RichM

That's interesting to read. Do you transport it on to your boat? If so, how? I've seen a few narrowboats with some kind of rack mounted to the stern.

I use a Huawei E5786 fixed to a porthole. It was originally intended to be temporary as it's a quick & simple set up commonly referred to as "MiFI". The idea was to set up something more sophisticated but I find the E5786 works surprisingly well and I regularly get download speeds of up to 40 Mbps. It is 12v but also has a built in battery which is useful. Just wish it had dual sim support with automatic failover given the EE masts seem to suffer from network congestion occasionally. It would be nice to switch over to 3 without messing about swapping over sims etc. From that I RDP (remote desktop) to a computer hosted in a data centre which achieves download speeds up to around 350 Mbps. Oh and I do have a TP-Link TL-WR802N N300 Nano Router (had to google it ) set up as a repeater. This lets me connect up the few ethernet only devices I have but to be honest I rarely need to use it. It's also USB powered.

Just completed the CRT survey, which landed in my inbox. I encourage everyone to complete it if you received one but be warned, it's quite long. Took me about half an hour to do it.

As you mentioned, it is on the previous legacy theme, both top and bottom but evidently not on the new one. It would be relatively easy to modify the theme and put a link next to the default Activity Stream (next to Facebook icon). Though, I'm reluctant to make non-critical changes to the theme as it will add extra complexity when applying official theme updates. (e.g. updates provided by the people who developed the theme) I will check with the people who developed them theme to see if it's an oversight or something they intentionally dropped. RichM

Ok, had a look into this. It's not that they're banned as such, it's that the database character set does not support them. This can be fixed but is a database intensive task, meaning it's an overnight job. I will do it in the during early hours one weekend. - contrary to popular belief, I do have a job and a life outside Canal World, so I appreciate your patience. RichM

Can I just confirm if people are talking about submitting emoticons from a mobile device or actual emoji's?

I'm looking for a professional solar panel installation on our boat in the South West of the canal network. Does anyone recommend anyone in that region? Cheers RichM

That MySQL error is a server-side issue, so not just you. Usually that error occurs when the database details in the config file are incorrect or if MySQL simply isn't running/crashed, but it can be caused by other things such as database corruption. RichM

I have removed them from Activity Streams. They have been reduced to 3 on the main page and have been resized to 200px. I hope this is seen as a reasonable compromise bearing in mind 5x Gallery Images were displayed horizontally for years prior to the upgrade and as such, we have reduced the number of images displayed. We are looking into implementing a plugin to allow users to hide it if they wish. RichM

You are right in that there is a 100mb personal attachment limit though this is nothing new. IIRC when you reach the limit, it won't allow you to upload any more attachments until you delete any you no longer require. (see attached which shows how to get to the right page) The site is hosted on a server which uses SSD hard drives which are fast but mean storage was limited until recently which is likely one of the reasons behind this limit. However, we are trialing a "Cloud" storage solution and if that is successful, increasing the 100mb personal attachment limit will be viable. RichM

Thanks for confirming. The issue that caused this also caused other issues with the theme this morning which are now fixed. Apologies for the inconvenience RichM

Thanks for reporting it. Should be ok now, it was caused by a missing Apache module. Please can you kindly re-test? Cheers RichM

Tried doing that - looks fine to me. Though I appreciate we all have different perspectives and I guess this is largely a subjective matter. I would still appreciate any screenshots showing what people are not happy with.

Thanks for the feedback. To those reporting display issues on smaller screens, would you mind posting a screenshot as I'm unable to replicate this. I'm using an older iPhone 6 and a 15" laptop. We have had gallery image streams for years. The only difference is that on the main index page, we now have one gallery stream rather than two which also appears on the Activity Streams. Amongst other things, it provides some visual identity which we would be lacking if it wasn't for the streams. Thanks RichM

I have one of these for hot water/heating but Webasto's/Eberspachers don't like to be run for short periods of time and/or at reduced power. As such I have set mine to operate at maximum power early in the morning to heat up the water and in the afternoon to re-heat water. If I need heating, I put it on override outside of those timeframes until the boat is warm enough. - this works as it never reaches its maximum setting of 30°C except during the summer as it's a little underpowered for the size of boat.

Thanks for the feedback: Rather than have two gallery streams we thought we would try by replacing it with one at the side. The reason we have them is partly because it gives a visual identity to the forum and we'd like to promote the use of the Gallery. Previous gallery stream: (x2):

Thanks again for your patience this evening as we migrated the site back to its primary server. Ideally we would have liked to be able to provide some notice but the limitations we had meant that we were unable to do so though I'm pleased to advise that the migration was completed within 40 minutes. Again, I expect a few to have DNS resolution issues which will iron out automatically. I did what I could to reduce the impact of this but some ISPs take longer to update than others. Thanks for your understanding RichM

Should be fixed now. Thanks for flagging this RichM

We reported this to Invision not so long ago and to our surprise they replied to say it's the standard behaviour, "designed to conserve server resources". Though if you set a date range, you should be able to find search results dating back beyond a year. RichM

Last night I noticed errors which suggested the hard drive was failing and swiftly moved the site to a different server overnight. I doubt the hard drive issue explains the speed issues some report as it performed fine for many. However the server was previously in a data centre in France (yes, I know - it was only a temporary server) where as the current temporrary one is in a data centre in London, so it's on a completely different network which could explain why it's loading faster. Ping times are some 40ms quicker testing from here. I am going to look further into caching to improve performance. Keep the feedback coming RichM

We had to carry out some emergency maintenance overnight due to a hard drive issue on the server. The quickest fix was to move the site to a different server. Most should be able to access the site fine but I expect a few to have DNS resolution issues which will iron out automatically. I did what I could to reduce the impact of this but some ISPs take longer to update than others. Thanks for your understanding RichM

Same here and I'm sat aboard a boat using a flaky 4G connection due to the weather. Not surprised. I'm also a big fan of vBulletin also but if we were to migrate to it, it would be a significant change for all users and I don't think the wider community would appreciate that too much. We would also lose some functionality in doing so so I don't think it's likely anytime soon.

Do you know the software that is used for the forum you refer to? I've not seen this as an option in IP.Board but will have another look.