IMPORTANT POLL: New Forum Categories / Reorg

[EEVblog]

I'm missing a very important option in the poll: fewer subcategories.

It's not an option for very good reasons that have been discussed.

[EEVblog]

I can't agree more! It's so annoying that I can only display 50 comments per page  This makes reading through longer threads so much more painful.
There's also no real sane reason I can think of why the 50 message limit needs to be there in the first place. SMF 2.0 certainly doesn't need it (it can handle a virtually unlimited number of post) so seriously, why is it there?

Because it's sensible. Not everyone has the bandwidth to open a page that contains 1000 posts that may contain images etc.
It would also tax the server more that has to do the page rendering for every user at every instance.

I do, too. I think there needs to be a bigger push to make people post into the right category, not just by admins but also by other members.

If you see a post in the wrong place, you can report it.

[station240]

Someone's been busy moving some existing threads into the new subforums.
At one point do we report threads that should be moved ?
I don't wish to interrupt if it's all still being worked on.

[Brumby]

It would be great to have a running summary/ranking of test gear that have been reviewed/torn-down.
Top 10 lists for
Meters (Premium/Midrange/Budget)
Osciloscopes (Premium/Midrange/Budget)
Bench Power Supplies
Signal Generators
etc...

I don't think that is really possible, at least not with complex instruments like oscilloscopes.  Simply because the "best" instrument can't just be identified by looking at specs and price (or at Dave's review), it also very much depends on what the user actually intends to achieve (i.e. what the measurement problem is).

Just have a look at the test instrument section, which is full of threads where people search for a suitable instrument that does a particular job, and most of them come with specific individual requirements.

In addition, such a list would need to be maintained/updated for new gear (including instruments Dave didn't get for testing) and retired products would need to be taken off. It also would leave out the big alternative to buying new kit which is the 2nd hand market, which for many situations is a viable (and often more economical) option.

I quite agree.  The 'best' of anything has several parameters affecting the outcome and any efforts to evaluate and organise a range of products would not be insignificant - and the ongoing maintenance could easily become a full time job.  Even then, there is no guarantee that such a database would achieve the intent, especially as we have a global and diverse membership.

[EEVblog]

Someone's been busy moving some existing threads into the new subforums.
At one point do we report threads that should be moved ?
I don't wish to interrupt if it's all still being worked on.

Eventually, yes, report threads that needs moving. I haven't done much searching and moving yet, so many still to go.

[tautech]

I do, too. I think there needs to be a bigger push to make people post into the right category, not just by admins but also by other members.

If you see a post in the wrong place, you can report it.

Would you and the Mods really want that bother? 

[station240]

For one thing, we could end up with two threads on the same topic, as no one would look in the 'other equipment' forum.

Dave, you'll want to move this one, for some reason I cannot report your posts 
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/reviews/tesla-powerwall-in-australia/

[VK5RC]

Hi All, I like the new layout , looks good to me! 

[TiN]

Love new metrology cave, thanks! 

[EEVblog]

I think it looks much more organised now.
The obvious two for me that need more thought are:

a) Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff which is still the big "catch all" thread for general electronics design, which doesn't really make sense now we have more specific categories for other things.

and

b) Test Equipment. The obvious question being should this category be split up into different products. Part of me says obviously yes, but the other part says that a lot of people just like test gear and want to have it all in one place. Perhaps, as the description says, it might be better to have separate sections for user reviews and user teardowns? instead of individual product categories? I'm erring more towards that thinking now.

[Radio Tech]

So far so good. I like it Dave 

[tautech]

So far so good. I like it Dave 

+1

I think it looks much more organised now.
The obvious two for me that need more thought are:

a) Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff which is still the big "catch all" thread for general electronics design, which doesn't really make sense now we have more specific categories for other things.

and

b) Test Equipment. The obvious question being should this category be split up into different products. Part of me says obviously yes, but the other part says that a lot of people just like test gear and want to have it all in one place. Perhaps, as the description says, it might be better to have separate sections for user reviews and user teardowns? instead of individual product categories? I'm erring more towards that thinking now.

Can further be done with sticky threads or will it be too messy?

[EEVblog]

Can further be done with sticky threads or will it be too messy?

You can't have more than maybe half a dozen stickies before they just get in the way of normal threads.

[dom0]

I can't agree more! It's so annoying that I can only display 50 comments per page  This makes reading through longer threads so much more painful.
There's also no real sane reason I can think of why the 50 message limit needs to be there in the first place. SMF 2.0 certainly doesn't need it (it can handle a virtually unlimited number of post) so seriously, why is it there?

Because it's sensible. Not everyone has the bandwidth to open a page that contains 1000 posts that may contain images etc.
It would also tax the server more that has to do the page rendering for every user at every instance.

I think Würstchenhund wants you to increase the limit, not the default. This is a user setting, the default is 20 (I think?) 15 and one can currently select 50 as the maximum (Profile -> Look and Layout -> Messages to display per page).

In terms of server load it should be more efficient to have fewer requests with more content (posts per page) than the other way around, since this is a PHP forum with PHP's large per-request overheads. But then again few people stray from the default user settings when looking at the whole user base.

Still, it'd be nice to have at least a 100 or 200 posts / page option.

---

By the way, can we have Unicode support for the forum? Doesn't work: ?
(Interestingly it's displayed correctly in the Preview page, so I guess it is an issue with the database. The forum probably uses Unicode and the database columns are set for latin1)

[EEVblog]

I think Würstchenhund wants you to increase the limit, not the default. This is a user setting, the default is 20 (I think?) 15 and one can currently select 50 as the maximum (Profile -> Look and Layout -> Messages to display per page).

