyPic because they stated that your images would be permanently saved if you created this account (I guess so they could harvest your email address!). At that time I even contacted TinyPic and complained but got no response.

So Probe Software started looking for a solution and one of our consultants showed us that the Simple Machines Forum software we are using for this user forum did provide a free image gallery plugin that we could have installed.  After some considerable effort we got the image gallery software installed, and I managed to grab all the images of mine I could find that were still left on TinyPic and moved them over to a folder on the Probe Software site where they would be safe from being randomly replaced by photos of boyfriends and cats!

Now it's even worse as some of you may already have noticed. TinyPic has shut down their image hosting site saying: sorry!  And in the place of any image links we now see this instead:



Anyway, if you've ever used TinyPic to host your in-line images on the Probe Software user forum, you might want to check your older posts and see if any of your image links are broken. And if they are broken but you still have those images saved locally on your computer, please utilize the user forum image gallery instead and then edit your posts as described here:

http://probesoftware.com/smf/index.php?topic=2.msg4040#msg4040

It's sad that these images which so many people thought were worth uploading and linking to have all been deleted from the TinyPic site, but hopefully you all have the original image files and can fix these broken image links in this user forum.

[John Donovan]

Bump.

A few people have contacted me at my donovan@probesoftware.com email and said that they never got "approved" to join the user forum.

I am very sorry about this, but we get about a dozen attempts to "spam" the user forum every day, and sometimes from the email address alone it is difficult to determine who the "bad guys" are.

So, if this has happened to you, either please try again to register on the forum, this time using your professional email address, or contact me directly and let me know who you are and I will approve your membership right away.

Thanks.
john

[John Donovan]

Let us also add an additional point about membership requests.

Sometimes we get a request to join the user forum from someone with what appears to be a valid email address, but the IP address appears unrelated to the email address.

Because this could be a spammer "spoofing" someone's email address, we usually approve the membership request, but require that you activate the membership using the provided email address. We do this by sending an activation email to the email address provided.

Most of the time, the prospective member sees this activation email, and clicks the link and everything is golden, but occasionally this activation email is missed, or ends up in the prospective member's spam folder.

If we don't see the membership activated in a week or so, we usually follow up with a reminder to check for this email.  But sometimes even that doesn't work!

So if you tried to join the EPMA user forum in the past, and wondered why you newer got "approved", this is most likely the reason.   So please try again, preferably using your professional email address, but also be sure to check your spam folder for the activation email!

[John Donovan]

Here's a forum tip that some of you may not know about. This can be especially handy if you've haven't looked at the forum in a while and wondered what has been going on since you last visited.

Just scroll to the bottom of the main forum page and then click on this link:

[John Donovan]

Please note that when using the search feature (located in the upper right of the forum web pages), the search will only search the currently listed boards or topics (and sub topics).

Therefore if you want to restrict your search to the, say the CalcImage board only, simply click on that board before typing in your search term.  If you want to limit your search to a specific topic in a specific board, again, browse to that topic before entering your search terms.

To search for literal strings use double quotation marks.

-suggested by Anette von der Handt