Technical Issues & Suggestions

Temporary suspension of registration.

Big_Dog — Mon, 13 Apr 2015 18:01:42 +0000

After several months of being flooded with spammers, and having to sort them out every day, I've decided to shut down registration for the time being. If people want to register, they can send me an email through the "contact us" link. Eventually I'll find a better solution for automatic registration. It will probably be off until I have more time, along with all the other big plans for the site. How long is determined by several business ventures I'm involved with which are sucking up all my...

Temporary suspension of registration.

Profiles: list of languages

Cavesa — Wed, 19 Nov 2014 22:12:36 +0000

Ok, the forum is not friendly when it comes to adding languages to the native, advanced, intermediate and basic lists. As our Administrator suggested in a message, we should put together a list of languages that would be sufficient for most of us so that the Administrator would be spared of redoing the list one piece at a time to keep it alphabetically ordered (because now it's a mess) every week.

So, which languages should definitely be included in the wave one, which ones do you think will...

Profiles: list of languages

7 members banned

Big_Dog — Wed, 29 Oct 2014 14:31:08 +0000

After months of debating and knowing we had a bad situation on our hands, and after a flurry of negative posting earlier today, I finally decided to ban Peregrinus, Wise owl chick, SaraH, Oak, Lance Manion, Wulfgar, Hua Hua.

As you know, I wanted this forum to be a place where people could argue without being censored or banned, so this was a very hard decision to make. I investigated it to the best of my abilities, and came to the conclusion that they needed to be banned, but hesitated...

7 members banned

How to unsubscribe from threads?

Stelle — Thu, 09 Oct 2014 00:52:01 +0000

I've clicked around through my profile, but I can't figure out how to turn off email subscriptions. I'd really prefer not to get email notifications every time someone posts to a thread that I've posted to.

Any suggestions? Thanks!

Down or Not

Peregrinus — Tue, 07 Oct 2014 05:35:25 +0000

For about 20 minutes or so during the past hour, this forum seems to have been down. One of those online tools said that was so when I checked after being unable to return to the forum, when I had been on it just a few minutes previous to that.

Which begs the question, "what's our backup plan?" Will HTLAL be as amenable to a thread there for information on a temporary outage here at polydog, as this forum has been for it?

Let's try to increase our visibility

Big_Dog — Sat, 04 Oct 2014 01:27:55 +0000

Hi everybody! I'm in the process of trying to improve our SEO, or make our site more visible. I'd like it to show up higher on the list during a search for language learning forums, for example. I have been told the two most important things for this are:
1) getting links posted on other highly ranked sites
2) having good content on our site that people want to link to

Everybody is doing great as far as content goes. Thank you all so much for that! Over half our members post here, which is...

Let's try to increase our visibility

Miscellaneous suggestions/thoughts

Peregrinus — Tue, 16 Sep 2014 15:33:19 +0000

Any chance of adding to the banner logo for the forum to convey a little of the forum's actual purpose? Like put a couple language based images with the dogs as bookends for the whole? Despite HTLAL's older looking forum software, the logo is very cool from a language perspective.

Also, is there vertical space for important messages, or just changing regular messages at the top? A lot of forums seem to have that capability.

If someone of the stature of Dr. Arguelles or linguamor were to start...

Miscellaneous suggestions/thoughts

Tables

Peregrinus — Wed, 13 Aug 2014 07:55:23 +0000

I was trying to insert an html table with the html code option with the following:

HTML:



 1 2 3
4 5 6

I tried all square brackets and both [] and <> with lowercase as well, but can't get a table to appear. Maybe I made a mistake above though.

Alternately, there appears to be an addon, given below, for this forum's software. It seems to have both a free and "branded" version. I am not sure if "branding" means pushing adds to the...

Tables

Block point

Big_Dog — Wed, 13 Aug 2014 04:07:20 +0000

I'm going to use this thread to keep a list of things that I want to get done in a not-so-distant block point. This will help me keep track of things, and give others the chance to make comments and suggestions.

