CR4 Feature Requests - Share Them Here

After reading the comments on the previous blog entry, I have a feature to suggest...

How about a 'Disable This Guy's Keyboard For a Few Days' radio button within the RATE dropdown menu?

LOL!!!!!

For Anonymous posters maybe?

Uploaded images at full resolution.

This was completely legible in the edit window, but suffers as described when posted.

Still not readable.

Are you satisfied with this ridulously-low resolution? On an engineering site.

From this drawing tell me the wire colours on the ECCS control relay.

The wire colors are:

Blur
Schmear
Mrfpl

I'm agreeing with you, detailed resolution is not a strong suit.

[edit] This seems a much larger issue for you than me. During my entire journey on Spaceship Earth, I have found nothing that is exactly the way I want it. Compromises, acceptable alternatives, and work-arounds are the buzzphrases that I choose to live with because that causes me less heartburn than the resistance I get when insisting to get my way.

Same here, but there are levels of compromise that are acceptable, and levels that are not.

An example of a level that is not acceptable: buying replacement car batteries at Walmart because, yes, they're cheap - but only at the checkout.

Let's say you're a woman working late evenings in Atlanta, teaching at a college in a not-so-nice part of town (lots of those in Atlanta). You go out to your car with its crap Walmart battery which is now dead. Permanently dead, because someone else found crap quality acceptable and put it in her car. If it were only a matter of the lost time - peeps' time isn't worth anything, right? - no big deal.

So she lifts the hood, unwittingly signalling to certain individuals in the dark car park that her car - her only defense in a hostile world - is inoperative and so here they come, and they rape her, leaving her body for some other late-night person to find.

"Oh, but you can take it back to Walmart for a free replacement!"

Low-rez images on engineering site is like putting casters on a Ferrari. If this were Facebook? Yeah, low rez is acceptable.

Is this a cybermob social site full of selfies? Or an engineering one, where peeps might need to post schematics?

There are levels of acceptable. This ain't one of 'em.

If those are good reasons for files to be small here, then they would be good reasons for files to be small everywhere else as well. Evidently other sites don't find those reasons to be good enough reasons to post at low resolution and certainly not reason enough to tell their members to post their images elsewhere (usually having to create yet another account to do so).

This is the ONLY site - and supposedly an engineering site at that - that decimates images.

You've got to be kidding.

I am on several electronics forums that allow full capacity pictures to be posted, you can enlarge them later as big as you need.....

This is the ONLY forum that I know of that wastes such a potential as in most cases, no picture would be about the same as the actual quality allows.....!!!! So in fact, all the thousands of useless diagrams, are taking up space for no reason at all....

i agree, too much bits on the server's load, a link will be better off

Terabyte mass storage being dirt-cheap an' all. Especially when you buy in volume. Why not make members open accounts elsewhere on sites they may not even wish to join?

So far the reasons for doing so are about as lame as this site's pix are decimated. Keeping files small would have been a good reason ten years ago because of the cost of server storage, but no longer. Not when I can go online and buy two terabytes for under a hundred bucks in quantities of one, that reason no longer holds water.

Savvy E will agree if you'll donate the budget.

Posting a high resolution image is great, I also agree, it is more fun with the foolishness going around often times.

S.E. will gonna have 50% of the post of this kind not to mention Lyn and his war crimes to the fools

True, however, telling people they have to link to another site brings in the added complication of relying that members can reach the other site.

IMHO A workable compromise would be a large data file site within the IHS Engineering \ CR4 domain that CR4 images can link with. These larger files could also have a finite lifetime automatically maintained by the server.

Extend the 15-minute editing period or eliminate it completely. PLEASE???

Most sites allow editing for the life of the post. I would find that very handy as I have classic dyslexia making it extremely hard for me to proofread my own writing (a uni I had to hire a proofreader to help me - at great expense - back in the day when there was no accommodation at all for peeps with cognitive disabilities). For peeps like me that 15 minute period is a killer.

Do you have cognitive disabilities? Try it with cognitive disabilities sometime.

Why was this thread even started, when the only feedback to members' input is "We're sticking with the tried-and-true" ???

