Any Suggestions? - RF Cafe Forums

RF Cafe Forums closed its virtual doors in late 2012 mainly due to other social media platforms dominating public commenting venues. RF Cafe Forums began sometime around August of 2003 and was quite well-attended for many years. By 2012, Facebook and Twitter were overwhelmingly dominating online personal interaction, and RF Cafe Forums activity dropped off precipitously. Regardless, there are still lots of great posts in the archive that ware worth looking at. Below are the old forum threads, including responses to the original posts. Here is the full original RF Cafe Forums on Archive.org

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 Post subject: Any Suggestions?
Posted: Tue Mar 04, 2008 11:49 pm 
 
Site Admin
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Joined: Sun Aug 03, 2003 2:02 pm
Posts: 653
Location: Erie, PA
Greetings:

I welcome and encourage any suggestions for how to increase participation by visitors on the RF Cafe Fourms. The pages receive thousands of views each month, but not many posts.

Unfortunately, turning off the requirement for logging in is not an option because the garbage posts by web bots is too much to keep up with.

Anyone? :smt102

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- Kirt Blattenberger :smt024
RF Cafe Progenitor & Webmaster


 
   
 
 Post subject:
Posted: Wed Mar 05, 2008 4:36 am 
 
General
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Joined: Fri Feb 17, 2006 12:07 pm
Posts: 304
Location: London UK
Kirt
Here's 2 suggestions that are worth another RF Cafe mug (my 1st one was stolen, because they are so so sought after by international rob-to-order snatch thieves).
1. How about a search engine?
A few newbies I have referred to this site complain it is not easy to locate a topic that concerns them when it was a hot topic for regulars 3 years ago.
Does the RFCafe software team of thousands stretch to write the needful bytes?
2 How about making it much simpler to import graphics, or even draw them as lines, circles and boxes? The image importer is fine if you use it regularly, but very clunky to the very occasional user.


 
   
 
 Post subject:
Posted: Wed Mar 05, 2008 4:17 pm 
 
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Location: Erie, PA
Greetings nubbage:

Thanks for offering your suggestions.

I am not enough of a PHP codemeister to implement the kinds of features that you mention. Both would definitely be an improvement.

What I can do - and have done - in response to your post is create a page that details how to add images and hyperlinks in with a post. You have done so in many of your posts, so this is not new to you, but it might be useful to a lot of other people who are not familiar with the tag useage.

There is now a link at the top of the Forum pages that will take visitors to a page with explanations of how to implement the features.

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- Kirt Blattenberger :smt024
RF Cafe Progenitor & Webmaster


 
   
 
 Post subject:
Posted: Thu Mar 06, 2008 5:33 am 
 
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Joined: Fri Feb 17, 2006 12:07 pm
Posts: 304
Location: London UK
Hi Kirt
Well, I have done a few, but with long gaps between, I tend to forget how I did it last time.
A search feature should be fairly easy to implement, although I am no web-meister either. I kind of conceptualize all of the posts being saved into a mega-text-file kept on the server, with a hyperlink created that takes a reader to a basic search engine that just looks for an ASCII string of text.
But hey, I'm just goofing around mentally on this one. It really needs a 17 year-old college student to focus on the problem and kept fed with pizzas until the problem is cracked. (or fed with crack until the problem is pizza-d)


 
   
 
 Post subject:
Posted: Thu Mar 06, 2008 1:32 pm 
 
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Joined: Sun Aug 03, 2003 2:02 pm
Posts: 653
Location: Erie, PA
Greetings nubbage:

There is a built-in Search function that can be accessed with the link up in the FAQ & Log In area at the top of the forum page. It accesses the MySQL database where all the info is stored. It has worked fairly well in the past. Did you have something else in mind?

Regarding 'The case of the Purlioned RF Cafe Coffee Mug," I'll be glad to send you another in appreciation for all your good posts. Is the mailing address the same as before? Is 8 oz. still enough coffee per trip to the kitchen or is the 15 oz. size required now? :smt107

_________________
- Kirt Blattenberger :smt024
RF Cafe Progenitor & Webmaster


 
   
 
 Post subject: Re: Any Suggestions?
Posted: Sat Sep 05, 2009 9:46 am 
 
Lieutenant

Joined: Sat Sep 05, 2009 9:25 am
Posts: 1
Boy, does your site need a search function. The SQL query only searches the forum, not the articles and other pages. Google provides a custom search engine https://www.google.com/coop/cse/ that you can add to your site. Here is the page with the code to paste https://www.google.com/webelements/customsearch/.

Is that worth a mug?


 
   
 
 Post subject: Re: Any Suggestions?
Posted: Sat Sep 05, 2009 2:30 pm 
 
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Joined: Sun Aug 03, 2003 2:02 pm
Posts: 653
Location: Erie, PA
Spinningspark wrote:
Boy, does your site need a search function. The SQL query only searches the forum, not the articles and other pages. Google provides a custom search engine https://www.google.com/coop/cse/ that you can add to your site. Here is the page with the code to paste https://www.google.com/webelements/customsearch/.

Is that worth a mug?


Greetings Spinningspark:

There is already a Google Search function. The link is at the top of all the pages just under the RF Cafe logo. It links to here:

https://www.rfcafe.com/search.htm

On RF Cafe or any site, if you cannot find a link on the homepage for Search or anything else, just do a Ctrl+F (find) and enter what you're looking for on the page. Doing that for any RF Cafe page will revel the location of the Search link.

Now, as far as the mug goes... maybe a set of glasses would be of more use to you. :oops:

Thanks for your input. :D

_________________
- Kirt Blattenberger :smt024
RF Cafe Progenitor & Webmaster




Posted  11/12/2012