Subject: Re: tags and subforums
Author:
Posted on: 2019-10-25 03:09:53 UTC
There is a bug in how subforum view works, and the whole tag view and subforum view code could use a serious rewrite ... when I'm not a month out from a paper deadline.
In other words, I'm aware there are issues, and there's general plans to fix them eventually.
If people have comments on the new system - tags we could have, tweaks to the interface, and so on - here's a good place to leave them.
We may not be able to get to them super quickly (work's picking up for me, for one thing), but they'll be taken into consideration.
So far as I can see, there's no indication in Subforum View as to how many posts a thread has on it. You can see how many 'new' posts it has - though this seems to be calculated differently to how Aurora suggests the 'new' dot works (I think in Subforum view, it's 'posts in the last 24 hours'). You can also see whether the top post is the one bearing the tag (my last plug appears in Writing, because I tagged a couple of responses, but doesn't have a Writing tag, because the post itself was automatically generated), but nothing more than that.
If this section is supposed to imitate a view like this, then some indication as to whether you're looking at a single post with no replies, or a sprawling 120-piece conversation, would be useful I think?
hS
... that it seems the logic for assigning posts to subforums has an error somewhere. Currently, Cassie's returnbie thread is listed under both 'Plugs' and 'None of the Above', probably due to having no tags on the main post and a 'Plug' tag on a subpost; this seems logically impossible, and threads assigned categories should be removed from 'None of the Above'. And Huinesoron, it looks like the New Post dot was fixed, so it is consistent with the Subforum numbers now.
There is a bug in how subforum view works, and the whole tag view and subforum view code could use a serious rewrite ... when I'm not a month out from a paper deadline.
In other words, I'm aware there are issues, and there's general plans to fix them eventually.
I'm not trying to hassle and say This Needs Doing Now (if I was, I'd be a lot more obnoxious about it), just throwing things up on this as they come up. :)
hS
Since I'm RPing over on the T-Board and posting here, I've noticed T-Board has more tags, and they seem like good ones! Should we have the same set here?
~Neshomeh
Anyone think some of them aren't needed/I should add some more?
Does the 'sort by tags' option literally just list everything under that tag, in order? That seems to be how it works on T-Board, where you hit 2016 under RPs before you get down to a different tag.
Because that seems like a... less-than-useful view if the tags get used a lot? I can't come up with a reason I'd want to view three years of Writing posts, and then start over with three years of Permission Request posts. I guess for the topmost tag (Writing will always come first, I assume) it means you can get the effect of a Subforum view without having to deal with 'there's 90 posts here and the only way to see them is to scroll through the entire expanded thread' from that, but if you're after a tag that isn't the first one, I don't understand how it's meant to help?
hS
I tried to post a short response just now and it said you can only post once a minute to avoid spam. I don't think this will really be a major problem, but it could be a bit of a pain occasionally.
... it doesn't actually help that much; even at a rate of one post every 65 seconds or so, a spammer could still completely overwrite the front page in half an hour, less if they controlled multiple accounts. It's definitely a good idea to have some sort of anti-spam measures here, but a fixed-rate restriction doesn't seem to be the best idea, as it's too easy to abuse and might inconvenience legitimate Boarders; maybe something fancier like a roughly exponential rate filter (no more than 1 post per 10 seconds, 2 posts per 20 seconds, 3 posts per 40 seconds... 9 posts per ~45 minutes, 10 posts per ~1.5 hours) to disproportionately cap multiple posting? This would cut the maximum long-term posting rate to once every nine minutes, while allowing shortish bursts (and if you do need to post more than once every nine minutes for an extended period of time, there's the chat).
The sort of spam we've been assailed with before has been spambots who post hundreds of threads all at once (including hilarious spelling errors like ypurs). Limiting to 1/minute will stymie those quite nicely (cleanup will be easy anyway; I assume they can just delete everything by an account).
