Good ideas and suggestions!! The most common approach is as Griatch suggested, a simple "fill in the blank" Support Request Template. I moved the current SRT to the announcement section of the Gimp Help forum so it will always be the first thing a member sees when browsing that section.

There are many technical and security issues one would face in creating a template that automatically inserts a post into a phpBB forum. phpBB is designed in such a way as to make auto-posting a non-trivial venture, with permissions that must be checked, data validity checks, along with multiple databases that would need to be updated correctly. Also, once implemented, it would be somewhat of a hassle to maintain when new updates to phpBB came along.

Even the designers of phpBB chose not to auto-post their SRT. Their solution was to create a SRT that wasn't integrated with phpBB but instead, ran outside of phpBB. The user would still be responsible for registering, and copy & pasting the results of the SRT into a new thread in the forums.

Y'all can take a look at what they did here...
http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopi ... 6&t=543515

You can also follow the thread that discusses some of the reasons behind their approach...
http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopi ... &t=1455965

Of course, the phpBB support forum needs much more information than simply OS & Gimp versions so creating a large multi-question SRT makes sense, perhaps more so there than here.

i hope that add:
if was a error message please copy here

will not add too much complexity

Somehow i feel irritated when i read in a post that was a error message saying
" something about something else that didn't work "

Hopefully even no geeks may learn to copy and paste...

Thanks Tux.

After sleeping on it, a custom BBcode button in the posting/editing dialog which presents a "fill in the blank" template might be the solution. Similar to clicking a button to insert a link, a user could click a button to get a popup support template, fill in the blanks and insert the SRT into the post. They would still have to hit the submit button, as one normally does while in the posting/editing dialog.

Laying some code behind a custom button in the post/edit dialog is very doable and would have little impact on performance or future support. This board already contains major modification to the BBcode buttons so adding one more won't matter.

Sounds good.

My only fear is that if it is a template that can be accessed through any topic - it may get miss-used?
Is there a way to add it to just the Gimp Help editor or is that global?

BBcode buttons are global to all forums. There are no provisions in the ACP to have certain buttons appear only in selected forums. When adding the button, I'll look to see how messy it might be to do a check for a specific forum.

When I ran ASP forums as system/server admin, I coded MODS to display polls, forms, etc for specific forums. They were tailored to allow special input and could only be viewed when viewing a specific forum, so I know it's possible, at least, on Windows. Not entirely certain about PHP, but one would think it would be easier to do on Linux?

It's really not a matter of possible. Anything is possible. I was involved in writing the one of the first custom BBcode mods for phpBB2. It's just a matter of work -vs- benefit and choosing the best approach with minimal hand coded hacks. The more hacks, the more of a chance for conflicts during future mods and system updates. My philosophy is to keep things as vanilla as possible within the original open source code, as to avoid future pitfalls and extra time demands.

You just reminded me (how time flies and memories fade) of all the hair pulling every time there were forum upgrades, and the constant rehacking of older MODs. Gah! I get that. You're right, and sometimes the longer the time span is between upgrades, you tend to "forget" all the dependencies you coded into the original hacked MOD.

Edit: And all the database crashes/confusion when something is missed!

Good luck with the form, GnuTux.

Tux we could actually just try the form available to all the editors and see if it gets miss used.
Then implement something different if needed.
We do have 2 Global Mods and 1 very good Admin (Oregonian) besides yourself to keep things under control.

Yep, I've been there and I guess I'm going back again.


I decided to go with a forum hack. I ran across an old mod that did something similar and used it as a template for this hack.

Whenever a "New Topic" is posted in the GIMP Help forum, the user will be asked to complete a ticket requesting their relevant information. Just click on New Topic to check it out. The form can be enabled per forum via the ACP so we can enable it in other forums if needed.

it seems a excellent solution !!

I like it! I think it will help people understand what info will aid in getting answers they need.

Looks really cool Tux! Great job I am sure this will help us get much Clearer questions so that they can be answered Easier/

Perfect Tux!

Thanks again.

Thanks for the suggestion, PhotoComix. It's a good idea. Well worth the effort to implement.

@gnu tux

still i don't think relevant ask the "GIMP knowledge" level
while i would like see the exact error message displayed by gimp (if any)

So if you may get time i would suggest to remove
"GIMP knowledge"
but add at the end of the form
Copy here Gimp error message
(or upload screenshot)

I guess I just assumed they would put the error message in the post body but it's probably not wise to assume.

I kinda like the experience level tic but I can certainly add in a "GIMP Error Message:" dialog box.