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Community Feedback: New Forum Software Is Live!

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We are excited to announce that we are live on our new forum platform!

It’s been a long time coming. Let’s face it. Sometimes older forum technology lags behind other parts of the internet. Although seeing the same format for a long time is comforting, the member experience shouldn’t include dealing with outdated, unsafe, slow software.

The transition to a new platform will never be 100% smooth but the days of dealing with out of date forum software are over. We have teams dedicated to building a world-class community for you. The development has been steady with regular software releases since May 2019. Asking members for feedback and coming up with ideas for improvement is what we want.

Speed and Reliability Are Key
No one should have to wait for information. This site has been built to be much faster and more reliable, period.

New Homepage Experience
Our algorithm will serve a personal customized feed based on your prior engagement with content on the site. If you’ve liked and or commented, or are following certain topics that are of interest to you, similar content will appear at the top of the homepage.

Search
We have introduced new search algorithms, powered by an industry-leading AI platform, to help you find information faster. We plan to roll out new features to continue improving search, and to power many additional areas of the forum.

Due to the volume of content, our search platform may take some time to complete indexing over the first few days after migrating. During this process, you may see a limited number of posts until indexing has been completed. We appreciate your patience.

Finding Your Way Around
We have made the design clean and simple to use. Near the upper right-hand corner of the community, you will see navigation icons.

The first icon is for what’s new on the site.

Clicking on it, by default, will take you to new unread posts. On that page, you can click on additional tabs as well, such as Popular, if you prefer to view active topics.

Clicking the list icon next to “NEW” will bring you to the full forum listing.

Clicking your avatar will give you a drop-down menu for all things related to your account.

You can also navigate more by clicking the 3 vertical dots.

Dark Mode
We have introduced Dark Mode. One of our favorite features allows you to access the site with a power-saving, and easier on the eyes dark mode. You can access it in the drop-down menu under the 3 vertical dots.

Save Bookmarks
Now you can save your favorite discussion threads and posts! Bookmarks are a handy way to remember and easily find great content or stuff you want to read later.

We also wanted to make it easier for new users to understand the lingo of forums. We have cleaned up various language to more commonly recognized phrases including:
  • Following - Thread subscriptions, and Watched are now known as Following
  • Conversations - Private Messages or PMs are now conversations and can be accessed from the user avatar drop-down in the main navigation
  • Showcase - Showcase is designed for users to "showcase" items/projects through the use of uploaded images, text descriptions and custom content categories. It’s a way to visually and textually provide detailed information on the content you wish to share. The showcase would be similar to a catalog, whereas the gallery would be like a photo album. It can be accessed from the drop-down menu with the 3 dots.
Take a tour and look around! Check out the Help section for some quick FAQs about the new platform.

Please keep all feedback, questions, concerns, requests for help, etc. regarding the new platform right here in this Feedback thread. This will help us make sure not to miss a request for help and also let us pass along your thoughts to our Product team. The Admins and I will be here to help along the way taking note of your comments.

- Community Management Team
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I will be here during your transition to the new platform, to help with any questions, help with navigation or how to do things, and to listen to your feedback so please don't hesitate to holler at me. I want to help. You can also check out our FAQs.

I do want to take a moment to introduce myself. My name is Cricket. When I was born, my father told his friends I was the ugliest baby he had ever seen, and that I sounded just like a cricket (I was born with the hiccups.) so yes, I have been Cricket for 59 years now. I live just outside of San Antonio, Texas. I spend most of my free time out in nature and exploring the back roads. During late autumn when it starts to finally cool down, I disappear from the world for a bit for camping trips and hiking.

Please don't be afraid to explore and test out things to see how they work on the site. :)

Although you can certainly use the "insert image" icon to upload an image to your post, you can also just drag and drop it to the text editor or even copy/paste it into there!

You can easily share videos just by adding the URL directly into the text editor!


Gif links from sites like giphy.com will display automatically just by adding the gif URL directly in the text editor. Try it!


I am a huge fan of the dark mode for the community. What is your favorite feature?