"We're keeping the time limit"

"We're keeping the left-click menu. Use CTRL-V to paste" (on touch-screen devices that don't have CTRL-V? Good luck)

"We're keeping the image files small. Go elsewhere to post your images"

Why not just go elsewhere, period?? The reasons thus far are looking pretty good.

"Why not just go elsewhere, period?? The reasons thus far are looking pretty good."

You've done that several times, but still seem to keep coming back for more.

I am listing all of these requests to send to the development team. But I have responded to some comments where I either know of a workaround for the short term (see my other comment about how to paste on touch screen devices where there is no right click to bring up that wonky menu, anyway), or I know that it's unlikely we can implement those suggestions for various reasons.

Also... we can't do EVERYTHING. I'd love to make this a perfect website, but I'm trying to prioritize what needs to be done/what can be done against limited resources available. I posted these threads to get insight on what community members are having problems with and what they'd like to be able to do here.

good job Savvy E, thanks from us here. Merry Christmas!

"Also... we can't do EVERYTHING."

Not asking you to do EVERYTHING and that is just the sort of response I would expect from a third-grader, not from an adult ADMIN.

That clinched it for me, thank you very much and merry Christmas.

I disagree, every single other forum that I use allows between 1 and 2 hours for corrections.....CR4 is the shortest that I know of....

I think that Europium's elimination request is for an elimination of any edit time after posting. 15 minutes edit interval after posting lures people into making sloppy posts that they think they can correct later but gives them too little of a time to do something else and then come back.

I fully agree with you that one can always add a correction post. Eliminating any editing time seems like a better idea.

Maybe one could temporarily store a posting without making it public would be nice. More than once I have made an awkward posting due to reality dragging me away from a keyboard prematurely. If I could save an incomplete reply instead of post or start over, this would be useful.

Maybe it could be set up like a simplified Word doc editor that displays changes.

Ex. red strike-throughs and red characters for new content.

May even strike-though the whole post, but put it in the same window (presumably better explained or formatted) in red.

One problem with an extended editing period is you may invalidate GAs, OTs, and reply messages that follow it by changing the original message.

One possible alternative to full edit capability is to allow follow-up text to be appended to the original. This could allow for after-the-submission correction or explanations, but without removing the reason behind your scores and/or replies.

(Whenever I see an edited post in Facebook, I nearly always click the Edited hotlink to look at the edit history. Usually it's corrected grammar or spelling, but other times it's more...revealing...)

I, for one, would like to see a much better way to handle mathematical notations. Trying to discuss something that can be solved using multivariant calculus is very difficult with a text only editor. Maybe a proscribed method of using LateX or cut and pasting from another web site an image would be nice.

I agree, this is difficult. For the Challenge Questions, the question creators use LateX and then I create an image using the Snipping Tool in Windows. Then I insert the image into the post. It's a long workaround.

What would you like to see on CR4? Quoting someone else's post?

I don't understand what that means ? Is there an issues with people not giving credit when copying another post ?

This probably belongs in the 'bugs section', but another thing I don't understand is the custom menu ? What does it do that previous right-clicking didn't ? Personally I find it infuriating.

I'd like to see people stand by their voting habits - a la Facebook, hovering the mouse could show who voted for or against a post. I've seen countless arguments on CR4 over the topic. People feeling agrieved at a negative vote, or thinking that there is some sort of mutual back-slapping going on.

Europium raised an interesting point on the 'time-out'. JB Tardis made some valid points on the difficulties introduced by unlimited editing. Perhaps there is a compromise : A poster could go back and add (ie - the original remains, but a bit more can be added) clarification to a particular post they had made (?). With dyselexia, a person might read their post a hundred times and not be able to see an unintended error. Any such post that has been added to could be flagged for readers in the same way that unread post are.

The term 'Guru', whilst it is stated as just being a bit of fun, is often misctonstrued by new members. Perhaps it's time to review such member titles.

Whilst I'm on a roll, how about new mebers being restricted to posting 1 question per week for about a month. A few times recently the site has been bombed by idiot stuff about physical fitness and blah blah.

