AuburnChris

I was afraid this would happen. I'm going to have to re-code the entire app from basically scratch to update it for the new version of iOS.

It's on my radar, but it's a ton of work and our coding team is one guy, so I can't make any promises right now.

Basically, I'm going to have to lock myself in a closet for a couple of weekends in a row and hide from Jen until it gets done.

Then I get to do the whole thing over again for the Android version.

7 minutes ago, Grumpy and Grandma said:

So if we move to Imgur we have to re configure each pic over to here individually.

For all your previous posts, yes, you'd have to edit the link to point to the new location.

I am fully aware, again, that this is a tedious and frustrating process that I fully expect nobody will bother to do. Sadly, most of those pictures will simply disappear into the ether.

4 minutes ago, Travisma said:

I have been using Imgur for quite a while.

There is a limit on the amount of photos you can store for free, and the biggest thing is trying to remember what link to use to post on FF.  They have about 6 different types.  You would think I would either remember it, or put a sticker on my laptop.

 

But it does work great.

Use the "BB Code" option.

5 minutes ago, Grumpy and Grandma said:

My question is why can't we post pics directly like I can on other forums? The only pics I store on PB(100 account) are the ones for here.

The $99 account is the only one you need to link.

We have a limited amount of storage here on the site, and most of it is consumed by our database that holds, well, everything that you see here on the site that isn't a picture. If we tried to host all the pictures, the amount our hosting provider would charge for that much storage would be... too much.

If you have a paid account with Photobucket already (which I'm guessing you do? I can't tell), then you can still embed images until December 31, 2018. At that point, they're going to try to shove you into their $400 plan.

Note also that "linking" and "third-party hosting" are different things. By their definitions, "Linking" to Photobucket means putting a link in your post that doesn't show the picture, but instead opens up a page on Photobucket in a new tab where the picture will appear, for example something like "click here to view the picture". "Third-party hosting" is when you embed the picture itself so that it appears in the body of your post, which is how most of the people who post pictures here from Photobucket do it. That's only allowed in their new $400 plan.

TL;DR: Photobucket is evil and stupid now, use Imgur instead.

So Photobucket, a site a lot of you use to host pictures here on the site, is currently committing corporate suicide by preventing people from using their service for exactly what they've been using it for since forever. To post pictures from Photobucket here on Fort Fiends, the fine folks idiots at Photobucket have decided that you need to pay them $400 American dollars a year for the privilege.

That's dumb. And it's going to break a lot of links here on Fort Fiends. I wish there was something that we could do about that, but there's really not, from our end. Everyone's posts that link to Photobucket are going to break, unless they pay, which I wholeheartedly do not recommend.

WHAT DO I DO?, I hear you ask. Here's what you can do:

1. Go download everything you can from your Photobucket account, while you still can. I'm hearing horror stories of people whose accounts are being locked for "violating your free Photobucket account's terms of service" for third-party linking. Once your account has been locked, you apparently can't get to your photos until you pay up, which again DO NOT GIVE THIS DUMB COMPANY YOUR MONEY.

2. USE IMGUR. Imgur is my image host of choice, because it was built for hosting images. That's what it does, and it doesn't charge its users to do it. They're at imgur.com, and I'd write up a whole thing on how to use it, but I don't really have the time at the moment. They're pretty easy to figure out, though. I'm confident that you can do it- you certainly can if you were linking from Photobucket before.

3. Once your previously-hosted-on-Photobucket pictures are now on Imgur, you'll have to manually edit your old, broken posts to point to the new ones. This is the part which will be tedious, and hard, and unfortunately nobody will do it.

I'm not going to put too fine a point on this: This sucks, and it sucks a lot. It's going to decimate our Trip Reports forum, which is very image-heavy. I am filled, at this moment, with righteous anger at the morons at Photobucket who thought any of this was a good idea. 

TL;DR: Photobucket is evil and stupid now, use Imgur instead.

TL;DR: Photobucket is evil and stupid now, use Imgur instead.

So Photobucket, a site a lot of you use to host pictures here on the site, is currently committing corporate suicide by preventing people from using their service for exactly what they've been using it for since forever. To post pictures from Photobucket here on Fort Fiends, the fine folks idiots at Photobucket have decided that you need to pay them $400 American dollars a year for the privilege.

