No Laszlo, it's there. Been there all this time.
After kicking that post out onto the Forum I used a guest account on my laptop to view the Forum in Safari. Saw the same 'gone' message as you've noted.
It's probably Apple's security, in that I'd saved the image to my iCloud storage so it's likely only visible to myself. I've read there's an iCloud Photos service (app?) that may overcome this, as with Google Photos. Need to explore all this in time.
Standards are great. Every application should have a dozen or more different ones which might be applicable, depending on the disigners' and developers' whims. <;-) Not that I'm complaining; I made a lot of money over the years helping companies navigate the alligator infested swamp of arbitrarily applied EDI standards, which could be radically different even between different facilities of the same company, never mind from company to company. Of course, that's where a lot of the gray hair came from, too. Ah, well, variety is the spice of life....
For example, if I text a tinyurl of a link to one of my Dropbox folders, people with Android phones can see them just fine. With iPhones...el zippo. Hard to figure.
I had some success recently getting direct links to Dropbox photos to display correctly here, but I had to guess a bit as to how to edit the links to get 'em to work with the CLC image insert instructions here:
https://www.clcboats.com/various/posting-photos-forums.html
Of course, that'll only last as long as I keep my Dropbox going, then it'll go the way of Tinypic. The only way to really make 'em halfway permanent would be to actually store the images onsite here as part of the message data, which probably introduces a whole 'n'other layer of complication for CLC's web wizards.
That's what the Teardrop forum does, as well as allowing edits when your spellchecker messes up.
Laszlo
"That's what the Teardrop forum does, as well as allowing edits when your spellchecker messes up."
So with maybe 40,000 boat kits sold by now, a Forum dedicated to those customers gets short shrift over one for the new 'kids on the block'?
Is the Teardrop Camper forum running on the same software package as this'n, but maybe a more 'modern' version? Have to wonder what the upgrade cost'd be....
Make no mistake! I'm glad this Forum is here!
But given that 'a picture is worth a thousand words" I'd love seeing it made less frustrating trying to put 'em up here....
the only two pictures i can see now are mine and lazlos. (working through a chrome browser and internet explorer.)
with respect to my picture, i set up a new album in google pics following laszlo's instructions and dragged a photo into it and copied the link.
fwiw, whenever i post, i always set the width to 500 so it fits a normal screen and allows you to see the entire image without additional clicks.
on tech, my perspective, and i shared this with a team that CLC had working on a new website for them, is that the number one thing they need to do is allow pictures to be uploaded to the site with the text and stop this 'linking non-sense'. CLC and this community (past and present) built up a great asset of text and pictures......but the only real asset is the text becuase the pictures weren't safeguarded becuase they were links to other locations.....and you know how that goes over time.
so the site is actually degrading every day as some old imbedded link/picture evaporates into the ether.
you need to control/mange your content to protect your property. as a practicing Chief Information Officer for some of USA's top companies at one time and now for the federal government, never understood this strategy.
maybe john can update us on this. fwiw....guillemot site you upload your picture to their service.....so they inextricably tie the picture to the text.
that's what CLC needs to do.
humbly offered,
h
So with maybe 40,000 boat kits sold by now, a Forum dedicated to those customers gets short shrift over one for the new 'kids on the block'?
While there's some definite crocks with this website, I'd like to point out a few things in its defense.
First off, the forum is actually a secondary function here. The main purpose of this website is to display products and to safely, securely and reliably take your order, collect your money and pass that information along to the people who make it all happen. Additionally, this website keeps track of your order history since day 1 (actually April 2nd, 2008)
Which bring us to the next point. This website is approaching its 12th birthday. It's old software. When it became active it was already mature software with a good track record of reliability. So when it was originally developed, the world was drastically different. Hard drives were expensive. Terabyte drives were years in the future. Fora were mostly text-based. Cameras were expensive, cell cameras were crap with tiny images by today's standards. It made perfect sense back then to have a 500-pixel width limit because that was wider than most images. It also made sense to link to pictures instead of hosting them because that scarce disk space was needed for order history and directly business-related stuff. There was no fancy cloud storage, vendors used simple HTML links instead of hiding image locations, so having to supply links instead of dragging and dropping pictures was not a big deal. And if a few of the forum features were missing, like editing, that was nowhere near as important as not losing orders or allowing customers' money to disappear.
