This is the best software platform I've seen, out of the half dozen I've tried. Can't stand the indented conversation thread format, it's awful for scanning. Pictures here from my iPhone are easy to upload by simply turning it to landscape format.

Migrating this behemoth of data to a totally new platform would be a major undertaking. Don't care if it happens or not, just hope my 100+ blog entries and 1K's of photos don't disappear.

 

Yeah, we had a similar argument back when I was a kid….... why in the world do I need that table saw? I got a couple of hand saws… I mean one is for rip and one is for crosscut…. I'll have to run an electrical line down to the shop….... what is my kerosene supplier going to do if I put electric lights down there?...... I can cut a sheet of plywood in half in about 15 minutes….why do I need to make the same cut in 30 seconds?...... I mean it's worked great for thousands of years….. why bother?

Funs over now….. time to get to work….. pass me that smartphone…. need to cut some plywood sheets down to size…. I got an app for that, you know?

 

Oh hell Matt, we re all outlaws from Sawmill creek. They wont let bums like us on their pristine web site. ;-)

- papadan

I considered Saw Mill Creek not for me- I love the freedom of expressing my opinion without a Moderator on Lumber Jocks. You can get some helpful enlightenment here…. but it can be an arena.

- Desert_Woodworker

Actually, we do have a Moderator, but she's pretty awesome and takes more of a hands-off approach. Only gets called in when it's really over-the-top or we have unwanted Trolls and Spammers.

As for the mobile site, I agree it needs a little tweaking to make it better. It is quite difficult to navigate on an iPhone6 when I'm at work. On a desktop, it's perfectly fine and love it. Search engine could use a boost though…just saying. Not the easiest thing to use to look for projects unless I'm missing a feature somewhere.

 

of the 7-8 this is by far the worst software platform I ve seen. I don t think it needs upgraded….I think it needs replaced with something else entirely.

- Fred Hargis

Fred, can you post a few of the links to other sites? I'm curious about sites with better platforms. I visit quite a few other forums and I actually like the features and navigation of LJ's the best.

 

I'm fine with an upgrade as long as they keep it working on my ENIAC

 

From a business perspective, it would benefit the owners of Lumberjocks.com to provide a mobile-friendly format. More traffic would mean more income for them. But I'd be disappointed if that messed up the function of the site on a regular browser. I don't use phones for serious online work due to the small screens and tiny keypads. The ability to type with two hands, use a mouse and setup multiple monitors boosts productivity.

This is the main reason why I don't use Instagram for business. The interface is not PC-capable so I have little patience for trying to upload pictures to it.

 

This site is better suited for woodworkers than for apple geeks. Works perfectly fine for the first group.

 

This site is better suited for woodworkers than for apple geeks. Works perfectly fine for the first group.

- Carloz

Plenty of woodworkers are using a smart phone to access the site. Thats why there is this thread. I for one would not be on 1/20th as much if i had to get on the laptop to do it. No reason in 2017 for any site to not have responsive design. Mobile first 24/7 connected is the world we live in. At least until the next big thing comes along. The mobile web is not a new fangled fad. It is not going away. FWIW this is not a complete train wreck here. There are just a few frustrating issues. And there is absolutely no reason a mobile friendly tune-up would lessen the desktop experience. I am fast approaching old- fartedness but the kids can play on my lawn if the like. I don't mind.

 

No problem dessert Im a pretty straight forward guy even when messing with papadan its usually when a third steps in it gets off topic.
on a side note I hate it when Im using my phone and whatever website loads up their mobile version as its usually junk and hard to navigate. Then you have to go down and click the use full site and after that if you leave the page it loads up the mobile again. It annoys me to no end.

 

I am so confused when someone says there no reason for any site not to have a responsive design.

Yes, there is one reason…...MONEY.

The cost in dollars and manpower is huge. Any site that I have watched go thru transitions end up with problems and lost data, links, etc.

This site has more projects and blogs than any woodworking site I have visited and would hate to lose any of it. There are things wrong with every forum. I love this site…....

If someone would like to donate the money and time to do a major upgrade, I am certain the owners of LJ would listen.

 

what s a phone?

- EricTwice

its that thing kids today use to check facebook and do the twittering on!

 

What we need is an auction, to benefit the site. We could donate our projects to help fund LJ. I am willing to donate the following:

without reserve

with reserve

 

Here's what happens 10% of my site visits via note5/chrome:

I think people are taking this out of proportion. This thread is merely intended to bring glitches to the Ops attention. The spirit of this site has an element to welcome new people to the practice, Just seems counter-productive to let technology be the frustrating part of a younger generations experience, especially when all it takes is troubleshooting in the sites code.

 

This site is better suited for woodworkers than for apple geeks.

- Carloz

What an ignorant comment.

 

I am so confused when someone says there no reason for any site not to have a responsive design.

Yes, there is one reason…...MONEY.

The cost in dollars and manpower is huge. Any site that I have watched go thru transitions end up with problems and lost data, links, etc.

This site has more projects and blogs than any woodworking site I have visited and would hate to lose any of it. There are things wrong with every forum. I love this site…....

If someone would like to donate the money and time to do a major upgrade, I am certain the owners of LJ would listen.

