FAQs are kind of gone 1

[lexpatrie]

Looks like a large number of the FAQs I created are gone with the new site/forum backend. I won't be rebuilding them.

Cheers.

I'll probably drop off activity here, if not cease, too. Considering. It's been fun, though. I was really intending that to be something of use to more than just me, but also useful to me, and now it's gone. Maybe I can salvage them from the internet archive, when that comes back up, but that was a lot of effort (again primarily for my own benefit but "out there" for others to refer to), and yeah. Discouraged.

Regards,
Brian

 

[SinStrucEng]

Hi @lexpatrie , perhaps try posting about this on the "New Forum Platform" forum? It's at the top of the list. They've been replying and helping out on some of the other threads and maybe they can help you (us) too! Would hate to see you go.

 

[ChorasDen]

Hi Lex, sorry to hear that, I understand the sentiment. Lucky for us, EngTips has been updated so that every link and interface is tracked through AWS, to watch all your moves on this website and other sites, to better serve ads, isn't the future great?

 

[Jon]

Hi Lex, sorry to hear that, I understand the sentiment. Lucky for us, EngTips has been updated so that every link and interface is tracked through AWS interface, to watch all your moves on this website and other sites, to better serve ads, isn't the future great?

View attachment 29

Hi

We don't track link clicks on the site. Links that are clicked from email are recorded as clicked.

Jon

​

​

 

[Jon]

Looks like a large number of the FAQs I created are gone with the new site/forum backend. I won't be rebuilding them.

Cheers.

I'll probably drop off activity here, if not cease, too. Considering. It's been fun, though. I was really intending that to be something of use to more than just me, but also useful to me, and now it's gone. Maybe I can salvage them from the internet archive, when that comes back up, but that was a lot of effort (again primarily for my own benefit but "out there" for others to refer to), and yeah. Discouraged.

Regards,
Brian

HI,

We're looking at the FAQ issue. We have a backup of everything so once we sort out what is happening they will be restored.

Jon

 

[Envelope3]

Is one reason I don't frequent post forums anymore. Started questioning OCD tendencies, and ultimately its not worth it. If it bothers that much, it probably is worth not devoting so much effort.

 

[KootK]

Looks like a large number of the FAQs I created are gone with the new site/forum backend. I won't be rebuilding them.

For what it's worth, I valued what you were doing with the FAQs. How many times does one have to explain the difference between a fixed and a pinned connection after all?? At least quarterly it seems. The tension only bracing was a good fit for FAQ treatment.

 

[EngDM]

The new forum update also set the entire structural engineering discussion forum as "watched". Was great getting a floor of emails before turning that off...

 

[Jon]

Looks like a large number of the FAQs I created are gone with the new site/forum backend. I won't be rebuilding them.

Cheers.

I'll probably drop off activity here, if not cease, too. Considering. It's been fun, though. I was really intending that to be something of use to more than just me, but also useful to me, and now it's gone. Maybe I can salvage them from the internet archive, when that comes back up, but that was a lot of effort (again primarily for my own benefit but "out there" for others to refer to), and yeah. Discouraged.

Regards,
Brian

HI, These have been restored. There's a few issues with some of the markup elements that are working to correct as well.

Jon

 

[lexpatrie]

Cheers Jon!

Any chance we can get this thread unlocked?

Lateral system for row houses - Structural engineering general discussion

I am not very familiar with residential buildings and wood construction (only been working in this area for 3 years, so forgive me if the answer is so obvious). This is what I have done for a single-family row house rear and one-story addition (20'x50'). For the short side, there is not really...

www.eng-tips.com

And if we are doing wish list items, once the FAQs are all restored, if we can get some special consideration regarding deleting these two that would be fantastic..

I'm a youn run of 1' and rise of 8". It is advisable to used three cantilever beam with a dimension of 8"x8"x8' in which 1'-6" of

www.eng-tips.com

And

Can I overcome this O/S#52 error in Etabs

www.eng-tips.com

Neither of these can be responded to (they are FAQs with somebody long inactive asking a question), and one belongs in a software forum, if nothing else.

Thanks everyone else for the comments especially KootK, even the "maybe quit" comments i appreciated as they are supportive in their own way, saying it's okay to dial back or quit. I hear that OCD comment too. Got twitchy this am without the site to meander through.

