As you may have noticed, we've been sprucing up the site a bit. Among other things, we've added new ways to upload photos and email notifications of post replies. We are still cleaning out cobwebs and weeding some areas of the site, but we are also working on some bigger projects like a better search engine (yay!) and a mobile app. We'd also like to get some feedback from you. What enhancements or additions would you like to see? What do you love? What do you hate? Think big and small!

We can't promise the moon, but please know that we will read and consider every one of your ideas and suggestions. We appreciate your loyalty and dedication to our site and we know how important your community is to you. Help us make it even better!

Please use this post to offer your feedback. But, as always, you are welcome to contact me directly by clicking on my profile page.

Best regards,

Tamara Amey
GardenWeb Community Manager

This is my favorite website, but I do have a few suggestions.

Your message above contains an example of one form of advertising that is somewhat annoying. When you said, "We are still cleaning out cobwebs..." the forum automatically applied an advertisement link to the word "cleaning". I used to try to defeat that by including special Unicode characters in known keywords, but that wasn't convenient or effective. When I neutralized one keyword with a Unicode substitution, a different keyword-ad appeared in my message.

That brings up another suggestion, namely Unicode support. When I want to say something like 2 1/2 inches, and use the special character for "1/2", that can appear successful in the Message Preview, but appear corrupted in the message after it is posted.

We can usually depend on the Message Preview, but not always. For example, if I insert some "Ampersand Semicolon" example of HTML in a message, it appears as intended in the first Preview of the message, but I must submit that Preview. Otherwise, if I see some small error in that Preview, and correct it, the Ampersand Semicolon component is re-parsed into a corrupted form in the submitted message. This situation is not something that GardenWeb needs to "fix". As a person who occasionally uses some Ampersand Semicolon examples to show someone how to use it to insert HTML here, I just need to be careful to avoid a second parsing of my message.

However, apparently messages get re-parsed in later website maintenance, and special characters can "go bad" at that time. Knowing that, I now usually avoid using special characters, and just write out 2 1/2 instead of saying 2� or some Unicode.

Large uploaded images are now down-sized to 640 pixels wide. I think that is unnecessarily too small. There should be room for at least 800 pixels wide, even 900 or so pixels. Before so much advertising got added on the right-hand side, I determined by trial-and-error that images 986 pixels wide would not cause a scroll bar to appear at the bottom of the screen and images 987 pixels and wider would cause a scroll bar to appear. So I "standardized" my posted image width to 986 pixels. Now there are scroll bars, but my 986-wide images don't seem to be causing any problems. I think you could increase the down-sizing width to well above 640 pixels. There does need to be such a limit, because today's digital cameras take some very large pixel-size images.

This last issue is somewhat sensitive, and I bring it up in the spirit of maximum friendliness to GardenWeb. It has to do with the Dave's Garden web site. I concede that GardenWeb could regard Dave's Garden, and several other garden-related websites, as competitors. But a few years ago, in all innocence, I started to insert a link to a message thread in Daves's Garden, and GardenWeb "scared the living daylights out of me" with a warning that I would be disbarred from GardenWeb for posting such links. It stated that Dave's Garden had launched some kind of cyber attack against GardenWeb. I was unaware of that incident. Years later I forgot about that and tried a similar link, but was reminded with the same warning, so of course I removed the link in order to get my message posted. Dave's Garden has since been acquired by a company (Internet Brands), so it is "under new management". So my suggestion is that GardenWeb at least reevaluate its policy with respect to Dave's Garden. This is in no way a criticism of GardenWeb. In the interests of full disclosure, I am a participant at Dave's Garden, but I am in no other way associated with them. I respect GardenWeb's right to police the links posted here.

Respectfully,

ZM

Try Firefox Adblocker plus. Gets rid of the ads. Yes, I detest those inline text ads. Makes a website look cheap and very annoying. Yea 800 pixels would be nice...they probably worry about bandwidth? You also have to think about mobile devices. I'm guessing that's the biggest reason for it.

And all those banned links. My gosh the list must be halfway around New York City. Be nice if they could be re-analyzed. Some of them make no sense why they were banned.

Antiquated look here...hasn't changed since? But, why fix something that's not broken.

"...800 pixels would be nice...they probably worry about bandwidth?"

This subject was discussed toward the end of the Zinnia Art message thread. It is possible to reduce the file size of a picture in post processing. A very large picture can actually have a smaller file size than a smaller picture. In fact, in the Zinnia Art thread we posted an example of a large picture that was downsized to 640 pixels by the forum, and the downsized picture actually had a larger file size than the original larger picture! The ProJPEG plug-in is capable of doing some very efficient JPEG compression. My 986-wide pictures used to run about 300,000 bytes, and I can use ProJPEG to bring that down to about 100,000 bytes, so I frequently do that to reduce the load time of my message threads.

ZM
(not associated with any product or vendor mentioned or linked)

ZM

Also, any persons in many threads need the degree sigh. �, alt-0176 does not work for me. Perhaps it is my browser or font or something but I'm guessing GW disallowed it a year or two ago. In any even most plant people should be using it from time to time.

It is possible to emulate the degree character in HTML. For example;

The freezing point of water is 32^oF by definition. The small "o" was used in that example.

A slightly different result can achieved by using the numeral "0".

The freezing point of water is 32⁰F by definition. The HTML used to create those results is

The freezing point of water is 32< sup >< small >o< /small >< /sup >F by definition.

The freezing point of water is 32< sup >< small >0< /small >< /sup >F by definition.

The angle brackets in that HTML have been de-activated by inserting a space after the < and a space before the >.

Admittedly, using HTML to "fake" a degree character as a superscripted small "o" is not something we should have to do. I think all modern browsers support special characters and Unicode.

ZM

You asked and we listened. Today we are very excited to be debuting our newest feature -- post editing! To use this feature, go back to the post you wish to correct and you'll find the link under the 'My Clippings' links on the right side of the page.

I want to give a special shout out to all the testers who tried to break the editing tool. ;) Your feedback was insightful and invaluable. Thank you!

You may have also noticed that we adjusted the login cookie awhile back so that you should not have to login repeatedly.

Stay tuned -- we have more cool things in the works!

As always, please let us know if you have any questions or concerns.

Best regards,
Tamara