- Redoak49

The site does cary ads. There is money somewhere. If it isnt enough and the site owner wanted to start a gofund me campaign i am sure there would be plenty of contributions.

 

I've been a lurker for a little while and believe this forum software is odd compared to what I am accustomed to. Even when registering there were two issues I saw:

- No SSL/TLS certificate meaning HTTPS. When logging in or registering, passwords are passed unsecurely. This is a big no no which is why browsers these days mention the connection is insecure. There is no excuse these days with "Let's Encrypt"
- The password can only contain letters and numbers. Not sure what old tech this is, but certainly out dated. By limiting the character choices, it narrows the choices for a brute force attack. I sincerly hope passwords are not stored as plaintext in the database.

Do the top two issues really matter? Most likely not, but it is all in hindsight. It won't be an issue until SQL injection or something similar finds a flaw in the software and gets a dump of the user table.

I will second that vBulletin is a decent software package. I know it scales pretty well considering one forum I frequent consistently has 30,000+ users on it.

 

of the 7-8 this is by far the worst software platform I ve seen. I don t think it needs upgraded….I think it needs replaced with something else entirely.

- Fred Hargis

Fred, can you post a few of the links to other sites? I m curious about sites with better platforms. I visit quite a few other forums and I actually like the features and navigation of LJ s the best.

- OSU55

How about I send them to you in a PM?

 

X -Why as an older guy, who is trying to socialize, want to worry about what you just said? Answer: I put my bias aside, and then carefully "re"read your post. I believe that you made some very valid points.
Question: Would it be cost beneficial, for Lumber Jocks, inc.- to invest into what you are saying? Why?
Would the password have to be something like this $#@&(*TTTTaa146. This high security password is even appearing more and more. A pain in the ass, especially if it non-financial?
Respectfully,
Ps- do you do any woodworking?

 

I agree that the sight would benefit greatly from a better mobile friendly interface.

It would be great if it could be dual publish on Tapatalk, like so many other forums.

Cropping pics to ensure they post right side up is quite the PITA.

But all things considered, I love the forum and all most all of the woodticks that hang out here.

 

If this makes it any easier, I just rotate them 90 and rotate them right back and they're fine. I suppose that's an effective 360 rotation . . .

Rotate them 360 degrees?

- Rrrandy

Yes, 360 degrees… They are correct on the device/computer I m using, but when I upload and preview the post before I hit reply, the pictures rotate 90 degrees. I rotate them 360 on whatever device I m using, save, then re-upload, and they upload correctly…it s weird…

But know that I know, I just do it every time before I upload. Not really a big deal

- tschmidty68

 

X -Why as an older guy, who is trying to socialize, want to worry about what you just said? Answer: I put my bias aside, and then carefully "re"read your post. I believe that you made some very valid points.
Question: Would it be cost beneficial, for Lumber Jocks, inc.- to invest into what you are saying? Why?
Would the password have to be something like this $#@&(*TTTTaa146. This high security password is even appearing more and more. A pain in the ass, especially if it non-financial?
Respectfully,
Ps- do you do any woodworking?

- Desert_Woodworker

Yes, I do wood working with the latest toy being a lathe (awesome btw).

I realize for most people, it wouldn't matter. It just so happens my day job is a web/software developer, so I am biased when I look at particular things. For the password, my complaint is simply the limitation which is usually a result of implementation. By not allowing anything as a password, it has narrowed down the number of possibilities. It may seem super tedious/slow to run a brute force attack (meaning it starts with the most used passwords, uses a dictionary, with the last effort trying every combo), but it is easy enough to create a ridiculously fast application to do the work. Let's even say the passwords are not stored as plain text and are stored as a one way hash (think of it as being encrypted except it cannot be decrypted), the hashing algorithms are eventually cracked and ideally would be updated.

So there are lots of risks I imagine. Would anyone target a wood working forum? Most likely not. At the same time, this stuff is pretty easy. To give a bit more perspective, the webserver version that runs this very site was released on 2006-07-28. I'm sure we can all agree that technology has certainly changed in 11 years.

 

I owned a software company for a number of years … I think there may be some practical implications here that make porting LumberJocks to a different forum platform difficult.

This site was created by Martin Sojka ( http://lumberjocks.com/msojka ), and if memory serves me right, Martin wrote the software himself. It is a one-of-a-kind software package that has many features that are not common in other forum software. There is a high likelihood that some features or functions that LJ users like would not be available if the site was ported to one of the other available forum packages.

The site owners would have to either customize an available forum software package to include features not found in the package they might select, or build one from the ground up. Either way, there would be much tumult and shouting by users.

 

I could be wrong, but my sense is that the company that bought LJ's a few years ago sees it as a good source of revenue as a maintenance site, but not worth any major investment. That may be a solid business decision-who am I to say. I do think that given the age of the platform and the complexity and shear size of the data on this site, it would be a big job to transition to a better platform.

 

I think you're right Charles.

As for the picture issue I did tests in another thread and couldn't find a problem with the website. The only time my pictures came out sideways from a phone was when the auto rotate was off and it was locked to portrait and that was only on one phone, an old Samsung. I can't test Apple phones but Android phone pics oriented correctly.

 

I also think Charles may be onto something. I didn't realize that Martin wrote this platform…that would eplain why I've not seen it anywhere else.