Nice to see the attention to the forums! More modern look, very clean.
Iʼm now going to temporarily remove my “budding seducer” cap and don my “beta tester from Hell” cap. XD
1. BUG: Most Existing Reports Not Prefixed
It seems like the import script made some kind of attempt to extract the prefixes from the titles of the existing field reports, but failed badly. The odd one it has prefixed, but most it has not.
As well as looking a bit messy, this interferes with the search functionality.
The bulk of the reports it
hasnʼt prefixed
do follow the usual title convention of the two letter code, colon, space, and title. It
should be quite easy for a script to fix these.
2. MAJORLY USEFUL FEATURE: Minimum Rank to See Your Photo
I propose a feature that would be quite useful for those wanting to get feedback on photos but a little worried about putting their face out there: make it possible for a poster to choose, for a given post, a minimum rank required to view the images in the post. (This should be selectable per‑post, not per‑user, since the same user may want to post other images that are not sensitive.) A user browsing the forum who doesnʼt have that rank would be able to read the post but not see the images.
Obviously, setting the required rank
too high might preclude getting much advice, but itʼs up to the poster to decide what compromise they are comfortable with.
Myself, I have pics I would really like to get feedback on, but I wouldnʼt want to post them unless I could set a minimum of the new rank 3. If I canʼt post them, I instead end up having to explain them in excruciating detail Iʼm afraid nobody will read — a picture truly does tell 1000 words!
3. MINOR RETROGRESSION: Inflexible Font Sizes
Probably not worth fixing, but for completeness:
In the
[size= n ] BBcode tag, the meaning of
n has changed from a percentage to a number between 1 and 7. This makes it impossible to manually encode other sizes, which was occasionally useful. It also makes the interpretation of
n quite arbitrary, which is bad from a software design perspective and could complicate future software migrations.
One particular example where this actually screwed up a post is
this Field Report of mine from a while back. In the large “ramble” paragraph near the top, I had used BBcode to
gradually decrease the font size from normal to almost illegible, and this was a quite intentional allusion to the Star Wars opening text that rolls off into oblivion. In the new board, the effect was totally ruined. Well, I suppose thatʼs what I get for using features in unintended ways. XD
Iʼve found I can get a reasonably similar effect by combining font size and colour changes, at least assuming the post background colour is always white. There are no replies on that post so maybe I should just repost a fixed version and then have Franco delete the original and change the new oneʼs date to the original date... is it possible to change the date on a thread?
4. BUG: Poor Font Size Migration
The migration did a poor job of converting from font size percentages to the new preset sizes.
For instance,
[size=120] should have traslated to
[size=5], since normal text is 15px, and 120% of that is exactly 18px, which is the next preset size up. But instead, it got translated to
[size=4], which is the
same size as normal paragraph text. Likewise,
[size=150] shouldʼve translated to
[size=6] but was instead set to
[size=5].
Iʼve got about 60 posts affected by this; some now look like an endless wall of paragraphs because the section titles blend in with the rest of the text. And I know Iʼm not the only user who was using font sizes. Well, maybe me and ZacAdam... ;P
The
ideal solution would be to mass delete the old posts, migrate the posts from the last week to percentages and change the board to use percentages, then re-migrate the old posts, and this time, they wouldnʼt need any adjustments to their size tags, so itʼd be guaranteed theyʼd be correct. But thatʼs a fair bit of work to rescue the formatting of some minority of posts.
5. ISSUE: Non-Breaking Space No Longer Honored
I often insert the Unicode character U+00A0 ‘NO‑BREAK SPACE’ instead of a regular space in places where the typesetting would become messy or a phrase would not read as clearly if the browser happened to wrap to the next line at that particular space.
This used to work with the boardʼs old sofware, but it seems to be broken now. Web browsers understand this character by themselves (I just confirmed in Firefox, Vivaldi, Opera, and IE), so in order for this to have broken, there must be some code somewhere that is intentionally filtering it out and switching it to a normal space. I strongly suggest it should not do that.
Iʼve further determined that itʼs being done somewhere in the code that
accepts a post, not the code that
shows it. I know because I just checked one of my old posts, which would have been inserted directly into the database through some kind of import script, therefore bypassing the “accept post” code, and the non‑breaking spaces are fine in it.
