[Redoak49]

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.

 

[RvK]

what s a phone?

- EricTwice

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

 

[Desert_Woodworker]

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

 

[r33tc0w]

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.

 

[Smitty_Cabinetshop]

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

- Carloz

What an ignorant comment.

 

[BenDupre]

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.

 

[XeNoMoRpH]

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.

 

[wapakfred]

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?

 

[Desert_Woodworker]

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?

 

[ssnvet]

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.

 

[CharlesA]

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

 

[XeNoMoRpH]

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.

 

[TheDane]

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.

 

[CharlesA]

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.

 

[wormil]

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.

 

[wapakfred]

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.

 

[Andybb]

1. You guys do realize that 2 years ago 60-70% of all searches were from a mobile device and that now that number is closer to 80%?
2. A laptop is not a mobile device. An ipad is.
3. Most sites optimize for iPad but not for the less popular devices
4. People had the same attitude when the tech changed from records>tapes>CD's>iPods>mp3>streaming>???
5. Who here doesn't use youtube?
6. When I'm talking to my ww buddy and he asks "what ya workin' on?" we are on facetime showing each other live what we are working on.

We all can assume that the people who say, "I don't use a smartphone or know how to text" are not the current crop of millennial woodworkers who will be using this site 20 years from now. They will have their 27th generation iPads on the work bench next to them. They will say to that iPad, "Show me plans for an XYZ made of walnut" We want it to say, "Lumberjocks' has 27 plans for that." and it will search and display those plans instantly. I grew up with the Dewey decimal card file system at the library and the World Book Encyclopedia (which in now worldbookonline.com). Now I press a button on my phone and ask "What is the population of Cuba?" or "How many electrons are in an Iridium atom?"

This will probably all work itself out but you know that if this site were started today by the current crop of young ww's it would be more mobile friendly. It's a matter of staying relevant. I want them to come to this site and learn from the people here, not go to some other site.

Case in point…I was amazed that my youngest son who just graduated from college had never heard of John Glenn and his older brother who just graduated from Georgetown Law had only heard of him because he interned at NASA 2 yeas ago.

The world is always in flux, which the OP is trying to tell us. HE uses a mobile device! That number is only going to go up.

I don't know that a major overhaul is due NOW but to stay current and continue to attract new members it eventually needs to happen and I'm sure it will.

P.S. I love this site and want it to stay relevant and would have no problem making a yearly donation.

 

[kelvancra]

This reminds me of the kid at one of the well known electronics stores. He said we were going away from keyboards. I laughed. Like I told him, people in the real world, who create the pages complained of, who write books and form documents know that's bunk.

It's a safe bet you'll not find a code writer writing a few million lines of code using a smart phone. Too, if I were writing a forty page legal document, I sure wouldn't want to deal with the new version of carpel tunnel touching a screen all day long would cause. Nor would I want to try using a voice system. That would go something like:

"Go to page, twenty-eight, paragraph four, line seven, start cut, ten spaces, end cut. Go to page three, paragraph two, line one, character six, paste."

And on it goes.

Desktops have their place and will for a long time yet and will beat out a smart phone or touch screen for the reason said in the foreseeable future.

Use a computer instead of a damn telephone and the site works just fine!

- papadan
The world is moving away from the Desktop computer rapidly. Some articles say desktop could be obsolete the a couple years.

This site (if it intends to say in business) will be forced to update this site in the not s near future to surive. You old fogies like you better get with the program or you may be left behind.

- AlaskaGuy

 

[Andybb]

This reminds me of the kid at one of the well known electronics stores. He said we were going away from keyboards. I laughed. Like I told him, people in the real world, who create the pages complained of, who write books and form documents know that s bunk.

It s a safe bet you ll not find a code writer writing a few million lines of code using a smart phone. Too, if I were writing a forty page legal document, I sure would want to deal with the new version of carpel tunnel touching a screen, or trying to use a voice system. That would go something like:

"Go to page, twenty-eight, paragraph four, line seven, start cut, ten spaces, end cut. Go to page three, paragraph two, line one, character six, past."

And on it goes.

Desktops have their place and will for a long time yet.

Use a computer instead of a damn telephone and the site works just fine!

- papadan
The world is moving away from the Desktop computer rapidly. Some articles say desktop could be obsolete the a couple years.

This site (if it intends to say in business) will be forced to update this site in the not s near future to surive. You old fogies like you better get with the program or you may be left behind.

- AlaskaGuy

- Kelly

That may be true but we are not writing code and that "kid" is the future of our hobby and thus this site. Also the size of the screen has nothing to do with it being a desktop or not. A desktop is a piece of hardware that is quickly becoming obsolete like cd's have become. Code writing now recognizes speech patterns. This is not about the future of the desktop. It's about the future of the site which we all agree that we love. Advertisers have options these days. We need to give them a reason to advertise here. Relevance and a GROWING user base are major considerations. Us old guys are not going to grow the site through membership but its up to us to ensure that the site grows.

All this being said, I can't say how thankful I am to the folks that run and maintain the site in it's current form.

 

[wormil]

Desktop OS are not becoming obsolete, mobile and desktop are merging. People want their mobile to be an extension of the desktop.