It is a pleasure to announce that the Canadian Paper Money website is under new ownership and is now resuming operations! The new owners came to an agreement with Brent W.J. Mackie to purchase the website and it's content and assume all responsibility thereof moving forward.
Firstly, acknowledgement is due to Paul Wallis for building the website and to Brent W.J. Mackie for his tireless effort in keeping the site running all these years! The existence of the Canadian Paper Money website has helped introduce numerous aspiring collectors to the hobby has provided a platform for many lively discussions. It has given collectors the opportunity meet others who share their unusual passion and allowed buyers and sellers to connect directly without suffering the aggravation of using third party merchant sites.
Many people are undoubtedly curious about who will be running the site going forward. We believe the Canadian Paper Money website and its contents are the rightful property of the whole community which has made it what it is. The role of the new admin will be limited to developing and maintaining technical aspects of the site. We feel it would be contrary to the spirit of the community to use the the role of administrator to promote one's own personality or business. As such, the identities of administrators are being kept private.
What can be said is that the new admin have a vested interest in promoting the hobby and their personal interests are in line with those of the community. We wish to seamlessly carry on the work of Paul Wallis and Brent W.J. Mackie. The Canadian Paper Money site will continue to operate as a non-commercial venture with the purpose of promoting the interests of the community. Collectors, dealers and all those interested in Canadian Paper Money will be able to educate themselves, share their knowledge and conduct their business unimpeded.
With those formalities out of the way we can move onto more specific details...
* CPMF *
The entire site has been relaunched on a new dedicated server. To do so it was necessary to upgrade to a newer version of the forum software that is compatible with modern programming standards. We have attempted to recreate the previous theme of the forum as closely as possible to maintain the look and feel of the old forum. This is still a work in progress and many sections are still incomplete. Over the next few weeks we will be going over the different sections in detail to try to clean up the layout. We apologize for the inconvenience in the meantime. It was agreed that it would be better to deploy the site as-is than to further delay the launch.
* SNDB *
Some members are eager to access and contribute to the Serial Number Data Base (SNDB). Our next priority is to get this up and running. BWJM did a great job at writing the code for that site but this was done over 10 years ago and programming standards have evolved considerably since then. It will be necessary to rewrite much of the code to make it compatible with PHP7 and PDO DB queries.
* Wiki, Notes, etc *
Other sections of the site will be integrated into the new site in due course. The goal is for all sections to served through the forum (basically as custom forum extensions) so there will only be one login necessary and common features such as user profiles, stats, alerts, etc can be combined in one place.
Any recommendations, questions, bug reports and feature requests are more than welcome!
=== UPDATE Aug. 6, 2018 ===
* Attachments *
You can now post attachments directly to the forum! No more imageshack or other external hosting!
We have attempted to save local copies of any externally hosted images and have updated old posts to serve images directly from cdnpapermoney.com. Unfortunately many of these images have become dead over the years but we hope that by storing local copies we can prevent the forum from losing any more images in the future.
Any [img] tags will be converted to attachments for better reliability and security. Having externally hosted images causes a security warning in modern browsers and allows user information to be leaked to third parties. Therefore we would prefer to host all images locally from now on.
Note that guests can only see small thumbnails. Logging in gives you access to full size images. We did this to avoid any DDOS problems and to encourage greater forum participation!
We have also added some additional functionality to attachments. When posting attachments you are encouraged to click "preview" before posting your message to see a preview of your message including attached image files.
You can click on the attachment image to insert an "inline" attachment into the body of your message. You will see some code inserted into the message looking like {attach:......} where ...... is the attachment id. This allows you to display the attachment wherever you want inside the message.
Example:
Placing attachments inline also increases the size of the thumbnail displayed (for logged in users only) and hides extraneous information about the file (filename, size, downloads). We have chosen 600 x 600 px as the max size for inline thumbnails but this could be changed in the future based on screen size or other factors.
You can even quote someone else's inline attachment but it will be displayed at a smaller size to reduce clutter.
A substantial amount of code had to be rewritten to get this working properly so hopefully we didn't screw things up too badly. In the process of modifying the code we tried to address some of the issues pointed out by Rupiah. Attachments should now be shown in normal message view as well as in the "recent posts" and in the "topic summary" when replying to a topic.
Please don't feel shy to report any problems!