The new forum software is still a work in progress.

We will be seeing regular updates which are largely fueled by community feedback. While that doesn't mean we can action every request, it does mean we will be actively listening to the feedback and sharing it with the developers. We do ask that you keep any questions, thoughts or feedback about the new forum software here in the Community Feedback thread to help us keep all the information together so we don't miss anything.

There is still some work going on behind the scene so you may notice some changes as we work.
  • It can take 24-48 hours for the site to finish indexing so it may take a bit for search results to return proper results, including showing all your threads/posts under your profile.
  • We will continue to clean up the order of the sections on the full forum listings page so you might see some stuff move around.
  • We are reviewing permissions and special permission sections so let us know if you notice any issues so we can look into them.
I have worked with our community support team for 6 years. I have worked with forums for closer to two decades. I won't always know the answers to your questions, but I can find someone who does, as needed. ;)

- Cricket
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How To Find New Posts

Near the upper right-hand corner of the community, you will see navigation icons.

The first icon is for what’s new on the site.

Clicking on it, by default, will take you to new unread posts.

On that page, you can click on additional tabs as well, such as Popular, if you prefer to view active topics. You can also mark all as read.


- Cricket
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Not sure I like the new format, I guess we all have to succumb to advertising to pay the way, personally, I would prefer to pay a subscription.
Suppose I will get used to it in time
Regards
Alan
Not sure I like the new format, I guess we all have to succumb to advertising to pay the way, personally, I would prefer to pay a subscription.
Suppose I will get used to it in time
Regards
Alan
Although the forum will remain free to members, there is a Premium option available.


- Cricket
Having had a bit of a nosey around in the new set up, it seems to be ok, but having checked my own thread, Lymington Junction, I find that my more recent pictures are missing. Earlier ones that I have in PhotoBucket are still there, but none of the more recent ones (ok, a few years ago now!) which I keep in my Gallery are not showing in the thread. Anyone any suggestions as to why? I would have liked to go back to the old forum and see if I had the same problem there - but I can't. First attempt at posting a picture in the new world - wow - it looks easy enough! And editing the post is easy too.
Hope everyone is keeping well!
Philip

Train Sky Building Vehicle Rolling stock
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There is an Album/Gallery attached your member information. The preview shows about 5 pages worth of pictures. Did you find that?

David
Hi David, thanks for your reply. Yes I can see the pictures I originally used in my thread in my gallery, but they don't now appear in my thread. The extra picture of the Brockenhurst A signal box in my earlier post today was linked to my gallery, so that obviously works. It seems that the links from my earlier posts to my gallery have broken. I noticed also that pictures that you posted into my Lymo Junction thread in May 2018 also have disappeared. Did older links not come over in the transition, perhaps?
I would not be surprised if some links did not make it. I know from my own experience that 100% automatic data transfer from one format to another is very difficult.

David
The new format is messy 'style over substance'. Not sure what this is aimed at, and isn't inviting for this user.
Dark mode certainly makes it easier on the eye.
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Dark mode certainly makes it easier on the eye.
Yep, I agree there.
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Although the forum will remain free to members, there is a Premium option available.


- Cricket
Does premium option remove the adds ?
Regards
Alan
Well I spent a month re photoing my freight cars. I also spent money on a premium subscription.

Windows died and apparently the "keep your data" option on the restore only refers to data inside the Windows folder itself.
So I lost all 800 photos.

I still don't have my premium membership.

Oh well.
How do we mark all forums read from the index page like the old forum software used to let us?
Does premium option remove the adds ?
Regards
Alan
Yes.
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How do we mark all forums read from the index page like the old forum software used to let us?
How To Mark Forums Read

If you want to mark a specific forum as read, navigate to that forum. At the top you will see a button to “Mark All Read.

If you want to mark all threads in the community as read, click on NEW near the upper right-hand corners of the site.

Click on Mark All Read.

You will then see a popup confirming that this is what you want to do. Click “Mark All Read”.


