Emojis moved

[Marie2020]

As I attempted to put an emoji in a post today, I found that it has moved from the right top of the page to the far left. I had to enter it in twice because my first attempt landed in the persons post that I was replying to

 

[GottaGo]

Emoji poltergeists?

 

[Zeedman]

The preview button now toggles between views, rather than creating a second view below the first. I've also noticed that when loading photos, the thumbnail views are much larger... so only two thumbnail photos can be fitted side-by-side.

 

[Marie2020]

I don't understand how these sites work, I presumed they are controlled by people?

I also use BYC, there's no difference there at all, only here which brings me to wonder why is it only happening in teg? Strange.

 

[flowerbug]

I don't understand how these sites work, I presumed they are controlled by people?

I also use BYC, there's no difference there at all, only here which brings me to wonder why is it only happening in teg? Strange.

haha, @Nifty is the boss of both sites as far as i know.

i'm not on BYC or BYH as i don't have chickies or animals that fit the definition of herdable. i am on SS at times, but not as much as here. i much prefer talking about gardening the most so this site fits me the best.

 

[Marie2020]

haha, @Nifty is the boss of both sites as far as i know.

i'm not on BYC or BYH as i don't have chickies or animals that fit the definition of herdable. i am on SS at times, but not as much as here. i much prefer talking about gardening the most so this site fits me the best.

I'm more into the bakers thread in byc.

 

[Marie2020]

haha, @Nifty is the boss of both sites as far as i know.

i'm not on BYC or BYH as i don't have chickies or animals that fit the definition of herdable. i am on SS at times, but not as much as here. i much prefer talking about gardening the most so this site fits me the best.

The box we reply on has completely changed my end. Something is different.

 

[Ridgerunner]

I don't understand how these sites work, I presumed they are controlled by people?

I also use BYC, there's no difference there at all, only here which brings me to wonder why is it only happening in teg? Strange.

@Nifty can explain it better than me. I'll probably be wrong on some of this but I'll try.

Nifty owns the TEG, BYC, Herds, and SS sites and I presume makes money off of advertisers. The more active the sites the more money he makes. With all the traffic BYC has to be the cash cow, the other three sites can't be making enough to keep him in wine and cheese, let alone Christmas presents for his beautiful kids.

He and his coordinators maintain the different sites. They try to resolve problems we have and try to protect against scammers and viruses. They monitor content to a certain level, if they violate forum rules their posts may be deleted or they may be banned. Do you see the "report" tab, on my desktop it's at the bottom left of a post? I use that when a post shows up on here that I think is from a scammer or a computer instead of a human. When I say monitor content that does not mean they read every post, that would be impossible on BYC. They mainly rely on people reporting malicious content with that report button.

One huge problem has to be that the different providers and such like Chrome, Microsoft, and all the others are constantly upgrading and updating their programs. What worked before doesn't work anymore. Often a correction come in the next upgrade, but not always. We use different devices with different manufacturers. Desktops, laptops, phones, tablets, and whatever is new for Christmas. Can you imagine trying to keep up with all that? As aggravating as these changes are many are necessary. The scammers and hackers are constantly learning new ways to hack and scam us so they are trying to keep up with or ahead of the hackers and scammers.

BYC, TEG, and the others used to be on different platforms. I think that's the correct term. The forums looked totally different and you needed different skills to work them. Nifty has switched platforms on us before. For example, BYC got so big the platform it was on could not handle the traffic anymore so he upgraded. At some point he switched TEG and the others to the same platform, he and his coordinators only had to learn and keep up with changes to one. It makes it easier for users like us to use the different forums. I'm guessing on a lot of this that comes before, but especially on what follows. While BYC and TEG may be on the same "platform" they are probably on different versions, with different licenses, and on different servers. Changes to one does not always mean changes to another. Nifty just might use us as guinea pigs too. Before an upgrade on BYC, Herds, and SSS he tried the changes on this forum to work out the bugs before disrupting those other forums. He was nice enough to warn us about that and ask for feedback.

Marie, I just figure this is the world we live in these days if we care to participate. It is not as simple a world as we used to have, it requires learning new skills. Sort of like learning to drive a car instead of a horse and buggy. I resisted cell phones too and relied on a landline until that became not practical. One son and one daughter-in-law only use text. They don't answer a phone call and he does not check voice mail, if I need to actually talk to them I have to text them to get them to call.

Nifty, have I buttered you and your staff up enough. Anything you want to correct? I'm sure I got some things wrong.

 

[flowerbug]

I'm more into the bakers thread in byc.

i feel my butt expand when i read stuff like that.

 

[flowerbug]

The box we reply on has completely changed my end. Something is different.

yes, someplace @Nifty mentioned changes to the Editor which is what you use to reply to posts. depending upon the size of your screen on the device you are using that will appear differently than what i see here on a wider screen. for me the line at the top of the Editor box used to be all one layer of symbols. now it has empty spaces and the submenu stacked triple dot indicators showing up which were not there before.

the emojie symbol i so rarely used i don't know where it was before, but i will take your word that it moved.

sometimes things get changed back after they hear enough comments because user feedback is important. sometimes it doesn't change back at all and you have to just either go with it and relearn how to do things or in some cases it drives some people away. which is sad, but it happens. i know a few of the older more frequent posters here that used to be high volume writers have struggled with the recent changes of the past year and i miss their writings.

if you want some guesses at how things are set up behind the scenes it is partly covered by the post above by @Ridgerunner, but i can add some more context which may help you understand. if not, skip...

the whole website hosting environment has changed a lot the past five years or so. in many cases people no longer even pay money for specific hardware to run the programs on or to store the data which needs to be kept for running the website. instead they pay someone else for virtual machines which can then be controlled in ways completely apart from the hardware. this works out well in that if a site has not too much activity then the costs are lower than they would be for a dedicated hardware type of service.

each website running on a virtual server will have it's own software and in many cases this is a licensed program so the person using it must pay for it somehow. so for there to be different versions being used on the various sites would not be uncommon, but as time goes on it makes a lot of sense to keep the versions of each site pretty close to each other. it gets pretty hard to keep track of all the changes you need to make once you get a few versions behind especially if you haven't been using some kind of version control software.

[aside]
some people are more into doing their own coding for the website or even the stuff behind the scenes. they can create their own from many various existing programs. the real challenge though is when a website gets bigger because then you need a fairly complicated database program and plenty of storage and faster hardware to keep it on and to run it. the more complexity and the bigger it is means paying more either to run it or to pay others to run it. custom coding people make a lot of money.

[but back to the basic mechanisms...]

when you type something into the site and hit save that means that the information you typed in has to be saved someplace more permanent than just the memory of the computer system you've signed in on. so that information is transmitted to the website software and that software sticks it on a computer disk some place. the record keeping software is called a database.

so you have the computers involved, the network between computers, the website template software (which displays the messages), and the database which stores the messages. you can change the website templates often without doing much at all to the stored messages. this is a very good thing.

the website template software being used is getting pretty fancy and including editors which can run on all these various devices that people are using. what was updated recently was the website template software including the editor you use to write and edit messages. the layout of the menu bar at the top of the Editor box has changed.

perhaps a bit more detail than you want to know, and i may be wrong on some specific details but this is mostly how it looks from the other side. it is ultimately all ones and zeroes.