ASK ME ANYTHING (AMA) - Ask the administrator(s) your questions HERE PLEASE

Would be cool if there was a switch I could flip (maybe in my account settings) to switch videos to be links instead of embeds.  When I'm not interested in videos, but I'm just looking for conversation, embedded videos mean scrolling through dozens of pages/screens of stuff-I'm-not-interested-in.  Also, if/when I'm on a slow connection, the page would load a lot faster that way.

(I'm sure that's really easy; just a few lines of code to write, right?)

What you are looking for are the URL commands - you use square brackets around url - then post the youtube address right after it - then immediately follow with the /url command also in square brackets. This allows it not to be embedded.  The page loads way faster this way.

PS: Yeah I know we made a lot of pages here in a lot of threads with embedded videos that maybe we should not have and should have just made links using url commands in the past instead of embedding them but it would take years converting all those threads and posts to links instead of embeds by myself, so maybe from now on I or we or you may just do url links instead of embeds - I dunno what do you think?

Uh... okay.  would have posted my response publicly, but I saw the PM first.  Not gonna bother retyping it, and can't seem to find "sent messages" so I can copy-and-paste, but I do think this makes more sense as a public discussion, in case anyone else wants to chime in.

Well, what I had in mind was for people to continue using the "youtube" tag (or better yet, a provider-agnostic "video" tag), and for users to have a UI to toggle between show-videos-as-embed and show-videos-as-links.

Based on the assumption that some people would disagree with my videos-as-links-is-best preference.

And, when I'm on a fast connection, and in the right kind of mood, I myself might prefer show-videos-as-embed.

Oh that idea is great and maybe there is a way to make that happen but so far I haven't seen it in Simple Machines which is the software we use, so you or I would need to check SM's website (I already have an account on their forum) to see if they offer it in a new version of the software since our's is 2 years old now or if they offer add-ins that can do that since we do use several addins here already like the shout box.

Gee I hope we can get that option here but it could take some time on either our ends to research this and seen if we can set it up otherwise we have to stick with the current situation of having to choose embed or links only which I agree is not very good.

It appears this forum has been turned private -- as in, you can't view any part of it if you don't have an account, and log in to it.

Was that intentional?  I'm pretty sure it wasn't that way when I signed up -- I never would have bothered to sign up if I hadn't been able to browse anonymously first.

It appears this forum has been turned private -- as in, you can't view any part of it if you don't have an account, and log in to it.

Was that intentional?  I'm pretty sure it wasn't that way when I signed up -- I never would have bothered to sign up if I hadn't been able to browse anonymously first.

THAT IS CORRECT

PERIODICALLY - we take the forum private for a few days or weeks at a time in order to drive up or get people to sign up as new members and I also do some maintenance during these days as well.  Sometimes it gets a few new members and sometimes it doesn't so it's kinda a crap shoot unless you have better ideas?  As you may notice we get hundreds of lurkers but almost no new members - and you might notice they look at the threads but only contribute views which to me is fairly useless.


NEVER FEAR - the forum will be visible to guests again soon.

PERIODICALLY - we take the forum private for a few days or weeks at a time in order to drive up or get people to sign up as new members and I also do some maintenance during these days as well.  Sometimes it gets a few new members and sometimes it doesn't so it's kinda a crap shoot unless you have better ideas?  As you may notice we get hundreds of lurkers but almost no new members - and you might notice they look at the threads but only contribute views which to me is fairly useless.

Hm.  This seems like a bad idea to me.  It seems more likely to drive anonymous lurkers (who might later convert into active members) away than to convince them to create an account.  I know that I've often lurked/read on forums for weeks or months before signing up because I had something I wanted to post.  I'm not sure there's anything a forum owner could have done that would have changed that timetable, but if the anonymous access I had been using had mysteriously(*) gone away, I probably would have just stopped reading the forum instead of signing up.
I think the best you could hope for is to convert some anonymous lurkers into logged-in-but-not-posting lurkers.  Is that really any significant difference? 

(*) As regards "mysterious" -- if you continue this practice, it'd probably be a good idea to add some kind of explanation to the "access denied" page that's currently displayed.  I'd go with something like "We're limiting the board to members only for the next few days to lower the bandwidth requirements/server load while we do some maintenance.  We'll be back for public viewing on <date>"

I think the best you could hope for is to convert some anonymous lurkers into logged-in-but-not-posting lurkers.  Is that really any significant difference? 

(*) As regards "mysterious" -- if you continue this practice, it'd probably be a good idea to add some kind of explanation to the "access denied" page that's currently displayed.  I'd go with something like "We're limiting the board to members only for the next few days to lower the bandwidth requirements/server load while we do some maintenance.  We'll be back for public viewing on <date>"

Well I have no idea how that could actually be done.

That would be tricky in that I have to signin to Hostgator (our hosting) and edit the source page for the sign-in screen (I've done it before) but it would likely be very generic (so many days hours or weeks) and could further confuse the lurkers and TBH I don't spend much time thinking about them since I have my doubts they will ever want to be members here.

But thanks for the suggestions - keep em coming.