Airliners.net

moderators wrote:

VirginFlyer wrote:

It is great to see the level of positive interaction here. One suggestion: rather than the generic moderators account, it would be great if you could create a user account specifically for yourself, with which to continue this positive interaction.

V/F

Great minds think alike,

Normally I do that and will once the new registration issue is sorted. I got an error when I tried to go through the process manually last night.

I wanted to do "VS Jeff" but Paul mentioned (VS) was an airline code. Any other suggestions?

Jeff M

I think VerticalScope is a pretty neat username.

Are any of the current development team moving over to the new company with the transition? A big issue which happened quite often under Demand Media aka Leaf Group would be that one small change or feature addition would break the whole site.

The old A.Net was far more user friendly and easier to navigate, I've never liked the new format and spend far less time on it as a result.
Shame as its a great, entertaining site.


Bring the old one back !

Plainplane wrote:

Are any of the current development team moving over to the new company with the transition? A big issue which happened quite often under Demand Media aka Leaf Group would be that one small change or feature addition would break the whole site.

No, the former webmasters were employees of Leaf Group and will remain with Leaf group.

I think what this site need is to made more compact, reduce spacing between text, smaller box for user name/photos so one liner post doesn't have so much space wasted.

Old site

New site

Hello Jeff,

Nice to meet you.

I think it's fair to say that most of us still miss the old format to some extent. However, we have by now adjusted to the new one, and think this will only need a few tweaks to improve the functionality and looks. Please let's not change what is essentially good for the sake of "re-inventing the wheel", if you know what I mean. Most of us are by now happy with what we have and would probably appreciate some improvements such as reverting to the old 'search' function. And, please, let's keep A.net what it is -and, let's keep it BLUE!

Thanks

JohnKrist wrote:

11725Flyer wrote:

2. As noted above, the time stamp of "moments ago" needs to be corrected.

StTim wrote:

One thing I have noticed is a recent posting when viewed on the mobile site (iOS) using says an hour ago if if it is very recent.

See the top post on this page, mine shows moments ago when it actually was moments ago. Otherwise it shows 8 minutes ago, 46 minutes ago, 3 hours ago etc etc. That's both on IOS iphone 6S+ and iPad Pro, same with Win10 Chrome and IE.

Can I just add the that whole X-something-ago format is stupid. I don't know why that started being a thing on forums, but I find it much easier to follow who said what when if it's just shown by a timestamp!

Like yesterday when I went back through a slightly older thread on another forum... trying to find a point when something was said and I had to scroll through pages of posts ALL marked "2 months ago". Yeah, helpful... not.

caoimhin wrote:

Revelation wrote:

Re: National flags: My vote is to not restore them. It almost always prejudiced others (ahh, he thinks that way because he's from Country X, because everyone in Country X thinks the same way, yada yada).

Not that some of us haven't found alternatives to signaling nationality anyway But I agree that the flags were often unhelpful and stood in the way of productive conversation (e.g. "You're from the states. Of course you are a Boeing fanboy." or some version of that.)

I agree that this is a disadvantage, but the flags were nice because they were able to communicate the international nature of this website. They showed just how far this forum can reach and how enthusiasm for aviation is truly a global phenomenon. For me, that outweighs a prejudice that only a few people would have. It's just and ad hominem that can be easily refuted with a calm and intelligent response.

Welcome Jeff! I look forward to seeing how you manage this site.

Congratulations Jeff on VerticalScope's latest acquisition.

Simply put, bring a.net into 21st century.

dtw2hyd wrote:

Congratulations Jeff on VerticalScope's latest acquisition.

Simply put, bring a.net into 21st century.

Thanks!

Looking forward to working with the community.

Jeff M

Update:

Three priority issues being looked into now.

1. No Watermarks on image uploader – intermittently.
2. Crew unable to access the Crew Corner
3. New Registration timeout error

Once these are fixed will start working on the other fit and finish stuff.

