Welcome to the New bonsaiTALK!

TreeBay

Being popular isn't always easy: growth in our bonsaiTALK membership put increasing demands on our server, which led to slowly loading pages and even an occasional "BANDWIDTH EXCEEDED" message. But with our recently completed upgrades, we think we finally have that problem licked! -MORE-

We've spent the past few weeks upgrading our Forum and Gallery for your enjoyment. Right now these features are open for use while we work on a revision of the homepage. There are lots of changes, but we're working hard to keep up with the increased membership. The first thing you'll notice is that attachments are shown as tiny thumbnail pictures that you can choose to examine in detail or skim past. Doing this keeps our pages loading FAAAST!

Please expect things to change a little, sometimes under your nose as we work on the software. Hopefully, they will continue to improve. We can expect there will be a few "bugs," I am sure.

We do want your feedback, so keep it coming.

HOW YOU CAN HELP

1. Make sure you can log in and reach your user control panel. The menu
system is different. It may seem hard to get used to at first and there are
a lot of new options that we'll need to discuss which we want to use. Some
menus come up if you just roll over them, if your browser supports this. If you have problems, you can just email us at the link shown at the bottom of the page.

2. Use bonsaiTALK normally, or as normally as you might considering there
isn't a lot of activity. Feel free to post in the Test Area 51 if you get
bored.

3. Try some uploads. Note it works differently now and you can attach a
few attachments to a single email. Area 51 - Test Forum is the perfect place for that

4. If you could, please keep a record of things that seem odd and maybe
you can email or PM me with that info

5. By all means, you can post messages and stuff, and play around with your
USER CP and the test forum.

6. Feel free to comment on the colors. Things are far from final. There can
be different templates and not any single set is going to make everyone
happy. There are a couple of different choices available at the lower lefthand corner of the screen which you'll see after you log in.

SITE STATUS:

Stuff that is working at the moment:

1. The forum is up http://forum.bonsaitalk.com
- changes are too numerous to mention at the moment but
- a. Calendars - user notification on events, custom fields (later), recurring events, ranged events.
- b. separate calendars for main, each user (private), and clubs
- c. attachments now appear as thumbnails for quick loading of pages
- d. multiple attachments per post are supported
- e. there is a cool message editor
- f. Karma or reputation system is in effect (see the scales logo next to
each post)
- g. user specified folders in their PM mail system
- h.. lots and lots of changes to format and display of threads and
messages.
- i. better colors, and more possiblities down the road

2. The gallery is up http://pictures.bonsaitalk.com lots of changes -
- a. ratings are on a scale of ten
- b. users can edit and delete their own images
- c. users can add details like species, height, age to their images
- d. users can have a favorites folder
3. Classifieds are up http://forsale.bonsaitalk.com
- basically unchanged
4. Wiki is working but basically unchanged http://wiki.bonsaitalk.com
Thinking about renaming this FAQ

Stuff that is bent
1.(Fixed 9/22) Links is running but broken images http://bonsaitalk.com/links
2. Journals are working. http://forum.bonsaitalk.com/journals This is an
unexpected bonus. They aren't fully debugged yet though.
3. Reviews are running but you can't log in http://reviews.bonsaitalk.com
(don't waste time on this now)

Stuff that is down
1. We need a better logo to replace the temporary one that I dashed off five minutes before we went live. Obviously I am very tired or colorblind. Perhaps both.
2. The main page is currently down http://www.bonsaitalk.com , with a redirect in place to the forums
3. Forum User options Display (growing zone, contributor ) (fixed 9/21) and gallery and journal icons) are still down
4. Banners are down (fixed 9/27)
5. Bonsai buddies are down (expected within a week or two)

Most of what I have left to do I would describe as "paint" that affects the
visual display of the forum. Currently, the contributor icons aren't
showing and neither is some of the usual stuff. There is no logo and there
are no easy links between sections of the site.

The real work is re-integrating things and recreating our home page, then we can enjoy the benefits of the new system - speedy load times, user customization and more.

Regards,

Matt

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BonsaiMon

New look? I like it .. a few minutes into so far .. pages come up fast .. colors are soft ....
When this thread first loaded it showed the results then after I replied it allowed me to vote....
.. on to the rest of the forum..

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tom stoute

http://bonsaiinsights.spaces.live.com/

Pill_Man

Thumbs up from me too. Although early on.. everything seems to be functioning properly. I like the color scheme, and the movement from forum to forum is fast. I happen to use Mozilla's FireFox as my primary web browser, and I can attest that everything works properly within this browser.

Treebeard

Not sure I like the new colour scheme, and I preferred it when the avatar and poster details were in the panel down the side.

lets see if the smilies still work

edit - doesn't fill a 1024 wide screen either...

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-----------------------------------
christopherguise.co.uk

TreeBay

Hi Chris,

This is just one of several color schemes that are available, and one of the features of the new system is that it will support different color schemes and layouts, simultaneously, and remember your favorite "skin."

I just needed to choose ONE for the time being and this one was the least worrisome. I think it is something we can work with while all the templates are being ported over from the old layout. This particular scheme we're using at the moment is a fixed width layout, but I have other layouts that will fill your expensive monitor to its capacity.

There is a reason for everything, or so they say. The reason for having the avatar up top is to leave room for larger in-line attachments. Of course, most of our attachments are thumbnailed now, so who knows if that is even necessary!

The reason for the upgrade wasn't to change the colors, although that is the most obvious change.

After I get the home page going I will have more time to spend arranging the deck chairs...

Thanks for your feedback!

Matt

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Adam_MA

Pretty cool so far. I think it will just take a little while to get used to the new layout. Maybe I'm missing something, but on the forums list is there still a "View posts since last visit" type link?

Thanks for all your hard work Matt it is appreciated!

Adam

wmcorcor

Avatars come up big and in-line pictures come up as small thumbnails. Trying to click on each thumbnail especially when comparing a before and after picture no longer works well. I'd be OK with the big avatars if the pictures we in-line and not thumbnails.

jportock

Looking great! Matt, all of your hard work is appreciated. Thank you for making the time to do it all.

JP

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pootsie

Great job! We are all grateful.
I agree with Chris et al. about the avatars on the side. It just makes the conversation easier to follow if they are on the side. Otherwise, this is great!!! So we need to click a couple extra times to save bandwidth, big deal!

keep up the good work

pootsie

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