You're right that your method would deal well with human spammers, but... well,sometimes we spam! :) I've probably made more than 10 posts in 90 minutes on this board already at some point, and if we have an RP, it'll be inevitable. (For that matter, how long would my big thread over on the OldBoard have taken...?) And anyone who only gets a brief amount of time on the Board per day could want to rattle out replies...
You're also right that the chat is good for two people going back and forth; I don't think it works as well for (eg) replying to a bunch of reviews to your story, a one-to-many situation. It's all relative...
hS
This should be long enough to annoy automated scripts, while short enough to rarely trip up a human
I know, I know, daft question - but all except 2 posts on the Tarot thread have one, and they're dated to the 14th. They don't go away on refresh either (this is across both devices). Is it something like 'any post made more than 24 hours after the [thread/post] it's replying to', with no instruction to make it go away after another [24/48] hours has passed?
hS
that it's doing this because the New Post Dots (currently) refresh whenever a post is made on that thread, so if no posts are made the dots won't appear or disappear properly. This seems to fit all the data here (including the post I just made on the tarot thread, which wiped all the other dots on that thread only); if the dots are reprocessed 'whenever the page which the thread is on is loaded', this should be fixed.
This is a thing over on T-Board, too: the hat ( ^ ) character appears to cause whatever immediately follows it without a space to be written ^superscript , which is cool, but not a thing we need as often as we need an anime smiley face. There's always HTML for superscripts if we really want them. {= )
Also, speaking of T-Board, since this is up and running now, you might want to rename it to something other than PPC Posting Board if we're going to keep it as a separate RP location.
If not, how are RPs going to be handled here? Will threads with the RP tag and their replies not display in the main feed by default, perhaps?
~Neshomeh
See? ^_^
Much like Houdini, however, it takes some escaping.
Okay, I'll stop joking and actually explain. You can tell T-board things aren't formatting and are just literal text by prefixing them with a backslash. So to get "^_^", you actually need to type "\^\_\^". And to get a \, you type \\.
This is pretty standard on a lot of online forum-ey places, which is likely why T-board currently does it (and it's also a lot easier to make secure than HTML...), but given how common ^_^ is here, we may need to modify the rules a bit so ^ and _ aren't used maybe? I dunno. I also dunno if we'd be able to do that completely without just ripping stuff out—we're using someone else's code for that part, I think, and I don't know how easy it is to customize.
It's on this line right here
So that'll be merged if you guys wanna.
After this, ^_^ should Just Work nine times out of ten.
But you may have to put a \ before the underscore if you use two in a single paragraph.
Without escaping ^_^
As an accessibility issue, links in posts being distinguished solely by colour is less than great - particularly when that colour is red. I'm at the milder end of colourblind (red/green), and I'm still having trouble spotting them; someone with full colourblindness would be totally unable to see them.
hS
I've submitted a change to fix this and am waiting for Delta to approve it (because we're trying to have something resembling good engineering practices here).
Underlining works, but only when the rest of the text is not formatted with underlining. Is there a double-underline functionality that we could use?
(Random aside: every time, I try to start my subject line with 'Hui', because that's what goes in the first box. EVERY TIME. I'll get used to it. ^_^)
Links in HTML are default underlined, aren't they? I might be wrong, but that's my memory. It's not common that you'd have a block of underlined text with a link in the middle; I'm sure it could happen, but I can't think of a reason to do it.
Obviously the Board uses underlines... other places might use significantly different text colour, but I feel like that works best on a dark background, because... I think our eyes are better at picking out differences when they're set against black rather than white? I don't know. Wikipedia uses blue (which I think is also the default for YourWebApps), which works, but honestly I think Board-standard red-with-underlines has serves us well for a long time.
If a different solution is adopted, that's fine. But right now, reading something like this post is requiring me to run the cursor over every line to track down the links.
hS
I was just thinking a double-underline would help to differentiate it in cases where the rest of the text is also underlined for whatever reason. It's an edge case, I know, but one I think might be worth considering =]
(though I'm traveling for work and so it might be a few days unless one of the other new Board technical folks gets around to it)
Okay, so on the webapps board, one really useful thing that I found was the 'return to messages' behaviour. What it did was, if you went back from an old message it would take you to the page in the archives where that message was stored, rather than the main page; it's kind of inconvenient if you end up back at the main page by accident while you're trying to read multiple discussions from 2011. Could you please implement 'smart return'?