I'd also like an Etherville Flag, and some bells and whistles ! Sorry, I shouldn't go trivial, but I can't be the lone supporter of Norway forever.

Kris - good points. By quoting, I meant the feature that some other forum sites have to automatically reference part of a previous user's post in your reply.

New users actually are limited in how many posts they can make. The trouble with the spammers is that they come on and only post 1-2 times per account, then go on to create a new account before we can shut down the first one. Also, we do have some tools in place to automatically remove some types of spam (astrologers and the like) but they can take a few minutes to catch the stuff.

Thank you for your suggestions... I'll add them to the list.

Thanks for the feedback .

Let me know if you need help designing the Etherville flag !

I like your and jhowdy's editing time compromise of allowing unlimited time for crossout or the alternative yellow highlight for text deletions with red only text addition for a correction.

I for one have a crazy ass wife and I still don't hide behind the AP function when talking about her and what ever lunatic fringe nonsense is going through her mind when I feel like it.

If I can make it by with that what could anyone possibly have thats worse than that to hide their screen name from?

You try and understand what she's saying ?

I gave that notion up a long time ago. By any rights Google should be out of business by now - Mrs K knows it all. If a tree fell in the wood...it flippin well better clean up after itself .

It's one of those things that we blokes married to redheads learn early on. So she tells me !

Just to be fair...I was chatting with my Stepmother a long time back. No idea how we got to the topic, but she said, 'if you want to find a decent bloke, just go to the hardware store and look for a bloke with a pencil behind his ear'. Yes, she and her mates laughed at my blank face as well.

I have no serious objection to 'Anonymous Posters' being unknown to me on a one-to-one basis. but they should not be allowed to post without first being registered with CR4.

They can then click the 'Anonymous' button when posting if they prefer (that particular post) not to be identified in public.

I believe that that is already true. I agree with you also on that point.

Does anyone know differently?

Andy, people have to log-in to make any post. Anon or not. Our overlords at CR4 exercise discretion.

Huge ammount of work to make CR$ function, so it seems unlikely to me that a few backdoors would not exist.....Who is behind an 'anon' post, who casts votes......I imagine that admin can/coud discover such stuff, very easily, but they give us the liberty to play free.

Unlikely they will tell us, but I'd be a muppet to think I could post either anon or via some other route and not be discovered.

There is no such think as anonymous on the interweb.

That actually did not answer the question.....

...and I would be shamed if it did .

I have a shameful hangover, can you clarify so I can slambdunk you later ? Just cranking you up a bit. Deutschen humour is the best.

Its got a lot better since I moved here in 1981.....

I would like to know who gave me a "good answer". Not publicly, but on my member page. I've gotten personal messages from people who felt they gave a good answer to one or more of my queries and wanted to know if I gave them a good answer or not( I have). It would benefit members to know who may be be knowledgeable on topics for further PM contact.

I must admit that I did not read all the posts yet so I'm sure I will be repeating some ideas.

IMHO:

1. Better image handling and more formats like PDF, DWG, DXF, ETC. that can be scaled, enlarged or downloaded without distortion.
2. How about a drop down list where a poster can quickly choose a "template" that prompts them to give more information kind of like a questionnaire for the different sections that they can fill out.
3. An option to upload a high resolution picture and give the reader the option of either displaying the high res picture or just a low res picture or a thumbnail of the picture.
4. I appreciate this forum, it has probably the best look and format of all the blogs and forums I've visited. I think a few refinements would help a lot!

Thank you
Bryan

A lot of the suggestions here work really well on ElectricianTalk

images that appear small on the post, but when selected expand to full size.

Good answers are called "thanks" and the user who thanked them shows up below the post.

I would like to see "off topic" changed to something like "bad answer", with attribution given for the mark, and an explanation box which could come up when selected.

I agree with all the other posters that think images are generally degraded below usefulness by this website. There should at least be preservation of the image detail on an internal or external link. Also, it would be nice (not entirely necessary), but nice to have an interactive spreadsheet we could all use here. Even make it where other users could at least point out math errors on it, so that OP could go back and correct the obvious mistakes after his 15 min edit is over, as long as users have encircled that area on the sheet?