That's dumb. And it's going to break a lot of links here on Fort Fiends. I wish there was something that we could do about that, but there's really not, from our end. Everyone's posts that link to Photobucket are going to break, unless they pay, which I wholeheartedly do not recommend.

WHAT DO I DO?, I hear you ask. Here's what you can do:

1. Go download everything you can from your Photobucket account, while you still can. I'm hearing horror stories of people whose accounts are being locked for "violating your free Photobucket account's terms of service" for third-party linking. Once your account has been locked, you apparently can't get to your photos until you pay up, which again DO NOT GIVE THIS DUMB COMPANY YOUR MONEY.

2. USE IMGUR. Imgur is my image host of choice, because it was built for hosting images. That's what it does, and it doesn't charge its users to do it. They're at imgur.com, and I'd write up a whole thing on how to use it, but I don't really have the time at the moment. They're pretty easy to figure out, though. I'm confident that you can do it- you certainly can if you were linking from Photobucket before.

3. Once your previously-hosted-on-Photobucket pictures are now on Imgur, you'll have to manually edit your old, broken posts to point to the new ones. This is the part which will be tedious, and hard, and unfortunately nobody will do it.

I'm not going to put too fine a point on this: This sucks, and it sucks a lot. It's going to decimate our Trip Reports forum, which is very image-heavy. I am filled, at this moment, with righteous anger at the morons at Photobucket who thought any of this was a good idea. 

TL;DR: Photobucket is evil and stupid now, use Imgur instead.

Our friend Ken asked me to delete his account. I have complied with his request. I think there's nothing else to see here (except for possibly some questionably-replicated pastries).

http://wdwnt.com/blog/2016/06/breaking-walt-disney-world-introducing-fuelrod-service-to-revolutionize-how-guests-charge-electronics/

Short version: Disney will sell you a $30 portable phone charger that you can replace with a new one when you use it up. Because you will use it up.

Long version: Buckle in, folks. this is a long one, and it's gonna get geeky up in here.

As an Actual Person Who Develops Apps And Stuff™, there's some things that you have to take into account when you're working on your app. One of them is the fact that, even after years of improvements in battery technology, there's still some best-practices type stuff that you need to take into account when you're developing your app if you don't want it to suck power like a vampire.

One of the biggest battery hogs on a phone is its GPS antenna. You've probably noticed that when you turn on Waze or Google Maps or whatever navigation app you use is that your phone does 2 things: first, it gets really hot, and second, your battery takes a nosedive. To keep a GPS connection, your phone has to keep track of not only the 2 or 3 cell towers it's within range of, but also up to 12 satellites in orbit around the earth. Powering up that GPS receiver so that it can hear space takes a lot of power, and it has to do it on a constant basis to keep your location updated.

Coincidentally, when you fire up your Disney Parks app, guess how it knows where you are in the park? That's right, GPS. When it's running, it's constantly updating what developers call your "fine location" via GPS so it knows exactly where you are. Oh, and it's also transmitting your location back to Disney as well, because Disney loves having information about where its guests are and how they move through the park. Which is fine, you know. That's a treasure trove of data for Disney, and I'm sure they're using every bit of it to map out traffic flow and build models of guest behavior.

But all that data transmission and GPS tracking comes at a cost: your phone's battery. Which is a problem, really- if your phone is dead, Disney's no longer getting all that sweet, sweet data it needs. So they've got a solution for you! Just buy this FuelRod for thirty American dollars, and you can keep your phone on all day while you're in the parks. If the FuelRod dies, you just give it back to them and they'll give you a fresh one.

Or, they could do what every platform (Microsoft, Google, and Apple) tell them to do and reduce their app's dependence on a constant stream of fine location data, so that their users' phones have a chance to occasionally power down and save battery life.

So of course, Disney is going to rewrite their apps to be less power-hungry in a future update and HAHAHAHA what am I saying, of COURSE Disney is going to turn this problem into a profit opportunity what was I thinking?

tl;dr: Disney created a problem with their app that causes people who use it to run through phone battery like it's on sale, then solved said problem by selling external phone batteries to people at ludicrous markups instead of reducing their app's power-hungry nature.

