It's best first uploaded to YouTube.

Start with going here: https://www.youtube.com/upload

Once uploaded, copy the video URL into a new post where it says "Link YouTube Video"

Stephen

https://www.youtube.com/upload

🔗

Just a quick update to all. Had a few glitches in the last couple of days as well as spam being posted.

Apologies to anyone who received spam, although removed from the website quickly I am aware email notifications still went out which unfortunately cannot be recalled.

As a result, the flag and post removal system has been changed. Please can I ask you all to flag posts with obvious spam content as soon as possible so moderators are made aware quickly.

Thanks to all of you for keeping the site safe and friendly 😊

Stephen

Are we definately talking about mobile notifications, or is it email notifications that aren't coming through?

From what I see, you don't have any mobile apps installed, or you're logged out if you do?

Emails should come through, although they're always unpredictable. Emails are often scanned, filtered and delayed. Try checking they're not going to spam and if they are, mark them as not spam.

Stephen

The videos and photos part of member ranks only refer to media gallery posts. The full descriptions did used to be "video gallery" and "photo gallery" as the website used to have two distinct sections a few years ago. Agree it's not overly clear.

Pleased everyone likes the new members page layout 👍

Stephen

How did you notice that quickly? I only made the changes just now! Didn’t think people looked at the members page much 🤣

Stephen

I've an idea then where things may be going wrong. When you're editing a post it's temporarily saved, then when finally posted it transfers everything over. It sounds like it's this part which is faulty.

I agree on everyones points with uploads. I keep procrastinating about fixing it as I know it's such a troublesome feature to code up and have working reliably x-browser/x-app, also what happens with unused uploads (need deleting after a while), file formats that are acceptable, re-sizing hi-res images if needed to reduce file size, reading exif data and rotating upside down pictures, having a working progress bar for uploads so people don't give up, what happens if files get corrupted. Then shifting files around... well not too bad but adding drag and drop is complex, desktops need mouse down, mouse move and mouse up events, mobile users need touch start, touch move and touch end events and thumbnails need to snap and shuffle around similar to moving phone app icons. It's complex!

I'm tempted to remove the upload window mind, agree there is no need to pull images from google photos / dropbox etc. Anyone use that feature at all? If using the mobile app it's often a built in feature now to pick photos from other services on your phone directly.

The other thing I'd quite like to do is change the media viewer. On desktops it's ok (except arrow keys to toggle through), but on mobile it often shows the image smaller and doesn't allow for zooming in which is sometimes annoying.

All on the to-do list. Perhaps something for my next holiday.

Stephen

Struggling on the mystery photo uploads. Few questions for everyone;

* At what point do you first see the unknown photos? Is it after you click submit or do they appear in the post window?

* Is it always when adding new boats to the harbour? Or other areas?

* Is it always the same photos?

Thanks

Quick update on password resets... this is working correctly now too. Found a bug in the expiry part. Verification codes expire after 7 days, but stupidly after 7 days any reset requests were still getting the expired codes emailed. This is fixed.

Stephen

We had a few issues yesterday and last night with the database becoming full, this prevented anyone from posting or logging in.

Normally the database tidies itself up but it seems the background task that does this was getting "fatal errors" before reaching the clean up functions. Why it started giving errors now I don't know... I can only assume the number 47 has something to do with it somewhere!

I've made some tweaks and we're back in action. I'll keep monitoring things just in case.

Rick: I've merged your accounts (I found 3) into Newby7 - your password has been reset and emailed to you. I am testing the password reset functionality in the meantime too, there have been others reporting that it doesn't work reliably.

Stephen

Looking forward to the 🐛 list Doug.

I find it oddly fascinating how people interact online. In real life it’s a little easier as you can gauge how things are meant by visual cues, facial expressions etc.

Naively I don’t think anyone really means to belittle others. Like in real life you get personalities which are a bit more overbearing than others. Personally I brush off big headed comments. Generally why I’m not a fan of social media. That whole business model is built around people sharing how great their own lives are compared to other people.

