Welcome to our upgraded board.

We have some new features here, most notably better search results with more options, the ability to upload images to be hosted here on the board, new buttons for easier text formatting and a quote button (as requested).


Search

You'll notice some different search options (see Advanced Search for details) and new search boxes to facilitate searching individual forums and topics. We think search works better in this version, as in a search of two or three terms together may turn up 30 or 40 relevant results, rather than 2000 junk ones. Please try it out and let me know if you agree.

New Users: Please utilise the search function before posting a question. If you are new to Amsterdam, it is very likely your topic will have been addressed here at some length in past. So please help us out by searching before posting. Replying to an existing topic is generally always better than starting a new one.

One thing: Due to a bug in phpBB3, it is not possible to search for hyphenated terms. For example, a search for the string "rip-off" will turn up every post that contains both the words "rip" and "off" somewhere in the text, but not necessarily together as in "rip-off" (although the posts containing "rip-off" are matched too, at least). This is clearly something to do with the "-" delimiter not being handled properly when it appears in the middle of a word (and thus is not intended as the 'NOT' delimiter but rather part of the word itself). A minor annoyance... let's hope they get this right in the next version.


Quotes

• The quote button is there to lend clarity to replies, not to waste space by quoting an entire 12 page post and adding a two line reply. Please be mindful of your fellow readers and limit your quoting only to the text to which you are replying.
  
  
• Often times you may want to address several points raised in someone's post. But perhaps they are scattered about the (potentially long) post, and you don't want to waste space by quoting the entire thing. Here's what you can do.
  
  
  
  1. Instead of clicking "quote," click "reply." The message composition screen comes up.
     
     
  2. Scroll down and find the post you want to quote under "Topic Review" (if there are many posts in the topic and the one you want to reply to is one of the earlier ones, it may not show up under "Topic Review." In that case, you can go back to the board and find the post, quote the whole thing, and then just edit down the quoted portion to the relevant parts before posting your reply.)
     
     
  3. Using the mouse, highlight only the text you want quoted and click "Quote." This will copy the quoted text into your edit box above, with proper formatting and attribution. Rinse and repeat for every portion you want to quote. And use the "Preview" function to verify things look as expected before posting.
  
  
• The quote button is only there to make it easier to use that function when appropriate (i.e. to provide needed context if there's potential for confusion), not to encourage using it for the sake of using it. So if you would not have felt compelled to quote text on the old board (either by doing it with BBCode, or by copy/pasting and surrounding it with " "), then it's probably not necessary here either.

Formatting

As you can see, our new message composition screen makes it easy to change font colours and font size and apply bolding, italics and underlining, among other things. We were a little leery of even implementing these features as, while they can be rather useful under the right circumstances, they have some potential for abuse.

We have, IMO, a sleek looking board at the moment which would look less so if people started colouring up posts just for the sake of using the new features (see a recurrent theme here?) So please use the "new" formatting options sparingly, especially the font colours and sizes. These can be very useful for highlighting certain information within a post (e.g. names of girls, streets, restaurants, headings for sections in trip reports, etc), making it more readable. But they should not be used indiscriminately, so please make sure there's an actual reason for a colour change in your post. Bottom line: this is Ignatzmice, not your kindergarten art class.

While the new buttons make it easier, some knowledge of BBCode can still be useful -- especially if you need to un-do a formatting change, which the edit tools aren't smart enough to do. The BBCode primer is here.


Attaching Images

It's now possible to attach pictures to posts (limit it to images to which you hold the copyright, please), which are hosted here on the board. Please keep them to a reasonable file size if at all possible, the images below being a good example. There is a hard limit of 1.5MB per image so as not to overly discourage participation by any of our less tech-savvy users, but please keep the images much smaller than that if you can. JPEG is the preferred format. Please try to avoid using PNG as that format is a horribly inefficient way of representing photos, using up far more of our bandwidth than necessary (often 10x more) and loading too slowly here.




Attached images will appear as shown above if, after uploading the image, you click "place inline" in order to generate the BBCode to display the image and thus control where it appears in your post... otherwise it'll be at the end like the two below, with a thumbnail linking to the larger version in either case.

For "traditional" inclusion of images in posts, you would host the pics yourself -- e.g. on something like imageshack, flickr, etc -- and display them with the img tags as before. For example, say the image exists at http://www.ignatzmice.com/miscimages/biermuseum.jpg and you want to display it inline in a post. You would put:


making sure that "Disable BBCode" is unchecked before you post.

