I needed to update the compatibility information for the utility. While testing is not difficult, accessing the wide range of browser/OS combinations is. I decided that rather than trying to maintain a list myself I'd try something new and post compatibility information in a forum. In this way the users could post their own experiences so that broader compatibility information could be obtained. Also, in this way I could also post specific compatibility problems as related to a browser/OS combination plus any work-arounds that would address the problems.
While this could have been acheived with the older forum scripts, I decided that it would be a good time to update the scripts with modifications I've made since the IERI forum was initially released. Most of the updates are fairly minor.
- Previously a different set of scripts had to be written for each forum. Now, each forum is given an index which the scripts use to determine which database tables to access.
- The authentication of the forums has been better integrated with the utility's users table.
- Users now have a setting that will trigger a notification when a new post has been added (currently a universal setting).
I made a few modifications to the scripts as well to accommodate some special options that were requested for the activity level forums. Actually, the request was for the ability to add notes to the analysis. I made the decision that the forums would sufficiently address this need by adding the ability to record whether a post related to the activity analysis as a whole or to a specific sighting analysis. These do require some specialized code that target a specific forum, but I think this trade-off is worthwhile in this particular case.
