Science/Engineering/Technical forums

Jerry kindly taught me how to do this and sent some useful links to it all. I've done the board administration parts of this, but this youtube video shows you how to both do that, and to add a video to a post, so I'm going to do that here, too. The key is to use the youtube button above, then paste just the ID part of your url between the tags this inserts. Done!

So suppose you have a youtube video you want to post, we'll use one of mine as an example. The URL is (copied from browser):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ck8mO-2olw

That's just a link that will take you to youtube. But this:



Should put that same video inline here. And it worked, first try

Since you can't see what I did here's the clue.

Once I decided where in this post the video should go, I put the cursor there and clicked the "youtube" button above and got some tags in square brackets.
I then copied just the identifier from the youtube url, in this case the 2ck8mO-2olw to in between the new tags. Bingo!

/////
Note, we store pictures up here ourselves, on my bandwidth, and will be doing a HOWTO on preparing them for that. Hint -- we don't need 5 or 20 megapixel poorly composed pictures in large quantities per post -- make them count, people -- try and keep them around 1024x768 or so, and only good ones, the kind that really are worth a thousand words. Still a lot of people out there with monitors that won't do more anyway, and most autoscaling that bulletin boards do really stinks -- it comes out better if you do it first.


For those who run your own forum, a youtube video on how to do this is at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDWOEIUP ... re=related

And the webpage giving the magic BBCode is at:
http://www.qualityposts.com/AddingMoviesToForums.php

Enjoy! Now we can have videos inline here, but we don't have to store and convert them ourselves. Just put them up on youtube and link with this method.
So we expect to see some good videos of your work now -- but please, no cute kitty cats playing piano -- already have that going on live here.

Here is a link to how to use some other features we have here:
BBcode help page

I have tried to set board limits pretty high for things like pix and attachments (7 attachements up to 10 mb each). I don't want that to be a limit on communication style here, I want posts that are complete.
Of course, if you go nuts posting megapixel pictures that won't even fit on most monitors, and huge attachment files, you'll slow the board down for everyone, so please don't -- use a photo editor to crop and scale and things like that if you can. Avoid pictures that aren't worth a thousand words, more or less.

More testing

<object width="640" height="390"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/2ck8mO-2olw&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&version=3"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/2ck8mO-2olw&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&version=3" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" width="640" height="390"></embed></object>

I'm trying to allow youtube to go full screen and so far, no luck. This snippet was copied from the embed field in the video player itself. I've added all the allow full screen stuff, now I'm wondering if I need to allow script access? Would be nice to have them go full screen if someone wants that.

I've added the sub and superscript tags, so we can now show math and isotopes and chemical formulas a lot nicer looking. Still no luck with tables -- I can't seem to find a way to make it easy enough to put on a button, given the number of things you have to specify to make a table happen and look decent. For now, I guess you use the code tags to get it into a monospaced font and have the board not eat extra whitespace. Tabs, however, seem to not work at least when just typed in -- they move control to some other window on the page (as is normal in a browser). I've not tried pasting them in yet.

I am also looking for a way to have pdf's show inline, if you have the right plugin, rather than having to download them -- for whatever reason, you don't even get the option in the download to just use your pdf viewer to open them either, which stinks. Anyone who has an idea how to fix that, pipe up! If nothing else, you could then produce tables in some program that will export pdf, then show them here. Open Office will make pdf's for example, and the price is right. For now, you have to make a table in some editor, take a screenshot, masssage that and put it in here as an image -- yuck.

So, anyone who has a better clue than me about bbcodes and html (probably lots of people, I don't program in those, I do things like C) please chime in!

http://www.phpbb.com/kb/article/adding- ... in-phpbb3/

is a link to how to add some things. Any requests from this list?