In a perfect world, as the website became dated, there would have been a refresh. But all that business data, as well as the forum data, would need to be reliably and securely exported into the new system. That kind of tech refresh is a very tedious, time consuming, specialized, dangerous and expensive process. Since the catalogue and sales portion was working already, should CLC have stopped designing new boats and spent the money on fixing some forum crocks that people could work around? I know what I would have voted for if my opinion had been one that counted and I'm pretty sure that the vast majority of the builder community would have done the same.
While it would have been possible to keep the current website and just link to new forum software, the way the Teardrop and Pocketship fora did, that would require a major effort to preserve the old forum. The Teardrop and Pocketship fora got away with it because they were starting fresh, without a decade+ worth of data to preserve.
So one day there will inevitably be a new website with new forum features. Until then, we can work with what we have knowing that it helps CLC get us new boats.
Laszlo
Well said, the both of you. I agree in principle with everything you've written in those last two posts.
In the end it costs to put up then maintain a service such as this one, or the similarly-inspired one for WoodenBoat. Not only for the software and hardware it runs on, but also the management of same.
Otherwise sooner or later something'll burp, take the whole thing down. Maybe forever.
I may keep trying to work out an effective strategy for making best use of what's here, while admitting my technical understanding of why things are as they are with the various hosting services likely will hobble my progress.
Thanks all for your patient understanding.
trying two images to see if i have now resolved the problem
Well, I, for one, can see both images in the post immediately above. Firefox with an active Google sign in, so maybe we're one step closer to figuring this out.
Most of the time when I post photos and links here, I try to start a separate private browser window (fresh set of cookies, forms and other stuff like that) to come back and look at how things appear to make sure that visibility doesn't rely on my own permissions somehow. Even that doesn't always work, and it is sometimes difficult to understand what is going on behind the GUI. Mysteries of the Cyber Sea.
.....Michael
And yes, those two new image files (1:44 AM) are revealed to me also! Thanks! Beautiful work there you're showning us!
As for the 'hidden' one? I leave my longstanding Google account active 24/7/365 so both it and Chrome, as well as my main G-mail account, all stay functional.
"... and it is sometimes difficult to understand what is going on behind the GUI. Mysteries of the Cyber Sea."
S'truth that! And I like cookies... the edible kind we can share, that don't usually last long at all.
I can also see both images with 3 different browsers on 4 different operating systems. Looks like you found the magic key, Howard.
For those who want to test without a GUI hiding everything, Linux has some command line tools for network debugging and such. wget, for example, works with the Google pseudo-URLs as long as you specify an output file name. In verbose mode it gives you all sorts of good info.
So now that the Google mystery is solved, I wonder if anyone wants to tackle iCloud?
Laszlo
Ain't this fun, boys and girls? Beats the heck out of venturing out on a dangerous wild goose chase lookin' for, say, toilet paper or (strangely) slow-cook rolled oats. <;-)
.....Michael
"Linux has some command line tools for network debugging and such. wget, for example, works with the Google pseudo-URLs as long as you specify an output file name. In verbose mode it gives you all sorts of good info."
Ouch....
Your skillset obviously outclasses what I can claim.
For years I groused about not having been born in an earlier, simpler-to-navigate era.
Now I find myself wishing matbe I'd been born a decade later so I'd have had time to get up to speed with the speed of changes I've seen.
Closing fast on 71 I don't feel at all bad about where I'm at today but then this latest scourge strikes, planting my two feets firmly in the high risk category.
"So now that the Google mystery is solved, I wonder if anyone wants to tackle iCloud?"
Until I can spend a bit more 'free' time on that I'll go for now with the account thing; I can 'share' files there but I have to specify by e-mail address. There's no URL choice on a file-by-file basis I can find.
Seen there's an iCloud Photos app that may offer a viable path but that's iPhone/iPad only, not for devices like my rMBP.
I'd rather spend time on my Waterlust's build progress right now though....
JUST got wind of a macOS update for Catalina (10.15.4) that introduces iCloud Drive folder sharing, among other new tidbits. Blurb touts 'grant access to anyone with the folder link."
We'll see... need to run full back-up before taking this to heart.