Let’s not let this website become that. There’s no right or wrong in anything. It’s the community spirit and sharing ideas that’s important 😊

Stephen

What is this mayhem website you mention? Not been over there for years! 🤣 I remember it pre the forum, who remembers the original model boats magazine forum?

Only just seen this. So when you’re creating/editing posts, they’re regularly saved as drafts. This happens on both desktop and mobile. Mainly so you don’t lose everything if your computer crashes. As a result you can switch device like you’re wanting to. Any pending posts will pop up when you login on the other device. As for how long... I think drafts are kept for up to a week.

Stephen

I think it’s a great idea. I don’t think it’ll take anything away from the MBW community here if a few people want to do that. I can see how it’s fun getting to know people across the world who share a common interest.

Next best thing to model boat clubs and boating lakes right now!

Stephen

Not sure it’ll be people at home, often it’s factories and offices and industries that put the strain on the network. More likely there’s less staff monitoring network loads and doing regular maintenance checks at the moment.

That said, I’m all ready for outages! Worked out my electric car can power the fridge, freezer and mobile phones for three months 👍😁

Stephen

Reopening the flood gates didn't jam it, some straggler code did. I missed removing the emoji on the new account email verification mails. It was repeatedly trying to send the verification to a new member and wasn't progressing to the other notifications. We'll get there! There's a backlog of 260 emails from this morning about to go through! It should take 45 minutes to clear and then we'll be back on track...

Stephen

Great! Pleased it woiks now!

The 'stay home' traffic doesn't appear to have increased much when you look at google analytics. Although there does seem to be more posts and interaction. I'm risking (now I know emojis were the issue) increasing the hourly email threashold to 340. It'll help speed up the email notifications when there is high load and keeps us just below the 360 limit (if it does exist).

Stephen

RIGHT, so... Emoji's.

Something has changed on the server and I'm fairly sure now it's due to having the yacht emoji ⛵ in the email headers as daft as that sounds. Seems ok to have emoji's in subject lines, but not the "from name" anymore. So emails will look a fraction more boring with just the text "Model Boats Website" now but it does appear to fix the issue.

Any notifications not received in the last few days will never be received mind you, but lets hope it's ok from now on. This post can be test no.1!

Stephen

Well, I've done some digging and some tests, this morning I was able to successfully have the website email me within seconds. But I did go back a week to check the email sending history and see we've been topping out at 170 emails an hour. This is a deliberate limit to spread the load over time. Now... the question is, is that still too high? IONOS the web provider doesn't publish what the limits are, I'll need to phone them later, but another website suggests the limit is either:

6 per minute or
3500 per hour in the Unlimited Pro packages (which is this website)

If it's 3500 we're well under, even 360 an hour should be enough.

I'll find out. Unfortunately providers hate emails because they're often abused by spammers. Push notifications are the fastest most reliable way to get notifications really. They're not buffered and come through to anyone with the app immediately.

Worst case scenario; emails will have to be spread even further to ensure any thresholds are not hit. I'll probably reduce the sending priority for anyone who hasn't been online recently and they'll get the emails during the night!

*update* it could be something to do with sending mails from within crontab, this is a scheduled task that runs every minute. Doing some testing...

Stephen

When I created this website back in 2007, I never thought it would become something of a public service. I’m genuinely so happy it gives all of you a sense of community, especially at the moment 👍

The safety and well-being of members is the number one priority for MBW. Like any responsible organisation, we wanted to reach out and update you on some of the steps we have taken:

From now on, all members must work from their sheds or garages, only leaving for food and model boat supplies. Servers are being cleaned every hour, all data / heated debates over 37.5C will be destroyed. Toilet roll is stocked up.