That post is
here; in the line reading, “Well, I go nuts for South Sudanese chicks”, there is a non‑breaking space between “South” and “Sudanese”. If you resize your browser window so that “Sudanese” is at the very end of a line, you can see this in action by trying to split “South” and “Sudanese” by further reducing the windowʼs width. They wonʼt break up no matter what you do; the pair of words will move to the next line together. This was by design; I wanted to emphasize that I was referring to a country whose name is South Sudan, not a region of the country named Sudan.
I find itʼs pretty common to run into situations in English where depending on the cadence of the speech, it could be taken different ways, and I tend to use non‑breaking spaces to avoid the reader being more likely to imagine the wrong cadence, making the sentence less clear. Thus I use these all over the place! lol
6. ISSUE: Chat Notifications
I second that having these display at the bottom of topic pages is annoying.
7. FEATURE: The Smilies Never Laugh
Since there are graphical smilies, itʼs a wonder thereʼs no XD or something like that... eyes closed laughing / LMAO / ROFL type thing.
“Whyyyyyy soooooo...
serious?” (LMAO, sorry, just had to.)
8. USE CASES: Edit Time Wíndow
While Iʼm not specifically opposed to increasing the edit time window, I do have to caution those who rely on it heavily, that most people are only gonna read your post once. That means that if you edit after posting, the fraction of people who will have read only the unedited version increases with the length of time before you make the edit. I think thatʼs part of the rationale of a time limit.
A better solution is to proofread your posts more carefully. As with anything I publish, I normally donʼt make a post to the forum without a really careful proofread. (The odd time I might get a little sloppier if Iʼm facing an “oh my God this girl just texted me XYZ, how should I respond” type situation, but not usually.) Basically, I wonʼt publish anything without a proofread
in which I did not need to change anything at all. If when I get to the bottom Iʼve made even the slightest change, I read it again. Sometimes that means I donʼt post it until the next day because Iʼm too tired or donʼt have the time to read it again right then. And then the next day I realize I need to change it a lot! Well, itʼs just Creative Writing 101.
There is, however, one situation where it would be useful for there to not be any time restriction on editing posts. Iʼve occasionally linked to example photos that I donʼt own or host, and after some time those links die sometimes. But itʼs too minor to bother Franco to update them, so I just leave the links dead. (It would be
possible to implement a feature whereby after some time, users could still edit
links in a post but nothing else; however, I expect that would require custom coding, so probably not worth the bother.)
9. BUG: The Strangest Bug EVER
In the title of the preceding section, the accent in “Wíndow” was not a typo or my trying to be clever.
I had to misspell the word in order for the board software to accept this post! (
Donʼt ask how many hours I blew figuring that out...)
For those with admin access, try the following:
- Grab the entire text of this post as BBcode.
- Begin posting a new thread to Off Topic. (May need to be a regular user for this; not sure.)
- In the message composer, press the gear in order to go into BBcode mode.
- Paste in this postʼs BBcode text.
- Press the Preview button. Observe that you see a preview below the edit box.
- Find the word “Wíndow” and change it to “Window”.
- Press the Preview button again. You will probably be greeted with an error box reading:
Oops! We ran into some problems. Please try again later. More error details may be in the browser console.
The problem went away if I removed the
[SIZE=5] and
[U] tags from the title, and its appearance also seemed to depend on the extent of text below the title. In fact, I have also since seen the same thing happen where the word “Window” occurrs at the end of any text enclosed by BBcode tags, but not always, and I havenʼt been able to figure out the exact conditions that trigger it.
The best explanation I can think of, is that the word “Window” is a special word in some programming languages. That really should not matter at all, because a forum post is not program code. However, there could be some really bizarre bug wherein under specific conditions the BBcode text of a post could be interpreted as program code. Apart from being an annoyance,
there is some chance this could represent a security hole.
10. USER ADVICE: Missing Drafts: Donʼt Rely On Them!
Just a tip — and this applies on
all forums: donʼt draft your posts in the web interface. Write them as local files in a text editor instead. It does mean you have to format manually with BBcode (itʼs not hard once you see how it works), but the advantages are many. Youʼll never lose your draft due to a connection problem, site upgrade, etc. Youʼll never accidentally post something incomplete. Youʼll also have your own copy of all your posts. You can even keep different backup versions in case you want to try out some changes in direction while you draft your post.
11. RANDOM THOUGHT: Human Before Monkey?
Shouldnʼt the first level be
less evolved than a monkey?
Maybe a lizard or something. Orrrr... an embryo, which conveniently leaves out how evolved of an animal it is, and still conveys the sense of being a brief initial phase. If you like the idea, I volunteer to draw the icon if need be.
Cheers!
Phoenix