As a side note, and to continue to indulge my penchant for editing posts ad infinitum, there's a fair degree of rework ability to the FAQ, things can be moved about so the board categories can be shuffled about and reorganized and of course additional entries can be created, and I'm a "top level" thinker so I try to keep stuff all on the main pile (unlike, say, the resources where there's a collection of links inside the FAQ) anyway, feedback is appreciated and you can also use feedback on existing ones to message me on new ideas or things I've missed (or perhaps worded poorly or outright gotten wrong).

Just note that at least historical historically it was not possible to add images. One can circumvent that via linking to a post but it won't show an image inline. And posts eventualy get locked so they cant be revised indefinitely like a FAQ.That may perhaps change with the new site and backend.

 

[lexpatrie]

As a side note, those two stray FAQs that were just questions have been deleted.

Yay. Thanks, Jon!

 

[lexpatrie]

Alright, another "pay attention to me" style post -

As a favor, I'm fairly sure a good number of the AISC FAQs are gone, and I don't have them memorized, although my browser seems to remember some of the post titles *yay firefox*, but, to get to my point:

a) anybody remember any of the missing ones, I just added the 1997 HSS thickness change back into the FAQ, it may show up soon, it seems like when you edit an FAQ it goes dark for a bit then shows up. I thought there were around a hundred.

b) sorting by year is no longer working, which really goofs up the overall format, the idea was to list general topics and the year, with detail inside the FAQ.

c) the leading space hack that kept the generic web site references at the top is defunct. I can maybe address that with categories, which seems to be a new thing.

d) if anybody comes across my little furtive "there's an FAQ" on the subject, if you could PLEASE click on it to see if it's actually till there, that would be groovy. (this is really what I'm after, if you find missing FAQ entries I'm referring to, they are probably mine and I can at least try to recreate them).

e) to prevent this from happening again, I'm going to start off-boarding the FAQs. I won't be deleting them, but I'll be making some kind of backup. If anybody wants to host those, do please let me know. The FAQs can't do images, so they are hamstrung quite a bit on that as they can only be wall of text.

f) if anybody notices formatting errors, please use feedback and I'll try to look. Some of the fancier formatting (lists) broke in the conversion to the new forum, I've reported the issue to the "New forum" website but the admin folks appear to have moved on and I've not seen any replies in the last week. Or you can always cross-talk me in a normal thread and mention which FAQ broke. Structure magazine links appear to be going bad....... we lost Gjinolli and I haven't looked at the others.

Feel free to suggest an FAQ inline in various discussions if you feel they are frequent-enough fliers. I've expanded a few FAQs from various threads, if there's interesting articles, but I don't intend to use the FAQs to contain an index of "last time this came up".

Questions on Cantilevers seem to be the Platinum frequent flier on this forum. And I think I lost FAQs on that subject (history of steel beam design, some Cb articles, Nethercot and Steelwise)...

 

[Denial]

I put just one FAQ up on the old site, quite a few years ago. It was basically a wad of Excel VBA code to ensure that an "X Y (scatter)" chart would have equal X and Y scales, which enabled Excel's charting capabilities to be used to produce undistorted shapes on spreadsheet pages. The code came originally from that legend Jon Peltier, and was given minor changes by eng-tippers Panars, ElectricPete and me (and perhaps a few others). I will happily resubmit it once a new FAQ equivalent is established.

 

[lexpatrie]

I've been wondering when you'd wander back over here.....

That 1:1 scale issue with Excel is something I'm fighting with, so let us all know when it happens.

We also seem to have lost subscript and superscript functions so some of my posts look awful now.

 

[Denial]

I suspect that at this stage the simplest and quickest way for you to obtain the scale-equalising VBA code is for you to extract it from one of the downloadable spreadsheets on my website.
» Go to, for example, https://rmniall.com/downloads/software-downloads/#ESOEF
» Download the ESOEF spreadsheet.
» Open it, then turn off the protection (so you can access the VBA).
» Within the spreadsheet, open the VBA editor. (Shortcut to do this is Alt-F11.)
» Open the VBA module called "SlabEdgeModule".
» Inside that module, locate the subroutine called "GiveActivePlotEqualScales".
» Grab the VBA code for that subroutine.
» (I believe that the subroutine's comment lines adequately explain how to use it.)
Good luck.

 

[lexpatrie]

Uh not for the casual user is that. I thought there'd just be a command that could be typed into the immediate window to "fix" the chart once,

 

[Denial]

Agreed, LP. Even more ideally, Excel's chart-defining mechanism would include a switch allowing a spreadsheet's author to enforce equal scales. (I use Excel-2010 — maybe later versions do have such a feature.)

 

[lexpatrie]

I use the same version. I might have found something a touch more streamlined fron a 2012 YouTube video...