Update Feature Threads add-on: add slider, and make it automatically choose threads to feature
Update Banner to be more Language Forum related
Add awards system add-on
Add a simple chat room add-on

Problems with Attachments

Big_Dog — Tue, 05 Aug 2014 05:06:34 +0000

Just a heads up. I'm unable to attach files to posts right now. I have a ticket in on this - I assume it's due to the host change.

Post length limitations /quirks

Peregrinus — Fri, 01 Aug 2014 04:33:57 +0000

When I was making my German resources thread, after it got long when I tried to make a new link, the software selected the entire text of the post and made it into one link, apparently overriding many other links previously inserted. I reverted and tried it again a couple times and the same thing happened.

I suspected this was due to the length of the post and just continued the rest in a reply. Perhaps I did something else that caused it though. Not a biggie but thought I would mention it.

New Host

Big_Dog — Wed, 30 Jul 2014 19:11:31 +0000

We were down for about 4 hrs today, switching hosts. Sorry for any inconveniences. I hope this fixes all the downtime problems we've been having.

What nested post configuration should we use?

Big_Dog — Fri, 25 Jul 2014 20:08:15 +0000

I have turned on the new nested post add-on, but am a little disappointed that we have to refresh and push the "read more" button to see the full nested quote. Also, it only goes 3 levels deep; I thought it would be limited only by the length of the page. The avatars are nice though.

The option that was active yesterday only goes 1 level deep, but no refresh is needed.

Which do you prefer?

Saved post drafts

Peregrinus — Thu, 03 Jul 2014 18:06:45 +0000

I find it a useful feature for the forum software to save a draft for later editing and posting. I am wondering what limitations there may be on this. For example a time limit, only one draft or one per sub-forum, or if they get lost if your cookies get erased.

Editing

Wise owl chick — Fri, 27 Jun 2014 23:07:40 +0000

Hi

I wanted to edit the world clock post but it's not possible now, yesterday it was possible. I wanted to add Sarah and then edit the Infos for example correct the time zones.

can we edit only the first day after a post?

Thanks

Upgraded forum software

Big_Dog — Mon, 23 Jun 2014 07:01:21 +0000

Ladies & Gents,
I finally got the courage up to try to upgrade again, and this time it worked
There are a few new features. If you have questions, please watch this video first:
New Features of Forum Software (XenForo 1.3)

Next page at the bottom the page.

luke — Mon, 23 Jun 2014 04:51:56 +0000

I noticed there is no page selector at the bottom of a page that has next pages. There is one at the top of course. That would be a nice feature. When you are at the bottom of an N-1 page, there's no indication that there are more goodies to come.

I wonder if that's a feature in the new version

resources

Wise owl chick — Sat, 21 Jun 2014 10:01:06 +0000

Hi Big Dog

I think that the resources section must have some clear threads, for example for each language a clear thread. The icon can be the country's flag (or one of this for the mulitple countries).

To find a list of resources for your target language would be great I think.

Then the language resources must be spearate of the other resources as well. At the moment, the resources section is muddle up.

Then each langauge can have:

Resources thread
Practise in the language...

resources

Compete with LingQ?

SaraH — Fri, 20 Jun 2014 13:52:28 +0000

In your mission statement I saw you want to build a tool like LingQ. I just want to say I hope you do it soon because it's really frustrating how they are down so often. I have a membership there but I want to quit and go somewhere more stable so you would have one customer right away.

Place to Contribute Docs

Peregrinus — Thu, 12 Jun 2014 04:34:31 +0000

Since there is an option for "upload a file" when creating threads, does this mean that polydog can host short member contributions, say in pdf form?

As an example, there are so many different ways for teaching German adjective declension, but I have a spreadsheet showing how I learn it which I would like to contribute. I could easily convert it to pdf.

Obviously this depends on the hosting arrangements for this site, and there would have to be some limitations to avoid bloat.