Was a little worried when I could not find our butterfly FAQ but it just takes a couple more clicks and a little hunting to get to it.

Garden Web butterfly FAQ

Also appears that are posts are being actively monitored. Somebody put this topic in "Advice" instead of "Butterfly Garden" when I first posted. I very rarely strayed outside of Butterfly Garden on Garden Web. Guess I'll have to stay more "On Topic" so my posts don't get shoved to places I don't frequent.

I sorted the topics by "Popular." Found that one of Sherry's luna moth threads was the only thread here to hit the 150 post max that Garden Web had. I also see that the 150 post limit does not appear to exist anymore.

Being able to sort by "Popular" also makes it easy to find great threads like Angie's thread on raising ZST's.

I got a little panicked when I remembered that I have a bunch of my favorite threads bookmarked. Right now, the bookmarks still bring up the info I want.

I was able to massage my profile to have my name display in an acceptable way. I'd even rate it an improvement but I'm guessing I've lost the ability to search for posts by looking for my old user name. Houzz shows me threads I started going back to 2007 (the total # seems low) but comment history is very limited.

KC Clark...can you share where some of these features are??

I circled the drop down box that changes how the "discussions" are sorted for you. I also circled the link for the FAQs. Currently, the FAQ page does not sort properly so you have to hunt for "Butterfly Garden."

Not liking my first post of a picture on Houzz. Size really got reduced and I can find no way of seeing it in something closer to its original size. Pictures woolly posted today seem unaffected. Guess I'll have to experiment.

Blinded sphinx I caught last year.

Same moth but a picture I did not crop.

That second picture started out a lot bigger than the first but got shrunk to the point it is shorter than the first. Woolly's second picture of today displays much larger than all of mine. From examining the specs on my pics and woolly's, it appears the width is more of a limiting factor, topping out at 500 pixels.

Just realized that the location/zone info I saw for users on Garden Web is no longer part of the posts unless you specifically modify your display name. Really need folks to post their location with their questions now.

Could not find info on picture size. Did find out we are allowed 4 pics per post. Also found this FAQ aimed at us x-Garden Web folks.

Help for GardenWeb Users

Imperial from last year to test vertical length allowed.

So I have to add zone/location info to my username now? Wouldn't I have to re-register in order to do that, or is there an easier way?

The FAQs have been stripped of all html tags, images, and apparently there is a word count limit to any topic there, so the FAQs are no longer useful, I don't have the time to fix them.

Alex, I just edited my profile. In the "last name" box, I put my zone info after my last name. My guess is you could put "alex928" in the first name box and your zone info in the last name.

Larry, I had not looked at the FAQs until you said something. What a loss. I referred to the hostplant lists many times a year. I've been there at least twice this year. I've been a part of many system conversions and I've seen only one where the conversion was a blessing and that was because the new owners spent the time/$ to rescue some data that had been lost years before but still existed on some backups.

Bummer about the FAQs. I referred to those a few times when I had the caterpillars last summer (one of which is still pupating). Hopefully there is a way to improvise somehow.

I guess I'll have to try to figure out how to edit my profile. I'm still trying to get used to all this. I do like how the posts go a lot further back than they used to though.

We can still get to some of the old FAQ pages in Google's cache until Google does its next sweep. This is a link for the butterfly hostplant page.

What host plants are grown to feed caterpillars?

I could not bring up the cache of the members pictures mural FAQ.

Hi Guys,

The FAQ pages from GardenWeb were imported with the forum content. You can find them if you go to the main gardenweb.com page and look on the left side of the page for links to navigate to the different forums.

Or you can savethis link. :)

@Emily,

If you take a look at the FAQ "Butterfly Common Name to Scientific Name Look-Up List" or "The Member Mural: Photos of some members," you'll see how utterly worthless some of the imported content is.

Saw some other Garden Web users complaining and confirmed that long single posts on any forum, not just the FAQ, got chopped. I confirmed by looking at one of Ladobe's threads I had bookmarked.

Papering 101

Just found out that this place has a word limit on new posts too. Worst part is is there is no warning. Unless you notice that your whole post isn't there, you have no clue it happened. Plus you better remember what you typed because it is gone.

Another "plus" to Houzz ;(

I don't think we can contact each other off forum anymore unless both parties are "following" each other. Then you can private message. At least that is the way I read it.

I sent a feedback e-mail to the site since they do seem to be looking at them. I asked about the html content in posts, since they seem to not be displaying any html formatting or link tags that the poster used. It really does ruin a lot of posts. I checked some of my old posts and the image tags to display images on external photo hosting sites still work, but the links to view them larger on the host site are not working. One link I had to a video on Picasa is gone too. I hadn't even noticed that the long posts have been truncated!