Please use antibac before posting and wear an N95 or higher mask in the forum areas 😷

On a more serious note, I do hope everyone is being sensible. I'm certainly trying to avoid busy places at the moment. My company has told everyone to work from home starting Monday. For those of you retired, I'd say the advice is even more important. I hope you all have supporting families during this uncertain time 😐

Stephen

What’s the transmission distance on the runcam? I’m on the lookout for something similar to this but for my use case it needs to get about 500ft away and can’t use WiFi. Image quality is less important and no need to record. It’ll be used a little like an FPV cam.

Stephen

16 to 1 or 16 to 16? You’re going to need a lot of supplies! 😁

Stephen

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!!!!!

2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣0️⃣❗️❗️

🎇🎆🎉🎊🍾🥂

Stephen

Hi Rick,

All RWG posts have now been moved to your original Newby7 account. The email updated and password made to match the RWG one you setup. It should auto log you in as Newby7 now. The RWG account has been closed.

Thanks

Stephen

I’ll look into this one tomorrow. I need my laptop! If I understand right, you’ve now two profiles. An old one with the old email and a new one with your new email.

If it’s ok with you, I’ll move your posts from this account over to your old account, change your old account email to your new email, make your old account password the same as your new account and then delete the new account.

If that’s all ok, let me know 👍

Stephen

Merry Christmas everyone!!

Hope you’ve all been good this year and nobody has coal! (Although maybe useful for a steamer!).

🎄 🎅 🎁

Stephen

Hi All,

Firstly, thank you to everyone who has kindly contributed to the website and even more thanks to the few subscribers we have. Without your support this website would have sunk years ago.

I've been reviewing the website costs, generally an annual thing about this time of the year as a lot of the bills come through in November & December.

As well as your kind contributions, I've been minimising the running costs by reducing the amount of paid 3rd party data. Google maps for example has now been replaced by open source mapping software which doesn't have any usage quotas. In the new year the IP location data is being handled differently in order to stay within free quotas. That just leaves hosting fees, app store fees, backup fees and domain name fees (I don't count my development time 😎).

If you haven't already this year and have found the website useful, please do drop a donation. It can be as little or as much as you wish. All of it is greatly appreciated.

Stephen

Dodgy Geezer is on the right track. It's an emoji converted to plain text. I have looked it up, it's the GB flag. Where do you see it? I've occasionally seen it in emails, but that'll be down to the email client. Not everywhere supports emojis and so it happens sometimes that you see the nonsensical characters behind them.

Stephen

It’s going to be something like:

void setup() {
pinMode(1,INPUT); // PWM signal
pinMode(13,OUTPUT); // lights
}
void loop() {
if (analogRead(1) > 512) { // PWM signal ranges between 0-1023
digitalWrite(13,HIGH); // switch on lights
} else {
digitalWrite(13,LOW); // switch off lights
}
}

The transmitter stick PWM range is probably closer to 250-750 but 512 will be somewhere in the middle. So anything higher and it’ll switch on pin 13.

Check the max mA on the Arduino output pin before linking to LED’s. Sometimes it’s best to go via a NPN mosfet if powering higher amps. Although another cheat is to switch multiple outputs on at the same time which will get you a few more mA, just don’t melt the Arduino! 🤣 🔥

Hope the above gives you a starting point. Just typed it out now! For something that latches and counts stick movements you’ll need to include variables. Let me know if you need an example for that too. I’m sure once you get into it, it’ll begin making more sense 👍

Stephen

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Some screenshots here of the arduino code and the programming software I made.

I've seen the vixen lights software before, but I don't think it works on a mac? Also, part the fun was to make my own sequencing software. It's all HTML5 based and works in the browser. Each block is a draggable div, you can select many or some in one go, copy/paste, change colours, fade in, fade out etc. These are then split into tracks and saved to the database, then exported as function calls off a 50ms timer in the arduino code.

It's an Arduino Mega, simply due to the programming space required and the fact it has more available timers in the chip. Some are used by the MP3 player, so it was important not to mix timers.

As for programming a whole house display... although I know I've the technical know-how... it's not something I'd want to do! 🤣

Stephen

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