Also, there seems to be an issue with image formatting in some posts (does the Board not react well to Photobucket?); when a post containing an image is expanded, the posts below it may not move properly, leading to a region of difficult-to-read overlapping text. An example of this can be found in this thread. This seems like it's probably a bug in something.
Other than that, I can't really think of any issues I've noticed since official deployment; the aesthetic is a lot nicer than the old Board, although it's a bit slower sometimes.
My guess is that the NewBoard reads an image as a single line of HTML text, and moves the posts below it according to that, rather than according to the actual size of the image. An example, if the tech team need one, can be seen by expanding the posts below this one (at least on Chrome).
hS
I use Firefox, and the post you linked isn't broken there (at first, see clarification at the end) although the one I linked is; it seems like there might be browser details, a distinction between original posts and thread replies, posts from the archives versus new posts, or multiple related things here. In any case, image handling appears to be miscalculating the size, and consequently formatting posts improperly, under some unspecified circumstances.
(Edit: after further testing, intermittently reproducible would probably be the best term here. Clicking your link leads to a page which works the first time in Firefox; if the page is reloaded with F5, attempting to expand the post again demonstrates the bug. The link I provided, oddly, breaks immediately; I'm not really sure what the difference is, but it's there.)
This time it's fixed, I hope. (If it doesn't seem to be working, can people do a force-refresh?)
(and if it isn't, then I've got yet another potential fix in the pipeline)
Because I'm on android, and I don't think I can reproduce, so I'm trying to figure out if I'm just not seeing it or if it's a webkit thing (which would be iOS-only for those browsers).
Then maybe the patch I'm planning to write tonight to force a repaint might finally fix it.
(and I should test in Chrome)
Specifically Android 6, if that helps. Going to this and expanding the post below it causes the text of the next post down to start overlapping around the point I mention the bank central computer.
hS
And I am running on Gecko. It's definitely not a webkit issue.
Sorry, I just... misread the problem before?
I think the NewBoard is still using the previous version of the header. I feel like we deliberately separated the Constitution out for emphasis; we also have a link to T-Board, which (assuming it's still going to be used for RP) should probably go in.
On the flip side, I should also update the Board header to prominently redirect people over here. It looks like we're coming down on the 'move immediately' side of things, so a visible link would be valuable.
hS
The header is defined in _header.html.erb, and it includes the ability to have conditional sections based on which deployment of the Board the header is for (this one is :main). I'd appreciate if you, Delta, or anyone else could put together a pull request that updates the header.
This search seems to show that it doesn't list results chronologically (in either direction), and also that searching in "quote marks" has no effect.
(I also note that the URL of that link has a tick mark in it - o.O is that safe?)
hS
I'm not sure if it's always been like that and I just never noticed or if the library I'm using to handle search broke everything between 2012 and now.
I've looked into it some, and I at least have an initial sense of what's going on here, though the fix may be somewhat involved in the worst case - this bug has all the hastlly thrown together technical rambling in the unlikely event you're interested.
This post, the archived version of your review to There Is Another, seems to have thrown a slight formatting glitch - the first dashed point has transformed into a bullet point, though none of the others have.
hS
That's a quirk of how the newline to HTML conversion from the old Board interacted with the Markdown processor on the new Board
You can get
with
- Foo<br>- Bar
since from Markdown's perspective the list is on one line and has some HTML its single item
I've had to sign up again - my T-Board login no longer existed - which is fine, but I figured I'd throw up a note.
I assume the 'Enable reply emails' checkbox is just for replies to this post?
hS
This Board and T-Board use separate databases and therefore sets of accounts - your T-Board account will still work over there.
"Enable reply emails", unlike on the Board, goes for all replies (except yours) on the portion of the thread you enabled reply emails on.