Jeff M

Hi Jeff,

One thing I've been asking for (this is the third time) is for more watermark placements, like the old site had. The new site only allows 3 vertical positions for the watermark - top, middle and bottom. And the middle usually goes right through the fuselage of the aircraft, making top and bottom the only viable options, but those are easily cropped out by would-be photo thieves. I'd like the top-middle and bottom-middle (33% and 66%) positions to come back, so I can upload my better photos again without fearing they will be easily stolen (and I've had plenty of photos lifted from A.net in the past). Coming from a web dev background, this shouldn't be very hard to implement, and a competing site recently upgraded their watermark tool to allow it to be dragged to any position on the photo. Also, since there is only one watermark Color option (Light), it might as well be hidden so there is one less drop-down to select every time we upload a photo.

Thanks,
Cary

It was mentioned above that some of (a lot?) us miss the old feature that collapsed posts that had been read to one line.
This helped enormously in navigating long threads and following sub topics back to where they started.

Has anybody mentioned a working search function?

One thing that really needs to be fixed is the display of the top photos of the last 24 hours (and 48 hours and 7 days ect.....). Now the photos display in two columns on the screen, which results in each photo being rather small on the screen and hard to see. Please change the page so the photos are displayed in one column in a larger format, they'd be much easier to see and enjoy.

Thanks!

planespot wrote:

Hi Jeff,

One thing I've been asking for (this is the third time) is for more watermark placements, like the old site had. The new site only allows 3 vertical positions for the watermark - top, middle and bottom. And the middle usually goes right through the fuselage of the aircraft, making top and bottom the only viable options, but those are easily cropped out by would-be photo thieves. I'd like the top-middle and bottom-middle (33% and 66%) positions to come back, so I can upload my better photos again without fearing they will be easily stolen (and I've had plenty of photos lifted from A.net in the past). Coming from a web dev background, this shouldn't be very hard to implement, and a competing site recently upgraded their watermark tool to allow it to be dragged to any position on the photo. Also, since there is only one watermark Color option (Light), it might as well be hidden so there is one less drop-down to select every time we upload a photo.

Thanks,
Cary

Good call, putting it on the punch list also.

Jeff M

Note: we are working on some more critical issues right now in the back end and once those are sorted we can start tackling the front end feature requests.

Jeff M

Welcome! Onwards and upwards! It sounds like VerticalScope has experience with other similar hobbyist sites, which is good.

I don't perceive any major catastrophes with a.net UI or otherwise; the rework last year went initially badly but I think the new site actually does work. That doesn't mean there aren't plenty of things to adjust or develop. But I'm sure you guys will work on that.

Great!
1. Please make the photography standards more humane- that is- not dependent so much on technical parameters, and more on the art of the image.
2. Please make it easier to upload photos to a forum post directly from the hard drive. The current procedure is horrible cumbersome.
Thanks and hope we will have a great time!

Adipasquale wrote:

ikramerica wrote:

Sadly, hovering isn't mobile friendly. Mobile friendly sites lack a lot of useful functionality compared to desktop because there is no hover. It's a big step backward.

Fair enough, but I can think of many sites that have hover features for their desktop site, and are also mobile compatible. I know it takes more resources to develop, but it is possible. For example:
Mobile NHL site, which is very compatible with smartphones:

Desktop site with drop down menus when you hover over a title:

Good thing is Montreal won, finally

planeophilic wrote:

1. Please make the photography standards more humane- that is- not dependent so much on technical parameters, and more on the art of the image.

There is now plenty of scope for artistic/creative and non-standard photos. IMHO, the site should not lower the photographic standards one bit - the site is rightly renowned for those high quality images.

Aquired by Candia?

9w748capt wrote:

Aquired by Candia?

Do you mean a Canadian Company? If so then you are correct.
Jeff M

scbriml wrote:

planeophilic wrote:

1. Please make the photography standards more humane- that is- not dependent so much on technical parameters, and more on the art of the image.

There is now plenty of scope for artistic/creative and non-standard photos. IMHO, the site should not lower the photographic standards one bit - the site is rightly renowned for those high quality images.