Are we a bit hung up on this "phantom campers" thing, maybe? Are there any real numbers telling us how many times someone actually makes a reservation at the Fort and then doesn't use their campsite, staying somewhere else off-property? How is that even economical?

I wonder if this "phantom camper" thing isn't just anecdotal, with people who see a vacant campsite on a busy week assuming that it's a "phantom campsite" and not just one that's vacant for a different, logical reason?

I'm not trying to deny that phantom campers exist, I'm just wondering if it's not as big a problem as we're making it here. (Also, I'm wondering very hard why we're trying to solve it, because there's no way we're going to do that.)

Disney's solution to "phantom campers" because Fort sites are cheaper than on-property hotel rooms is going to be making Fort sites not be a bargain compared to on-property hotel rooms. Are you guys telling me you can't see that coming a mile off? If you really want them to do that, please continue to complain about phantom campers. They will raise Fort rates until phantom camping is no longer a problem.

Of course, then you may feel free to complain to them that the sites are too expensive, but they will look at their bottom line and think to themselves, "Nope, we like money."

Having said that, there are some good points in this thread, cart safety foremost among them, that we all would like Disney to address. However.

Please do not start a letter-writing campaign and put Fort Fiends name to it.

While it's true that the squeaky wheel gets the grease, sometimes the squeaky wheel gets replaced. I'm not interested in anything that might cause Disney's relationship with us to escalate to anything beyond "bemused interest," thank you very much.

If you want to write a letter to Disney about something, go for it! Good job, you! But Jen and I, as benevolent dictators around here, would like to keep "Start a letter-writing campaign to Fort management" off the table until it's really, absolutely, necessary. I just don't see the burning issue in front of us that requires it right now.

Thread reopened. Please try to keep things civil around here, won't you? Thank you.

I don't like the tone that this thread is taking, on both sides. I'm locking this thread for a day or so to let people cool off, and if people can't be civil, I'm going to move it to the debate thread so you can yell at each other all you want to about it. There's an interesting discussion to be had here, but it's been lost in everyone trying to score rhetorical points by sniping at one another.

I especially do not like it when you make up a name for the group of people who disagree with you. That way leads to community fracturing, and I will not have it.

It is perfectly OK for people to think that the Fort is, overall, a pretty great campsite (because it is!), and it's also OK for people to think that Disney has not managed it well in the past, present, and future (because they haven't!). People who hold these views are not enemies and, I believe, should stop arguing with one another.

I swear I feel like Dad stopping the car sometimes...

6 hours ago, Tri-Circle-D said:

Who are you, and why are you posting under a Fairy name?  I've never seen that before on this site, and, frankly, I don't like it.

I DO NOT LIKE IT, EITHER. THAT IS NOT WHAT THE FAIRY ACCOUNTS ARE FOR.

I don't like having to use Mod Voice, and I don't do it often. But to emphasize an important point before the conspiracy theories start:

The Tag Fairy accounts (there are a few - more than one and less than 5) exist so that a few people that aren't Jen and I can do the following things:

1. Change people's tags (the text below your avatar).
2. Nothing else.

The Tag Fairies do not have moderator status, nor are they voices of authority- either on the site, or on the Fort. Why have separate accounts? So they can log in as the Fairy account to change a user's tag without someone being able to play Internet Detective with the "Who's online" list and figure out who changed their tag.

Consider this a public rebuke of Snarky Fairy for the violation of PWF (Posting While Fairy), and I will get with him or her privately to make sure it does not happen again, as well.

It's all still there, the site just rearranges itself based on your screen size. It's all hidden under the "hamburger" menu in the top right of the page in portrait mode. In landscape, there's room enough to display it as you see it in desktop mode.

It's the magic™ of responsive web design! <insert glitter, but not regular glitter, more geeky than that>

What are you trying to figure out about the mobile view? There's no separate "mobile skin" like there was before, you see the same page on mobile as you do on a desktop computer or a tablet. It's called "responsive design" in geek circles, and it means that the page adapts to the width of the screen it's on. You have all the features of the regular site on a phone or tablet.

You can actually see it working if you're on a desktop/laptop computer. Just scale the width of your browser down to make it thinner than it is tall and you'll see the site respond by moving things around.

14 hours ago, keith_h said:

I see Info now. There is a problem though. When I pick the Info tab the tab turns white and I get the page but as soon as it is done loading the tab returns to purple and the Browse tab goes to white. Definitely makes it confusing as to what tab is really active.