This is useful if you want to show an image full size rather than as a thumbnail (images hosted on the board are always displayed as thumbnails linking to the larger versions, in order to conserve bandwidth and reduce the load on our poor server).


Threaded Display is Gone

It was not standard with phpBB2 but a custom mod installed on our old board. There seems to be nothing comparable currently available for phpBB3. I decided against writing something myself as this is a non-trivial mod that would likely require considerable support time and effort down the line, and complicate future upgrades. For anyone who was using threaded display, please accept my apologies. As only 1.9% of registered users were using it on the old board, we simply decided it was not worth maintaining -- especially in light of the fact that threaded display really only works if everyone is using it. With 98% of users using flat view and just clicking the nearest "reply" button to add to a thread/topic -- as opposed to carefully selecting to which post one replies and commenting only on the content of that parent post (perhaps posting several times to reply to different posts in the thread), Usenet-style -- we never had a true threaded display anyway. So it's gone. On that note, I'm keeping the "Reply" button in each post rather than just one at the top (the norm for phpBB), for now, even though we don't have threading... 1) because people hate change, 2) because adding another button next to "New Topic" makes that row too crowded with our fixed-width layout and 3) because I didn't want people using "quote" in lieu of reply, quoting entire posts without thinking.


Custom Profile Fields

For a combination of technical reasons and simple laziness, your "No. of visits to Amsterdam" and "RLD-related venue preference" profile values were not carried over from the old database. If you wish, you can re-enter them in your profile here (User Control Panel->Options->Profile).


Acknowledgements

We would like to extend our sincere gratitude to everyone who helped us test the new board (in no particular order): Harvey Wallenbanger, br1965, sunchildtine, neurosynth, 420, brad 07, sun-n-fun, tonymunch, smuler, ams2008dam, jgramos, davey1800, bitman and billybob69 (sincerest apologies if I missed anyone...PM me and I'll add to the list). With your help, we were able to fix a bug and also immediately implement several suggestions that improved the board substantially. You also contributed some great ideas for the future that we're definitely going to look at as we continue to work to improve the site. Thank you for helping make this the great place that it is. And a special nod to br1965 for his advice on phpBB3, which prompted me to look into it further and begin this upgrade sooner rather than later.

I also want to mention that my esteemed co-admin AmsterdamChris was there from day one, for months providing valuable input, testing and helping decide how to implement various board features, not to mention keeping me motivated to complete this project.


Still have questions about using the new board?

Your first stop should be the Help link above, which sends you to our phpBB FAQ. This covers most aspects of board functionality. If you still can't find the answer, reply here and we'll help you out.


In addition to the aforementioned guidelines regarding the new features, our general Terms of Use still apply of course and should be read by all new members prior to posting.

You'll notice a few other changes -- private messaging is upgraded, many new features in the User Control Panel, some new links on the index page (e.g. "view your posts"). Let me know if anything seems broken or any other feedback... please reply here.

We hope you like the changes. If so, please consider supporting us by making a donation, which entitles you to the "Supporting Member" tag on the board. These help us pay for upgrades and hosting (which isn't cheap) and thus help ensure that the site will be around for a long time to come. If you've used the site for research before trips in past, we hope you'll agree that the donation amount pales in comparison to the money you saved and experiences you had in our favourite city as a result of being a well-informed visitor. Thanks, folks.

Bluto

Fantastic upgrade - thanks

Looking good so far, scrap the login probs never read it correctly.


Purpose of my post was the attachment, when I clicked it it opened in the same window hence taking you away from the thread, is it possible that they could open in another tab/window?

That's a mighty effort Bluto everyone on this board owes you a debt of gratitude for all your hard work and dedication. Well done sir!

Great, now I could use colors and underline more easily but also in a wisely way.
I will however take my time to read the all thing you've wrote about functionalities.
That's a very good job. Well done !

definatly makes things a bit easier to use. i for one love the huuuuuge text field you now get whilst writing out your replies / threads. i hate the pokey little things. anyone ever having used the facebook message should know what i'm talking about. all in all, good news and great updates :D

Great job Bluto, and thanks for all your hard work and dedication.



Since I never learned how to use the former quote function, I thought I'd try the new one out now. And yes, you are right, we do save money by doing research on this board. As soon as I pull myself out of four years of poverty I will become a contributor!

Thanks again,

Mr. Plug

Excellent job on the upgrade Bluto!

Love the new version of PHPBB.

