The photo browsing still needs work

In a previous message I said,

When you click on the left-hand thumbnail, you get an enlarged view of the picture over the message text. The picture is smaller (I'll discuss that in a bit), but the text is now much more readable than before. Your choices are "Back to post" on the left or "Next photo" on the right. So far, so good. Click "Next photo" and you are now looking at the second photo with choices "Previous photo" on the left and "Next photo" on the right. So far, so good. Click "Next photo" and you are now looking at the third photo, and this is where the bug appears.

It now says "Previous photo" on the left and "Next photo" on the right. But since there is no next photo, it should say "Back to post" on the right. When you click on the "Next photo" link, you go to a no-picture page with just the message text, with "Previous photo" on the left and "Next photo" on the right. Clicking on the "Next photo" link now gets you nowhere, except a rebuild of this same page. To get "Back to post" you are obligated to keep clicking "Previous photo" laboriously until you get back to the starting point, where you have a "Back to post" link. That extra work is not good.

To which, you replied:

Apparently that problem has not been entirely fixed. If I am reading a message that has two or three attached pictures, it still prompts "Next photo" on the last picture, and leads you into a never ending sequence of message-without-photo displays.

In the case where there are four photos, the behavior is inconsistent. I saw one example in the first post of a thread that had four attached pictures when the prompt at the fourth said "Back to post", as it should. In another example down in a thread, the prompt at the fourth picture said "Next photo".

In the case when there are five pictures, selecting "Next photo" on the fifth picture does bring you back to the first photo, with the option of selecting "Back to post", and that is fine.

And when there is only one picture, there is no "Next photo" prompt, which is at it should be.

So the photo browsing mechanism is not quite fully baked yet.

ZM

I have experienced similar issues at times. The main thing I've noticed is that it doesn't seem to be consistent from one thread to the next.

Hi, ViolaAnn,

"The main thing I've noticed is that it doesn't seem to be consistent from one thread to the next."

That may well be true, and if it is, then there is a fundamental defect in the forum's software design. The forum HTML, CSS, and such should be based on master templates and the structure of everything should be derived as an instance from those master templates. Fixing a problem or a bug should entail fixing a master template, which would then automatically globally fix that problem everywhere.

If the behavior is different from one thread to another or from one forum to another, as is apparently the case, then apparently this website is depending on manual programming for each web page, and for a large web presence, like any website that hosts forums for example, that would be a maintenance nightmare.

And Dave's Garden has been experiencing a maintenance nightmare for the last several weeks of this site upgrade. It should be evident to "the powers that be" that their current methodology is flawed, and that they should acquire new software tools for maintaining Dave's Garden. One such candidate might be Adobe's Dreamweaver.

ZM