After looking a bit further the tab returns to the tab you were on before selecting Info.  Take that back.

This is because the "Info" tab is secretly a link to the Browse -> Articles tab.

15 hours ago, AuburnJen said:

Also, SuperGeek aka AuburnChris will be changing (because Mo and I said he has to) the Pages tab back to Info shortly.  

 

As Buford T. Justice so eloquently put it "One s##t at a time Junior!"

I don't know what you're talking about. The Info tab has always been the Info tab. 

Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.

23 minutes ago, Katman1356...Jason said:

Yes going forward what ever you had listed last as your display name will be the one needed to login now. 

 

Of course! It's so simple and easy to understand!

(please note the sarcasm in the above sentence. It is drenched in sarcasm.)

So, some definitions:

USER NAME: What you logged in with before The Great Upgradening Of 2016

DISPLAY NAME: The name attached to your posts above your avatar- for all intents and purposes, your "public" name.

Before The Great Upgradening, you could have a USER NAME of, let's say, FortFiend71. But you had changed your DISPLAY NAME to be, for sake of argument, FortFiend....Larry.

When you went to log in, you'd log in as:

Username: FortFiend71
Password: cupcakes

After The Great Upgradening, that won't work. You'll have to log in with:

Username: FortFiend....Larry
Password: cupcakes

Make sense now? I hope so.

We had a pretty major update to the site today. While we're still getting everything settled, all the articles, posts, and PMs from before are still here- they might have just moved around a bit. Give us a bit of time to get everything back where you'd like it to be.

IF YOU CAN'T LOG IN:
As part of the update, we had to consolidate login names and display names. If you were used to logging in using one name and seeing your posts under a different name, then you may find it difficult to log in. For a variety of security-related reasons, I chose to keep the display names. (Some of you were logging in with your e-mail address, which is fine, but I don't feel right putting your e-mail address out there in public view where it can be harvested by spammers- which is what would have happened if I had kept login names.) If you can't log in,
HERE'S WHAT TO DO:

1. Use your former display name to log in with.
2. Your password hasn't changed.
3. If you can't remember your old display name or if it's not working, shoot me an e-mail at cwmajors at gmail dot com with as much of it as you can remember and I'll get you working again.

Before the day goes any farther, I just want to say that I do not hold a high opinion of the athletics teams from the University of Alabama, and would be well pleased if they won no more athletic contests between now and the heat death of the universe.

Thank you.

I think I will just go make one for myself, thanks.

could you go a bit west to avoid atlanta and take i65 down to montgomery and the 231 down to i10?

then there is no atlanta

just wondering

and welcome to our insanity

As noted, even those Premium sites required a longer stay. And if you're not aware yet, Disney is no longer allowing you to make a longer reservation to get availability and then trim that reservation down to just the days you want- if those days aren't shown as available, then you won't be able to change your reservation, even though you already have a reservation containing those days.

Let's review, shall we?

1. OP had a mistakenly-canceled reservation for 5/21-5/24, can't re-book it, wants to share a site with someone.

2. Resident TA's confirm there's no availability for those dates.

3. TCD finds sites available, but for a wider range of dates- 5/20-6/3, wonders what OP's problem is.

(Note: We now know Disney is not allowing reservation-trimming anymore, so that's not a solution either.)

4. ? ? ?

5. Internet Drama!

Let's all remember that internet forums are not optimized for perfect communication. People can and do word things awkwardly, and other people can and do misunderstand them. From what I can tell, I don't think anyone here had any sort of bad intent- the OP was not a troll, and everyone seems to have been trying to help in their own way.

To the OP: If you received any negative or abusive PM's, please use the report function to let us know about them.

To everyone else: Be nice to each other. It's like, the one rule that we have.

Rule 1 of the Internet: If there is a thing, people will argue about it.  :protip:

The hat was put there in the first place as a giant kludge to prevent lawsuits from the management of Graumann's Chinese Theater when the original theater was sold and the contract for Disney to be able to use the image of the theater in marketing material lapsed.

Rumors are that they will redo the entrance to the Great Movie Ride to match a different classic Hollywood theater (the Cathay Circle? I might not have that right), which they do have the proper rights for.