I can understand their desire to not have a bunch of links directing people offsite or embedding potentially harmful code via html in the posts. But, many other forums still allow that versatility and have safety checks in place for harmful or undesirable content.

They also don't have any access to our trade pages yet at the height of seed swap season. I will be disappointed if my formatting with html tables on them has been reduced to a jumble of unreadable text.

I was already a member of Houzz via my home business prior to the forum changeover, and the new forum format is fine, but the FAQ content is a shambles, the list contents were alphabetically sorted, re-numbered, and truncated, did not fit the conversion algorithm. I have all the original text content, but it looks like the current FAQs are archived and not editable. If I find a way to delete the current ones and upload plain text to a new one, I may do that.

For some of the truncated FAQ topics, I got the missing info from Google's cache and added it via comments. In the comments, I explained what I was doing. My explanations have been deleted. Not really obvious now that the comments are part of the original FAQ post.

My hope is that the posts haven't actually been cut, and it is just a matter of their current design not being sized to display the full length. That is the easiest fix. One other possibility is that they moved the posts into another database and the posts were actually truncated in the process. In that case it would take more work to fix the problem, but not be too hard if they still have the originals. It is very unlikely that they totally hosed it up and lost the content forever...that would be a major screw-up! :) So I wouldn't worry about trying to fix the posts ourselves yet. I'm sure plenty of people have e-mailed them and they are aware of the problem, but have bigger fish to fry at the moment. They are probably most concerned about getting all the users moved over here and able to login so they don't lose users.

On their 2/11 update, Houzz said they "Increased the maximum length for posts and comments." So far, I have not seen that increase affect the old posts that got truncated. I "fixed" the posts that were important to me because if I wait, the Google cache where I'm pulling the info from could disappear. I do hope they fix the truncated posts someday because without the fix, a lot of info will be lost.

I'm thinking that the increased length they are referring to is for new posts. That is a good idea to save a copy of the Google cached pages since it may get overwritten soon. You may want to hold off on taking the time to add the info to the posts though. I would hate to see you go to the trouble of doing all that work and then have the original posts suddenly fixed. If they suddenly do fix it you may not be able to go back and delete the posts you added back in either. I think I read that there is a one week limit on editing or deleting comments and only like an hour limit on the original post. I don't think they were real well prepared for the transition and who knows how many people are actually working on fixing all the issues that have popped up in the last week.

On Feb. 10th, I commented how we could no longer contact each other unless both parties were "following" each other. In Houzz's Feb. 19th update, there is a new setting in our profile where that can be changed.

A way to contact other Houzz members?

Some changes have happened in our FAQ. Pics now exist in the membership mural. The Butterfly House page looks good. I checked a couple others that were bad and they are still bad.

Not sure about the increased length referring only to new posts. Al Tapla at container gardening seems to have been able to get his entire VERY LONG post reinstated in full. I dont know - perhaps he typed it all out...but he might be worth questioning bc it was an old post.. (beginning from a thread he started 10 years ago - in 2005!).

Mural is back but labeling is gibberish, no way to tell who is who.

Maybe the only long posts that have been fixed are ones that someone contacted them about specifically? After I saw this I checked two of mine that were cut-off that I had used as examples in a feedback e-mail I sent them. They were just fixed today. Then, I checked another older one of mine of the same length and it was still cut-off. I saw that the camera settings posts have just been fixed now too. If KC had e-mailed them those links, maybe that is why they were fixed.

Hopefully there are plans to fix all the truncated posts in the works, and they aren't just doing them on a case by case basis as complaints come in. If they moved content over to a different database and data was truncated that way, there should be a log file indicating exactly which entries were affected.

I guess we'll have to wait and see what they do. It is too bad they won't just post a list of known issues and changes they are already working on, instead of just what things they have already done. It would lessen the plethora of comments on every forum from irritated users trying to figure out what is exactly going on.

It appears that the time window has closed on retrieving old posts from Google cache. If you find a truncated post that you want restored, ask Houzz to fix it.

Houzz Support>Submit a request

Hi All, We are definitely still working on it. Migrating such a large amount of content can be tricky, and we are still ironing out some details, but we are working at it! :)

One thing I like about the Houzz setup is that the forum page loads and renders quickly. The iVillage pages took forever to completely load, some never did quit loading with all the ads and sub-ads. Many times I hit the red-x to stop the loading.