I can see where this would be a hotly contested topic. My focus in the immediate is getting the site running as it should, we can debate this when the dust settles.
Jeff M

AirlineCritic wrote:

Welcome! Onwards and upwards! It sounds like VerticalScope has experience with other similar hobbyist sites, which is good.

I don't perceive any major catastrophes with a.net UI or otherwise; the rework last year went initially badly but I think the new site actually does work. That doesn't mean there aren't plenty of things to adjust or develop. But I'm sure you guys will work on that.

Your vote of confidence in us is appreciated. We are pretty deep in repairs today, please do keep the requests and bug reports coming. We are indeed listening.
Jeff M

JohnKrist wrote:

salttee wrote:

Please fix the time stamps for posts: "moments ago" doesn't get it even if it was actually "moments ago.".

Many web sites include a link back to the post being quoted when quoting from another post, which makes it easy to get the context behind a quote; that would be a nice feature here.

Post time is not a bug, it's a time format mismatch between the forum settings and your computer. Please see the below thread, particulary post 14
viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1344559

The post makes a workaround, it would be great though if all of the formats worked with the various browsers.

Have the new owner's annouced if their going too have spell-cheque?

Ah, so this is a feature request thread now? Great!
What I miss is this: If you're on the page with the list of threads, and you click the title it brings you to the first page. Same goes for the "right now in the forum" on the homepage. This annoys me. I usually want to go the last page, even if I haven't read in that thread before. (maybe show the OPs post on top regardless of which page you're on)
Especially for the "right now in the forum" links. Say it's one of these production/delivery threads. You click on the thread title, and you need to click again to go to the last page.

The one thing that irks the daylight out me with this update is the way to reply to other members. With the old site it was so simple and to the point. The new way just plain annoying. I really would like the old way back.

rebr wrote:

Ah, so this is a feature request thread now? Great!
What I miss is this: If you're on the page with the list of threads, and you click the title it brings you to the first page. Same goes for the "right now in the forum" on the homepage. This annoys me. I usually want to go the last page, even if I haven't read in that thread before. (maybe show the OPs post on top regardless of which page you're on)
Especially for the "right now in the forum" links. Say it's one of these production/delivery threads. You click on the thread title, and you need to click again to go to the last page.

If you are on the thread page you can click the time stamp below the username of the last poster, that will take you to the last post. If you want to go to the first unread, click the icon to the left of the topic. But that does not work from "Right now in the forums" on the main page

INFINITI329 wrote:

The one thing that irks the daylight out me with this update is the way to reply to other members. With the old site it was so simple and to the point. The new way just plain annoying. I really would like the old way back.

Reply to PM, or in a post?

JohnKrist wrote:

INFINITI329 wrote:

The one thing that irks the daylight out me with this update is the way to reply to other members. With the old site it was so simple and to the point. The new way just plain annoying. I really would like the old way back.

Reply to PM, or in a post?

Im sorry, post

anshabhi wrote:

yeah a.net UI needs a massive upgrade. It's actually old fashioned. There could be much better use of CSS3.. I would suggest a lighter theme based on White colour, that's the most widely used background, and black on white is the easiest to read.
Some other suggestions:
1. Better editing box. Specially for adding URLs.
2. Ability to delete own posts atleast until no one makes a new post.
3. Better quote box. The current simple grey box looks very outdated.

This is not an airplane Eurowhite is not an option. The color background looks fine and keeps it from being the same boring look of every new site.

On the main page. Right now in the Forum section. Make the "Civil Aviation Forum" button actually go to "Civil Aviation Forum" instead of just to the forum pages. If I was looking at going to the forum pages list I would select that in the title links. Why does a button in a particular forum & labeled as that forum go to the list page! very annoying.

