Tell us what you like, dislike, or would like to see changed at Green Power Talk

[Rob Beckers]

The GPT forum has been operating in its current format for some time now, and membership is slowly reaching critical mass. Since there is always room for improvement, your feedback would be greatly appreciated: What do you like about the forum, or dislike? What would you like to see changed or added to the forum? Any additional functionality that you believe would be useful?

This forum is meant to be a useful resource for those working or interested in green power, sustainable living etc. Since you are reading this that includes you, so let's hear it!

-RoB-

[Stewart Corman]

Rob,
I've mentioned this to you offline before, so let's bring it up in a public forum.

I have always preferred the uploading capability of Otherpower, where an image or xls file is stored by a generic name, which can be replaced at will by the lister at a future time. This maintains the continuity of old posts with updated information.

One can replace an old photo with a better one, or in my case of the turbine calculator, the latest version would always be accessable.

Second bone of contention: the VB pager modes operendi
I have never seen an IM type screen that doesn't show the past conversations in an active screen ...I really don't like sending a note and not knowing if it got there at all, and it closes the screen all too often. Any improvement here would be appreciated.

Stew Corman from sunny Endicott

[Mario De Castris]

Hello Rob, Stew, and everyone,

What I would like is more time for posting instead of making cheese from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. every day for the last four weeks. (Cheese anyone?).:)

On a more serious note I have no suggestion for any improvement to the forum.

One quick note to Rob about the little green pager, I'm sure I've done something wrong when I register, I've only used it once to talk to Stew and he initiated the conversation. Because I am not a quick typist I really don't need it but just curious how to activate it.

Mario

[Rob Beckers]

Thanks for the feedback!

Stew, you should be able to replace attachments with new ones. It's a bit hard for me to test (because of the privilege settings, and if I create a regular account to test with I have to wait at least 30 days) though the idea is that you can always remove/replace attached images or files. So updating spreadsheets for example should be OK.

vbPager is a rather simple add-on to provide some means of quickly fire off a message to another member that happens to be online. It's not intended ot be fancy or full-featured. Just enough for a few quick back-and-forths. I've tested others, and there are more full-fledged IM apps, but they all eat resources in a gargantuan way. When this forum gets busy, with a few thousand members and a few dozen people at any given time, it would not scale. vbPager will still work at that point, anything more will bring the forum software to a crawl. So, the idea is that if you need more, just ask the other side if they run MSN Messenger or some such thing, and take it over there.

Mario, I hope to try some of that cheese next week! :)
The easiest way to see who's online, and to 'page' them using vbPager is to select "Quick Links" and then "Open vb Pager" from the menu at the top (dark green band, top of every forum page). It'll open up a little window with all the people that are online at that time. Double click any of 'm and you can type in an instant message. That's it.
If someone is sending an IM to you, there's no need for the extra window, just hit 'reply' after reading the message and that's all.

-RoB-