Just an idea...

OH, and another one. How about Original Poster's actually being required to check their maths while framing a question/discussion. I have seen half to more than half a blog wasted on attempting to parse what the OP really meant, or trying to fix a bad math assumptio that was made on the first post.

I would like to see the possibility to completely delete a post in the editing time....I read on and find someone else has said what I wanted to say before me.....now I want to erase my comments....

Is it possible in some way?

The 'name' of the poster is displayed when clicking on 'reply' as is the message itself, but I would like the post 'number' displayed as well.

It would also be helpful to me if the email notification of new posts gave the post number, or better still, go straight to it.

For some reason I have trouble making copy/cut/past work properly when using the mouse when 'replying'.

An alternative to, or in addition to, 'good answer' or 'off-topic' could be helpful, such as, 'not bad' or 'useful' or 'not useful, or in extreme cases 'dodgy' or 'rubbish'.

I say this because I sometimes think the posted reply is 'good' or 'I like' but not as an actual answer to the question, which I assume is what the original poster wants.

......and a list of abbreviations (in the Help menu say) for the likes of me who have not learned textspeak

Agree. How about adding "ambitious but still rubbish"?

Yes, there needs to be an agreed upon list of abbreviations (abbr.),

AFAIK - as far as I know

IMHO - in my humble opinion

LMAO - you know this one

TRAANSFL - I have no idea what this means

OP - Orignal Poster

PP - Previous poster, or could mean I have to go real bad.

TRAANSFL - I have no idea what this means

That didn't even come up on Google. Were you perhaps talking about TANSTAAFL?

There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.

Of course, I should have let you Google it yourself, as someone here uses as a clever tag line.

Thanks. TANSTAAFL is precisely what I was after.

TRAANSFL - there really ain't anything new since free love? nevermind.

Don't know if I posted this before (The list is huge, and I don't have enough time on my break at work to scan the whole thing looking for myself), but perhaps an 'expansion' of the rating system.

Right now you can only rate a post as Good Answer or Off-Topic. This works if everyone is being completely serious, in a "We at the Secret Serves do not have a sense of humor that we are aware om, Ma'am." way. However, there are times you want to give someone a 'thumbs up' for their wit, even though what they've posted isn't a 'Good Answer.' Perhaps they have given a 'Good Question,' something that will help clarify the OP's question, or perhaps it was just a spark of levity that some people appreciated to make their Monday seem less bleak.

My suggestion is to have two independent rating variables. One is the GA/Off-Topic rating we are all used to, the other is to measure a rating of 'This is funny/I like this' on the positive and 'Not funny/Lame joke/I take offense to that, but not enough to report it to the admins/"We are not amused"' on the negative. That way, the answers that are actually helpfull can be distinguished from the 'hey, check this out, this guy's a riot' posts.

With the separation of 'actual' Good Answers from 'amusing GA's, it also become easier when looking at a user's profile to see if they are wise, or witty, or (like me) think they're a wit, but are only half-right.

Half wit?

lol - a new vote button for 'wit'. Either a full vote or half a vote. Brilliant ! Two half votes might cause a problem, but I'm sure a solution could be found .

Full, half and the negative value of T[aint]wit.

Yeah, but to go the full monty we'd need the 'i' function as well. It could all get very complex .

Maybe instead of just one switch that we currently have, it should be two three four sliders.

GA----LA OT--OTARS GE------GAI and !!----------------------!!

Legend: GA- good answer, LA- lame answer, OT- off topic, OTARS- off topic and ridicuously stupid, GE-good english, GAI-get an interpreter, - funny, - offensive

Allowing a lot more rooom between not-so-funny, and offensive. I know I need to moderate my "I am offended by that" switch a lot. At the same time, my skin is pretty thick, so I don't mind being pelleted on here. You should see what I get at home. Maybe that is why I am here: to make plastic happen, and to accept the pelletations a lesser man could not endure.

I know I should be careful what I wish for.