Bookmarking your Members Photo Album thread

[Don Ricardo]

Hi all,

I just tried a little experiment about bookmarking your Members Photo Album thread on the forum. The experiment worked and some of you may find the result useful.

I noted that in a post by Minicamper earlier today he referred someone to the thread on his caravan in the Members Photo Album section. He mentioned the page it is currently on and the name of the thread. The trouble with that is that as more threads are started, the location of the thread on his van will change. For example it will be pushed down from page 14 to page 15 for starters.

Hmmm, I thought. The forum structure allows you to enter your website address (if you have one) under your member's profile, and then sets up a little icon of a house next to the email and PM icons... Hmmm... Sure enough if you enter the URL address for your Members Photo Album thread in the appropriate box in your member's profile the little house icon appears, and pressing the icon will take you straight to your thread. If you look to the left you will see that I now have a website icon under my avatar (ie under the Don badge).

One tip though, you need to insert both the URL address for your thread AND the thread name in the respective boxes, otherwise it doesn't seem to work.

I figure it is handy to have a direct link to your thread because you can refer people to the info on your van via the icon, and when you want to add something to your thread you can get there with one touch of a button rather than searching through the whole of the Members Photo Album section to work out which page your thread is on now.

Of course this will only be partly helpful to people with multiple vans and multiple threads such as JBJ, Reddo, Cobber, Mark T, Kingy, Sportsman1, Humpty, etc, etc, etc, but I'm working on that problem!

Don Ricardo

[cobber]

G'day Don R,

It's hard to find a system that works for everybody eh?
To get around the problem you mention in your last paragraph... and even for those who have only one entry I find the following method pretty simple.

For the majority of members who have worked out how to post their own photos I do it this way..... go to “members photo album”... go to the column marked “Started by” and click on that.
That puts everybody in alphabetical order (click on it again and it puts everybody in reverse order).

As an example, if you wanted to find Cobber's posts on his caravans you scroll through the names in that “Started by” column (after putting them in alphabetical order) until you get to page 4 where “Cobbers” entries start.
In this example you can see Cobber posted an entry on “Cruisersnooser's” behalf back in July 2006, if I wanted to post a link to that subject I click on the “subject” and then just copy and paste the URL at the top of the page which in this case is vintagecaravans.proboards30.com/index.cgi?board=photo&action=display&thread=1309

This sorting principal works on all columns on all forums, you can have fun getting statistics on all sorts of things (if you want to )

Cobber.

[Don Ricardo]

Hi Cobber,

A useful reminder. Thanks. I often use the 'sort' technique you have described to find threads I am looking for. Proboards is a lot more flexible and user friendly than many of us realise I think. The Search facility is pretty powerful as well, although it doesn't deal well with words that have been misspelt. Funny about that.

The only problem with the 'sort' technique I find is that if you are dealing with a section which has 20 plus pages, even after you have sorted the threads by 'Started by' (or 'Subject') you've still got to work out which page the threads started by say Cobber will be on. So you guess page 5 for example and then go backwards and forwards from there until you find the right one. Not really a major problem of course, just a bit fiddly sometimes.

Anyway it's good for folk to be familiar with the tools available for finding stuff they need, and using the website icon to bookmark your personal Members Photo Album thread is one of those. It hadn't occurred to me until today that it was possible - up until now there are only a handful of forum contributors who have used the icon and they all have their own separate actual websites.

Don Ricardo

[minicamper]

Hi Don,

The easiest thing to do if you want to refer to multiple vans, is have a thread that lists all your vans and their threads, like an index, then just have the little profile icon point to the "index"

Easy.. ;D

Hey Don, I just tried my index idea and it worked...

[cobber]

OK Chris.... I started doing that then I thought why !!

It's a duplication of what you get if you use the "sorting method"...it needs maintaining, to much work for my money & let's face it.... most members won't bother .

I'll stick with the "Sorting method" (I'm from the "rhythm method" generation remember) .

Cobber.