Bluto
Great work on the new upgrade and to everyone else who helped out.

This is a tough one. I could easily change it to do what you're describing (i.e. to open in a new window, or in a new tab if that's how you set the option in your browser -- there's no widely supported cross-platform way I'm aware of to guarantee it opens in a new tab rather than in a new window) but if I do it to satisfy one user's preference, there's a good chance it will annoy others who don't expect a new window to pop up. Some folks are not as computer-savvy and might not even realise it's happened as they frustratedly click a greyed out "Back" button. I think the way it works now gives slightly more control to the user. One can right click to "open in new tab" if that's the desired behaviour, otherwise it works the same as any other internal link on the site, opening in the existing window.

If others have strong feelings on this I'm willing to consider it further. Either way, any change to something like this is guaranteed to please some and annoy others.



Glad to hear you say that as I spent a lot of time customising that page since I couldn't stand the way it looked before... had lots of wasted space and a compressed text box that almost discouraged longer posts! Thanks for the feedback.

Thanks for all the nice comments guys, glad most of you seem to like the changes. And apologies again for the password conversion issue that affected some accounts. The phpBB developers decided it was more important to have the absolute latest, nerdiest setup than avoid breaking things for a large percentage of users. Little I could have done to avoid it I'm afraid.

Best,
Bluto

An additional acknowledgement to our good friend Sportsman's? -- who doesn't post here often and owes us a trip report, but who just improved the site with some of his Photoshop expertise. Your beleaguered webmaster here is a bit of a dinosaur when it comes to image editing, so he would like to thank Sportsman's? for contributing the "moved topic" icon which you'll see in the legend and whenever a topic gets moved from one forum to another. Thank you, dear friend.

Jesus Christ, Bluto!
If you could make it yank my wank, that would be great too.
Otherwise it is more than old guys like me will ever use!

Weasel

That's coming in the next version, stay tuned...

Just a quick vote to *not* change the behavior to open new windows or tabs by default. Opening links in the same window is very widely expected to be the default behavior. And a good browser will give you a right-click or (Mac) command-click etc. option to open links in a new tab or window. My suggestion would be to ask folks to check their browsers for those options.

Ditto what Neurosynth said. I anticipate most links to open in the same page. It is very easy to right click and open in a new tab/window.

no worries, although i think the person who'll benefit the most from this is book_guy haha

Not sure why, but I agree with you now. For *attachments* at least, since you don't necessarily expect those to take you away from the thread. And since it's sort of the way it worked on the old board (every inline image, if clicked, would open in a new tab/window), I don't want to make unnecessary changes here. Since I found that I can limit the new tab/window behaviour to attachments and inline images only (most links will still open in the same window, as expected), we'll do it.

Hope this is ok with most of you... just trying to please the greatest number of people here.

Bluto

In Mozilla Firefox (I don't know about Internet Explorer?) a middle-click with the mouse will open a link in a new tab (if you have a mouse with a clickable scroll-wheel). I find this very useful and use it all the time. For example, if I am replying to a thread, I would generally middle-click on "reply" so that I can refer back more easily to the entire thread that I am replying to.

Navigating the web without using this feature can be very annoying, especially when clicking off-site links in the middle of a newspaper article or forum post unintentionally obliterates the article/post you were reading.

For smooth web navigation, I prefer to control the behaviour of links myself, but having images and attachments open in new tabs/windows seems intuitive. On a typical forum post, I think of an image or attachment as being "within" the webpage, so that clicking on a thumbnail should open the full-size picture without closing the webpage it appears within. I expect to close the picture and still have the original page open. If I click an attachment such as a PDF file, I expect to open a PDF file in addition to what I already have open, I don't want to close the webpage I am looking at.

I think the approach proposed by Bluto is reasonable, there is no single solution that will please everyone but at least it's fairly logical & intuitive.

Thanks! I completely forgot about this and have been using it again today... great feature.

Firefox an excellent browser btw... 40% of you (I'm referring to ALL traffic, so probably not indicative of everyone reading this) are using Internet Explorer and I can't understand why... do something about that, won't you? ;-) We here at IgnatzMice recommend Firefox (at least on Windows... I found it dog slow on my old Mac) or Safari to maximize your browsing experience. Chrome works pretty well too. I would avoid Opera for now as there is one display problem (odd table borders on some pages) I haven't been able to get to the bottom of yet... was the case on the old board too. I'll figure it out, but since less than 2% of you use Opera, it's not very high priority.