Recently I have had to edit dozens of postings for clarity due to some members not sticking to some basics such as starting a sentence with a capital letter and ending it with a fullstop. It doesn't give me much enjoyment when I need to sound like a school teacher so I will keep this reminder as brief as possible.

The bottom line is that comments are not easy to read when this sort of thing is neglected. We all make mistakes at times and this is taken into account though at the same time others are just ignoring it post after post and doing little to make sure they are understood by others. The result of this is that I need to edit just about every post they make and of late this has been taking me away from my job of making this site a better one through continual improvement. I won't put the members who are doing this through the embarrassment of being named as this isn't the point of this exercise and there is no need for members fessing up. In future, to those who need to, just please make sure that your posts are formatted in the correct English sentence structure. It keeps the credibility of yourselves plus this site high and the importance of this cannot be overstated. The start of a sentence plus any proper nouns (EG: names of radios or people) should start with a capital letter. Acronyms (EG: AWA, STC, etc) should be in ALLCAPS.

Please proof-read your posts before pressing the 'Submit' button. Don't forget, if you spot a mistake you can use the edit feature to correct it. Again, do not panic about an occasional mistake. I am writing this to bring the serial offenders up to speed. A time will come when posts that are just a string of lowercase letters will get deleted instead of corrected if I need to keep doing it.

On another note, I'd like to see an improvement in the quality of photos that are published in posts. Again, the problem of submitting blurry photos is not a new one and it is not just one or two members doing it but it is problematic because people cannot see any detail in them. So is there a point in submitting them? Probably not. As of midnight tonight a new policy will be invoked - no blurry or dark photos will be published anywhere on this site. There will be a moratorium period where I may ask blurry photos to be changed for sharp ones before publication but after that any unclear photos will be ignored and offending photos that are hosted elsewhere will be delinked.

I am close to finalising the long-requested ability for members to upload photos to this website themselves and will soon ask a couple of members who submit photos often to test the feature before it rolls out to all members. The feature will come with a special condition of use - no blurry photos.

In finishing, good quality content will hold every member here in the high regard visitors to this site should gold them in. High quality becomes relied on and becomes trustworthy and that is good for us and the site in general.

Will we have the ability to take photos down from our own posts if we make a boo boo. I am in the throws of purchasing a Nikon p900 . Its that good that it is just flying in and out of the shops.

Photos will not be able to be over-written but the workaround to cover mistakes will be a two step process of delete old file then upload revised file. On the old system it was the opposite, where nothing could be deleted but could be over-written.

Both methods help prevent files being lost but the latter is a much better and safer way of handling things, especially if one has uploaded a file and then misplaced their own copy of it at a later stage.

If one wishes to delink their photos but leave the files on the server for later use then it is just a matter of using the edit feature to delete the link code.

If you have a big picture that is blurry, you should shrink it. You won't lose any information. And it will be better, as the picture would be a better size and not look as blurry. This assumes that the shrunken picture is clear enough to display the desired features (like valve numbers and such).

If you have a big picture that is in focus, you should either crop it to show the relevant portion, or shrink it after you do a low pass filtering on it. To avoid alias artifacts (I've done lots of video and image processing circuit design over the years).

On photos;
I have found Irftanview a very good freeware program for editing pictures. You can easily trim, reduce file size, combine photos, etc. The reduce file size option is very good because you can reduce a 3mb photo down to 100k with no reduction in quality for the viewer on the web. This would be a big saving for Brad in storage mb’s.
Its a lot easier than Photoshop.

Try it;
http://www.irfanview.com/

The best size to send here is 1024 x 768 or higher. This has a couple of benefits. As has been said, shrinking photos can make those with a slight blur appear sharp. The other reason is that I archive anything sent in at its original size. This allows larger files to be uploaded at a time in the future if the site's forum template is widened, although this is not likely for years to come - the site is already wider than most of the popular news sites.

Anything lower than a width of 800px is definitely no good to us.

Agree Irfanview is easy and practical, not to say FREE!

Another feature is "batch conversion" where you can point Irfanview to a whole list of images simultaneously, and it will convert them all to a smaller file size, cropped dimensions, consistent filenames including sequence numbering, or many other things useful for posting for web use.

Picture dimensions affect file size by a squaring factor - half the dimensions=quarter the file size.
Image resolution can even more dramatically reduce file size. Screen viewing does not need 24bits per pixel - I often use IrfanView to reduce resolution to 16bits or less. Slight loss of quality only and major filesize saving.

Maven

What I need most is the knowledge I once had with web development. I've done little work on any site in recent years and because of this the things I need to know to finish off some of the new features for the site aren't going to be finished for a long time.