INFINITI329 wrote:

Im sorry, post

I suppose you have tried the "Expand View" option when replying? From there it's a simple click on the quotation mark on the posts you wish to quote. Not as easy as the select functionality of the old site since you have to delete unwanted text, but still not too bad to do on desktop.
Also, read that in phpbb3 v3.2, the quotes will include links to original post, and also the profile of the poster. So that's something I hope will be done

Please
- keep blue
- hover over 1) airport codes to get city/airport name, 2) airline codes to get name, and 3) aviation acronyms to reveal component words

Thanks

9w748capt wrote:

Have the new owner's annouced if their going too have spell-cheque?

Not talked about it yet, however, this is a great tool I use for Chrome and it is free.

https://app.grammarly.com/?utm_term=gra ... &network=g

Jeff M

groundbird wrote:

Please
- keep blue
- hover over 1) airport codes to get city/airport name, 2) airline codes to get name, and 3) aviation acronyms to reveal component words

Thanks

So did the hover over auto fill the full name or just show a pop up box with full name? Or like for #2 did it like auto fill Ohare Chicago if you typed ORD?

Just looking for more detail for my reporting.

Jeff M

As I recall, the hover popped up a small box with the full name. I don't recall that it did anything in a text entry box, just when viewing, but I could be wrong.

While we're asking for things, how about getting rid of the weird shift / shading that appears for a moment when bringing up a new page? A dark blue band, maybe an inch, appears for a moment at the top of the window and then vanishes, shifting the rest of the page, which is super annoying when it's the topic list. The timing is very erratic and it usually appears, or vanishes, right as I am about to click on a topic, causing the click to go to the wrong topic. I've no idea what it's doing and I wish it would stop. (Safari on OS X.)

(edited to indicate that it happens on all pages, not just the topic index.)

moderators wrote:

9w748capt wrote:

Have the new owner's annouced if their going too have spell-cheque?

Not talked about it yet, however, this is a great tool I use for Chrome and it is free.

https://app.grammarly.com/?utm_term=gra ... &network=g

Jeff M

Wow that's a nice tool - thanks for sharing! Maybe it'll work for existing thread titles too.

PITingres wrote:

As I recall, the hover popped up a small box with the full name. I don't recall that it did anything in a text entry box, just when viewing, but I could be wrong.

While we're asking for things, how about getting rid of the weird shift / shading that appears for a moment when bringing up a new page? A dark blue band, maybe an inch, appears for a moment at the top of the window and then vanishes, shifting the rest of the page, which is super annoying when it's the topic list. The timing is very erratic and it usually appears, or vanishes, right as I am about to click on a topic, causing the click to go to the wrong topic. I've no idea what it's doing and I wish it would stop. (Safari on OS X.)

(edited to indicate that it happens on all pages, not just the topic index.)

I will try and replicate this.
Jeff M

If you're making a list of things to fix here's one more.

When re-editing a post, if you hit the preview button it makes a second post of the one you are trying to edit.
This could be fixed easy enough by disabling the preview function on a re-edit.

Threads should be allowed to run no matter how old dont lock them, for more popular threads a page limit of 50 should be allowed before they are locked, although other forums have threads running since a decade or more with hundreds of pages.

The biggest thing for me was having all the replies on a single page, and collapsed once they'd been read. Opening the thread would you to the first unread post, and everything was condensed on one page. Made it super easy to scroll up and down and re-read posts without having to click through and think "hm was that on page 4, 5 or 6?" I can understand needing to go to a second page after 200 posts or so, but threads got locked at that point before anyways. I imagine the original intent with this new forum was that more pages equals more advertising opportunities, but I'd imagine that all the regular forum users use adblock because it's such a mess otherwise, thus rendering that moot. And non-regular forum users probably are only jumping on to read up after an incident, so the few extra page views is probably not worth a whole ton in the grand scheme of things.

I also really miss how condensed the old site was. There's so much extra scrolling and clicking involved now to make it mobile friendly and there's no good reason for it. Make the forum mobile friendly by running a mobile site, and also have a desktop optimized version that replicates the old forum, ideally as close to 100% as possible.

