Forum Tips and Tricks

[Levina de Ruijter]

Moving from AMASS to XenForo is not too difficult, but there are differences and like on AMASS some functionality is not always immediately visible or if it is it's not always clear how to use it exactly. So here are some tips and tricks in no particular order.

** You can select part of a text after which a tiny window will pop-up with Quote/Reply, like so:

When you click on +Quote it will be used in MultiQuote. Click on Reply and the text editor will open with the selected text in place.

** When you don't want to quote anything but only want to say something to somebody, you can type the @ sign, followed by the username (without a space in between!), like so:


Baan will now receive an alert that someone left a comment to him and his name in the reply will be a link to his profile that is hoverable, like so:



** Uploaded (attached) images can also be resized. When you click on an image you will see it's in a frame with some tools you can use, like so:
The icons on top are, from left to right: Align (left, middle, right), Change Size (by dragging the corners), Alt Text, Replace, Remove, Insert Link.


** Sometimes it's handy to toggle the BBCode off and on. Here's how:
In the text editor, in the upper right corner is an open box. Click that and you have flat text that you can edit. Click it again and you are back in normal mode.



**One of the things that this is handy for is when you can't get the text where you want, after uploading a pic. You can just toggle the BBCode off, insert the text where you want, toggle the code, see if it worked, submit. Or when you inadvertently also included the thumbnail. With the BBCode toggled off, that would look like this:


Then simply select the bit I have selected in the above code (Attach####/Attach), delete it and the thumbnail will be gone. The right code is the one where it says "full".

 

[Levina de Ruijter]

**Notifications work a little different here than on POTN. Clicking on the bell icon, a list drops down with the latest activity, related to you (likes, quotes, replies). New entries are darker than viewed entries and there is a dot on the right hand side of each entry that is filled. When you click on an entry and go to the thread to look at the activity in the thread and then click on the bell again, you will see that the entry has not disappeared from the list. What does change is that the little dot is now empty and the entry doesn't have a darker colour anymore.

Also know that if you have several notifications in the same thread, viewing only one will be regarded as having viewed all of them in that thread and this is shown in the drop down list: the light coloured notifications are viewed. The grey ones are still to be viewed.



What works best for me personally is starting at the bottom and working my way up. Another option is to click on the bell again or choose Show All (at the bottom of the notifications pull down window) which will take you to a page view of all the notifications.

 

[Levina de Ruijter]

Gifs won't play when you directly upload them from your desktop to the text editor on the board. They either don't play at all or you get a warning that they are too large.

The trick is to first upload them to your gallery. And from there post them on the board, copy/pasting the BBCode.

Here's an example of a little doodle I did on my iPad to practice a walking cycle. It wouldn't work in the OP of the thread when I directly uploaded it from my desktop. It moved in the preview window, but turned static the moment I submitted it. However, uploaded to my gallery first and then copy/pasting the BBcode in the text editor makes it work: https://focus-on-photography-forum.net/threads/let’s-try-a-gif.21/page-3#post-13120

 

[Levina de Ruijter]

As you all know the EXIF information is not displayed with the images on the board (not yet, that is, we're still looking to make this possible!). However, you can use a browser extension to view the EXIF (if it is embedded in the file of course).

For Firefox there is xIFr and after you install it, you simply right click (PC) or ctrl click (Mac) and a contextual menu pops up where you can choose the exif viewer, like so:



Click on View EXIF data and the EXIF window opens with all the information, like so:


I use Firefox as my main browser, but no doubt other browsers like Safari, Chrome, Brave, etc. will have EXIF viewing extensions too and they will probably work just the same.

 

[Levina de Ruijter]

Today I added new functionality to the Gallery.

Every attached (uploaded) image you post in a forum on the board in the Image Sharing section, is now mirrored into a special Gallery named Forum Photos. Click it open and you will find (most of) the Forums in there with every image that is posted in those forums on the board. This is an automated process. You post an image in say "Birds" and it is mirrored in the gallery Forum Photos > Birds automatically. Unfortunately it only works with directly uploaded images and not with embedded images, hosted elsewhere (flickr, smugmug etc.).

If you like to view images within a certain forum without the distraction of discussions, this is the place to do it.



When you click on "my media" it will show all your images, with each image showing a link to where you posted it on the board. And like images in any gallery, you can rate the image and/or leave a comment.



PS: after enabling this, I synchronised all the images posted prior to it and it seemed to have turned off the EXIF for them in the gallery. The Firefox extension still works though, and the good news is that new images all have the EXIF intact in the gallery, as they should (provided the EXIF is embedded in the file of course).