I didn't know that, but just changed it.
Yes it's a user option, but no, it does not seem to be a maximum global setting (at least I can't find it), it seems to be the default setting I can change.
I just changed it to 100 and sure enough, my own account showed 100 posts per page even though my profile default value was 15 (now changed to 100).
It's now set to 25.

By the way, can we have Unicode support for the forum? Doesn't work: ?

I have no idea what that means.

[EEVblog]

I just increased the number of topics displayed on the index page to 40, that seems to make sense.

[rrinker]

 Looks good. Might take a day or two to get used to, but on first pass the new category organization looks reasonable.

Unicode allows adding characters used in languages other than English, such as those umlauted letters (the 2 dots on top) that you love so well on Mailbag, and accented characters and others. It's a standard, as far as what codes represent what characters, although forum software support may not be consistent from one software vendor to another.
 Oversimplification, but that's the primary reason you'd want Unicode on a forum that caters to an international audience.

[dom0]

Currently any Unicode one enters e.g. ? (<- actually an unicode ohm symbol) gets mangled to ? (<- actually a question mark) as soon as the post is submitted. This is a common pattern when the application thinks it's working with Unicode, but the database stores text as latin1 or some other obsolete encoding and removes all the unicode.

Actually Umlauts (öäüß) work fine, probably because they are part of latin1. The same goes for e.g. ±, ®, ©, ™, ¹, ², ³, ¼, ½, ?


There should (should - the SMF docs are ... not good...) be a couple options related to page size:
- Topic Settings / Maximum messages to display in a topic page <- I guess this is the one we are looking for
- Topic Settings / Number of posts per page in a topic page  <- And this is probably what changed the default for everyone
- Topic Settings / Max number of replies in a topic to show "All" posts <- "Set this to the maximum number of posts a topic can have to show the all link. Setting this lower than "Maximum messages to display in a topic page" will simply mean it never gets shown, and setting it too high could slow down your forum." ... I guess setting this high enough enables a view where the entire topic is on one page or something like that.

[xrunner]

Looks good. Might take a day or two to get used to, but on first pass the new category organization looks reasonable.

Yea, there's a gazillion way to organize it, but really, it needed a few more boards, and what I see is prolly a good enough expansion for the next few years. 

[Wuerstchenhund]

I think Würstchenhund wants you to increase the limit, not the default.

Correct!    I never suggested that everyone needs to have all messages thrown on a single page. But the option should be there to allow it if the user wants to.

This way the impact on the server should be negligible, provided the hardware is at least somewhat adequate for a server for the amount of users and traffic this forum has.

I didn't know that, but just changed it.
Yes it's a user option, but no, it does not seem to be a maximum global setting (at least I can't find it), it seems to be the default setting I can change.

If I remember right it's in

Admin > Edit Features and Options > Layout and Options > Maximum messages to display in a topic page

It doesn't need to be set to unlimited ('0'), though, set it to 5000 or 10000.

Also, there's

Admin > Edit Features and Options > Layout and Options > Max topic size to show "All" posts

which should be set to the same number (i.e. 5000)

If you can't see any of these settings then maybe the account you're logging in with doesn't have full administrative rights.

[EEVblog]

If I remember right it's in
Admin > Edit Features and Options > Layout and Options > Maximum messages to display in a topic page
Also, there's
Admin > Edit Features and Options > Layout and Options > Max topic size to show "All" posts
If you can't see any of these settings then maybe the account you're logging in with doesn't have full administrative rights.

No such options.
And yep, I'm an Admin with the power of god.

[EEVblog]

There should (should - the SMF docs are ... not good...) be a couple options related to page size:
- Topic Settings / Maximum messages to display in a topic page <- I guess this is the one we are looking for

No such option.

- Topic Settings / Number of posts per page in a topic page  <- And this is probably what changed the default for everyone

Correct, I changed that to 25.

- Topic Settings / Max number of replies in a topic to show "All" posts <- "Set this to the maximum number of posts a topic can have to show the all link. Setting this lower than "Maximum messages to display in a topic page" will simply mean it never gets shown, and setting it too high could slow down your forum." ... I guess setting this high enough enables a view where the entire topic is on one page or something like that.

This option is there, and it sounds like it works like that.
I set it to both 20 and 50 (above and below my default) and it did nothing.
I set it to 500 and I got the All button on this thread with 6 pages, but not on another huge thread like the Batteriser.
And curiously, when you hit all, it still keep the pages numbers there, although it does seem to display them all.
So a strange option, it only works on threads that are not too big and not too small, but I guess that makes sense because you don't want one person hitting All on the Batteriser thread and killing the server.

[PA0PBZ]

And curiously, when you hit all, it still keep the pages numbers there, although it does seem to display them all.

I think that actually makes sense, that is the way to go back to paged mode. All is just another page with all posts, and it still shows on what page you are with the [  ]

1 2 3 4 5 6 [All]

[EEVblog]

And curiously, when you hit all, it still keep the pages numbers there, although it does seem to display them all.

I think that actually makes sense, that is the way to go back to paged mode. All is just another page with all posts, and it still shows on what page you are with the [  ]
1 2 3 4 5 6 [All]

Yep, makes sense I guess. The All is highlighted to show you are in that mode.
But once a thread gets too big, you get no option at all.

[PA0PBZ]

But once a thread gets too big, you get no option at all.

Which is actually what you want (don't 'All' the batteriser thread) and what you did set here:

I set it to 500 and I got the All button on this thread with 6 pages, but not on another huge thread like the Batteriser.