My other main gripes were with DM and the massive decline in quality on this site under their watch. Hopefully there's now some competent folks at the helm who can right the ship. I'm willing to give 'em a chance. The fact that there's someone acting as an official representative is leaps and bounds more than what we got before.



My other main gripes were

I'm not sure if this is really the place for this type of discussion (we do have a "site related" section, after all), but on the topic of the website's color, it is clear that some people prefer the blue theme (I would guess this is a majority) while others prefer the white theme that was briefly used. The only way to make everyone happy would be to have different themes available. We know the white theme exists, and I do believe that phpbb can be themed. Why not simply make this choice available in the user preferences?

Personally I quite like the blue theme, it's easier on the eyes

Bring back the hover over for airport and airline codes! Its the only way I was able to learn them, and made the threads so much easier to follow at times.

To make it clear what the hover did:

People "in the know" can recite every 3 character airport IATA code and 2 character airline IATA code out there. And they type them in with no explaination.

The old forum would recognize the code and insert some HTML code into the post before publishing it that identified the long form version of the airport or airline. This would not be printed in the post itself, but instead would pop up in a box when hovered on.

This allowed newer enthusiasts to learn the codes and understand a thread without having to look them up or ask.

There were problems though:

Some members "super in the know" refused to use the 2 and 3 character codes and instead used the 3 and 4 character ICAO codes. KLAX instead of LAX for example. Hover did not work there. Whenever people would complain about this, the poster would make them out to be plebes or insist that being helpful wasn't their problem.

Also, you had to use F/A for flight attendant otherwise it would activate the IATAcode for Safair. This could get frustrating.

And even before the switch, Demand had ruined it for a time by activating hover ads over various random words which made the site obnoxious.

And don't get all bent out of shape. There isn't anything wrong with ICAO codes, but they are really for pilots and air traffic controllers and not the general flying public. And considering many 4 letter airport codes don't match the familiar 3 letter codes in any familiar way, and hover didn't recognize them, it becomes confusing.

JohnKrist wrote:

INFINITI329 wrote:

Im sorry, post

I suppose you have tried the "Expand View" option when replying? From there it's a simple click on the quotation mark on the posts you wish to quote. Not as easy as the select functionality of the old site since you have to delete unwanted text, but still not too bad to do on desktop.
Also, read that in phpbb3 v3.2, the quotes will include links to original post, and also the profile of the poster. So that's something I hope will be done

Yes, but I don't like it. The old way was much more efficient, everything on one screen. You were able to highlight what you wanted to reply to hit the quote button and voila there it was

ikramerica wrote:

To make it clear what the hover did:

People "in the know" can recite every 3 character airport IATA code and 2 character airline IATA code out there. And they type them in with no explaination.

The old forum would recognize the code and insert some HTML code into the post before publishing it that identified the long form version of the airport or airline. This would not be printed in the post itself, but instead would pop up in a box when hovered on.

This allowed newer enthusiasts to learn the codes and understand a thread without having to look them up or ask.

Agreed, especially for some of the more esoteric international airports that many people won't know offhand. Or even more common airports with odd codes (ie, PIE = St. Petersburg/Clearwater Int'l).

There is a nice public data set for airports available here:
http://ourairports.com/data/

Seems that if this data was imported into a database, they could set up a call to a server side script on hover which would search for the airport code in the DB and return/display the matching value. Done this way, it could quickly search and return results for both 3-character IATA and 4-character ICAO codes. Might be something to look into.

VetteDude wrote:

anshabhi wrote:

yeah a.net UI needs a massive upgrade. It's actually old fashioned. There could be much better use of CSS3.. I would suggest a lighter theme based on White colour, that's the most widely used background, and black on white is the easiest to read.
Some other suggestions:
1. Better editing box. Specially for adding URLs.
2. Ability to delete own posts atleast until no one makes a new post.
3. Better quote box. The current simple grey box looks very outdated.

Website looked a lot better when the new version first rolled out, but people who hate any kind of change complained so they made it look more like the old site (including the horrid blue).

Not all change is good, for instance. Like airliners.net