Welcome To My Brand New Forums

Hello! I've completely redone my website, turning it into a forum which anyone can join. I want to build a little community of like-minded adventurers where we can talk about stuff, make plans, ask and answer questions and everything else you'd expect.

If you would like to be part of it then join up right now and say hello!

I built the entire site by myself (I'm a web designer, if you didn't know) and so the good thing about this is that I have 100% control over everything. Therefore I can develop the forums to be anything we want them to be. It all depends on how people use them and what they want with it.

So, let's see what happens and I'll go with the flow.

Cheers!

PS: I've got a whole list of big adventures planned for this year and I'm hoping that these new forums help me to sort out stuff for them. Maybe even meet up with some of you lot! :)

cool website, it looks much different than it did a year or so ago!

Haha, thanks. It looks a lot different to how it did 24 hours ago too (it was just a white screen saying "Coming soon" :P

Just wanted to say, great website...I will be a regular visitor!

Excellent! Glad to hear it, CH! I'll do my best to grow it into something good!

Hi Dave, I've been enjoying watching your adventures on youtube for a few years now, after seeing your latest video I wanted to join your new website and say hi!

Well I'm glad you joined and said hi, Johnny :) And I'm glad that I've entertained you for so long. Hopefully I'll continue to do so!

Exerlent idea for a space like this

Ah forums. Now I can stalk you full time lol

Errrm, great! I think... >:-/

How about starting a thread where we can suggest an adventure for you (bearing in mind that you are brave Dave and not clinically insane Dave lol) and maybe crowd fund the adventure.

Haha, that would be awesome! But I don't think there's enough of you to crowd fund me just yet, unless the adventure was "Eat a sandwich" :P

I've got a list of big potential adventures for this year but nothing is set in stone and everything is hinging on my finances. but I fully plan on pulling my finger out and making things happen so there is still hope...

I can think of a few cafes I've been in where you would be dicing with death eating a sandwich but I concede your point.

Yeah, I'd prefer to stick to the mountain / outdoors / freight train type adventures for the moment. "Brave Dave Contracts Salmonella" can wait for another day I think ;-)

I signed up :) Looking forward to your mega mountain adventure this summer ;)
I'm just taking it easy this year and going to take a few mountain virgins up Snowdon via Crib Goch and Tryfan. Same old peaks, but they're beautiful enough to not get boring.

Wahey! Hi, Kev! Good to see you on here :)

Yeah, I'm looking forward to my endurance mountain challenge too. Which reminds me, I need to start getting fit otherwise it'll be a whole lot of wasted driving. Again.

Hello people. I've spent that last 5 days or so redoing the forums again. No, really. But I'd always planned this. I wanted to get a handful of you lot using the forums a bit so I could see how it works properly and what needs changing. Well it turns out that quite a fundamental part of its structure needed redoing. Currently on threads with multiple articles (namely my video ones) the same thread of posts appears for each article which is silly and also confusing.

Anyway, blah blah, I've redone loads and am still putting the new one together so the thing you're looking at right now is the same as before but will be upgraded in the next few days.

So rather than this just be me talking to myself I thought I'd ask if anyone had any suggestions for stuff to be added on here or things that can be improved/fixed.

All I can think of at the moment (other than the massive restructure I've been doing behind the scenes) is having a way for people to promote their websites or YouTube channels.

If anyone can think of anything else then say so here, now, this moment, right now.

I really dont know much about website design, but I noticed that If some replys on a forum to the topic, I cannot directly reply to their reply...that make sense? ha. Like right now I cannot reply to comment #6 directly....unless I sent a private msg. Im not sure if this is something that can even be fixed just something I noticed. Thanks

Ah yes, good point. Having a little "Reply" button at the bottom of each post would be good, especially as the threads get bigger. And do you mean like in the same way Facebook (and some other forums) do it like how if you reply to a post it starts a mini thread of posts under that post? So people can go off topic without it cluttering up the thread?

It's much more complicated to make that happen compared to just the normal structure of posts in just one stack, but it could be worth doing.

Thanks for the suggestion :)

I am meaning exactly that yes. I frequent a few Disqus pages as well as Reddit, so im used to seeing that. That's unfortunate you say it is more work to make that happen, I just like that I could then respond to 1 persons post instead of the entire subtopic, especially as the page gets bigger...if im trying to respond to #4 post but there are #34 posts......you can see where there may be confusion.

Yeah, it does make sense (which is why a lot of forums do it). And of course, Reddit is the king of that sort of format.

The thing is that it gets really complicated, really fast. At the moment each page displays a max of 15 posts. However, if there were sub posts as well then there'd be no limit to how many posts could display on a page. What if a thread of subposts got to like 100 posts long? Of course there are ways to code it to try and keep things organised but like I said, it's a big job.

Ahh, coding. It's great and everything, but damn there is NO limit to what can be done. And my problem is that I keep thinking of new ideas and spend most of my life redoing things over and over again :P

The only problem I've encountered was embedding photos in my posts, almost all my photos have had to be cut down in size, quartered in one case, to be small enough for the post. Other than that, it's all smashin'.

Ah yes. Unfortunately that's a problem I don't have any control over :(

See, when you upload a pic it gets processed by PHP. My hosts have put a restriction on how big this process can be (obviously so it can't be abused and doesn't put too much strain on their system). If you upload a big pic then it requires too much processing power to sort out and the screen just goes blank. So in order to stop this from happening I set dimension and filesize limits on the website so that anything which might cause the process to crash won't get through in the first place.

All you need is a very basic image editor on your computer to resize your original pics down to something under 1000px wide and it should work just fine. This works out as an advantage to you too because modern cameras take absolutely massive pics these days, so rather than trying to upload a 12MB image you simply resize it and it'll probably be a few hundred k max instead. Much faster to upload :)

If anyone needs it :
imageresizer.codeplex.com/

Adds the option into windows to Right click a file and have a new option of "Resize" appear. Super simple. Used to use it quite a lot, so it's always been a staple bit of software for me.

Nice one, Kev. Yeah, I had meant to include a link to one of the many image resizing sites out there, next to the image uploaders. I'll add a link to a site and also to the download you shared :)

Okay, I've been sorting out a bug with the New Posts bubble (the red thing that tells you when there's a new post in a thread). It's surprisingly complicated but I think I've found the issue and fixed it. Unfortunately this means that your New Posts bubbles will be reset so you'll see all the threads from the last 3 days as having new posts in them, even if you've already read them. My deepest apologies! I'm sure you'll get over it ;)

Oh but if you do notice anything wrong with the way that you're told about new posts then let me know. It's pretty hard for me to test because everything is tailored to each member individually.

love the new look with the forums, much more organized :)

Thank you for having your page mobile friendly, broke my best friend, my laptop today and may be a couple weeks before I can get another. *sigh*