- Cricket
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Having had a bit of a nosey around in the new set up, it seems to be ok, but having checked my own thread, Lymington Junction, I find that my more recent pictures are missing. Earlier ones that I have in PhotoBucket are still there, but none of the more recent ones (ok, a few years ago now!) which I keep in my Gallery are not showing in the thread. Anyone any suggestions as to why? I would have liked to go back to the old forum and see if I had the same problem there - but I can't. First attempt at posting a picture in the new world - wow - it looks easy enough! And editing the post is easy too.
Hope everyone is keeping well!
Philip

View attachment 19977
Can you give me a link to a thread with the missing images, please?

- Cricket
Can you give me a link to a thread with the missing images, please?

Hi Cricket,
Here is a sample that had several pictures included from my Gallery. Does this work?
Philip

- Cricket
Belated thanks for your comments, David. I'm afraid I still haven't got out the airbrush, and I decided in the end to paint the long footbridge with a spay can of dark green paint.

But first, I had to correct something I only spotted looking at the last two photos in my last post. In 1937, the platforms were extended by a few hundred feet towards the west, requiring the trackwork at the entrance to the goods yard on the north side of the station to be modified. This meant that the long footbridge had to be made longer at the north end to accommodate an additional road (there is evidence in other photos I have, and in the model, of this extension, although I have not found a pre 1937 photo of the footbridge to be certain of the changes made; I suspect the original bridge only had a single off-centre support, the one on platform 3/4).

The support structure for the footbridge on platform 1/2 appears to have been built new in 1937, but the existing support structure on platform 3/4 which had previously stood on the ground, is of a different pattern. At first I built this support in the same style as the new support on platform 1/2, but comparing the last two photos in post #108, I realised this was not correct. So I rebuilt it according to the real photo, which has the lower "half" of the support much shorter than the upper part. The rest of the lower part was apparently buried in the new platform extension. The change from brick to concrete platform wall at that point, which shows in the next photo, also shows the extent of the new platform extension, which luckily I got in the right place when I built the platform nearly three years ago! I added a couple of train spotters for good measure.



Next project was the goods shed, for which I have several photos which allowed me to count brick courses to help draw up a more or less scale plan. This is 100% scratch built, using 3mm foam board and brick papers. Unfortunately the goods shed crane kit I had bought produced a model that was way too big to fit inside my shed - so it now needs to be modified as a platform crane, not a ground mounted yard crane.




Next was the Brockenhurst B signal box. Again, scratch built using the same methods, but this time I did have a scale drawing from a chance article in a model magazine that someone found for me.




A signal box ladder kit from Ancorton Models suitably lengthened for the height of this box was added, as well as opening sliding windows (which is why they never look quite straight in the photos!). The interior is fitted with a Ratio signal box kit (actually two kits to make a big enough lever frame).




The latest addition and one I am very pleased with, is the Brockenhurst A signal box. At first sight, the small wooden signal box kit from LCut Creative was a good match, with the correct number of windows to make the original configuration of the box, although it needed to be quite a bit taller than the kit. Again, some interesting railway archaeology here was discovered on careful examination of the photos I have of it at various times of its life. The original signal box was evidently built at a time when the gates were walked open and closed by the gate keeper.



When a wheel operated gate mechanism was installed, the upper floor of the box was extended to the edge of the balcony at the top of the steps to accommodate the wheel and its mechanism, with the extension supported by the same fortuitously positioned concrete telegraph pole as had supported the balcony. The steps and the upstairs door door had to be realigned too.



The wheelhouse extension and front balcony required a selection of parts from LCut's range of components which allow for endless kit modifications! Another Ratio signal box interior kit, another Ancorton signal box steps kit, and a good deal of cutting and shutting resulted in a model I am very happy with. And all brush painted by hand to look rather old and tatty as it did in the days I am modelling.





Only a couple more buildings to go for Brockenhurst, the crossing keeper's cottage and the store room by the B box, then I have a few trees to add!


That's it for now...
Can you give me a link to a thread with the missing images, please?

- Cricket
I need the actual link (URL) of the thread, please.

- Cricket
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