Site Updates

[Wolf]

Thanks.

A separate issue: on my profile it says (under "Active Posts") that I have 2,097 posts (I suppose now 2,098). However, when I post messages, it records a different number (in this case, 2,024, though, I suppose now 2,025). What's an "active post"? Furthermore, what accounts for the discrepency? My apologies if this has been addressed already--I'm not the most active board user.

[MrFlibble]

[c=#00dd00]The age of lax moderation is over. From now on, you will receive a warn point every time you make a personal attack on another forum member, and such attacks will be deleted. Defending yourself from an insult is no excuse to insult back.[/c]

Yay! All hail the moderators' dictatorship!

[c=#00dd00]Now, let's get back on topic and discuss site updates.[/c]

Allrighty. First off, the scrolling lags I've complained somewhere above are either less noticeable now, or I got used to them. The broad margins are still an issue though (once again, somewhere above I posted a screenie), since so much screen space gets wasted. When I switch to the IP.Board skin, the forum body occupies the entire width of the screen.

BTW, what are the prospects of making an old-style FED2k skin for the forum? I remember Gob saying something about the number of available skins being limited (with the need to pay for extra additions) or something of that kind. Is that true?

[Dante]

Ok, so, are these warn points recorded somewhere or is it a case of a handwritten note on your desk? I ask simply to clarify "people involved," I'm not sure all the posts deleted were point-worthy. Honestly not trying to start anything, but if this is a new regime then it would be useful to know things like this as a point of reference.

(This is on topic, sort of, right?)

[Gobalopper]

In regards to the warning stuff. I'm not sure if you guys see it but moderators/admins see a bar below your profile pic and can also go to a page to view what the warning was about.

btw, if someone can create a list or point me to one of the top requested fixes that would be handy. I have two weeks off starting on the 20th and while I won't be able to dedicate all that time to working on the site I should be able to get some things done. If no such list exists than maybe a poll on the topic would be useful.

[Andrew]

I click on wiki link at top of forum, brings me back to forum.

I don't see quick link to Rules/FAQ

I let gurneyman know about posting to really old threads in duniverse board. Not going to remove the lengthy one with questions.

[Andrew]

Sorry guys, I just checked my inbox first time since software change, so I didn't read any messages sent to me.

Let me know if any are still needed to reply to.

[Dante]

We don't see the warning points, no. Or at least, I don't. There are little grey dots, but they seem to be related to post count.

The issue I have is that a lot of old posts, some of them in locked threads or by people who have long since left, just aren't showing up. Granted we don't reference old discussions very often, but when we do it's handy when they're complete. Besides that, it's the extraneous features that bother me. The Digg button, the ratings buttons for posts, and what does the 'promote to article' button do anyway?

Hey Gob, good to see you.

[MrFlibble]

btw, if someone can create a list or point me to one of the top requested fixes that would be handy. I have two weeks off starting on the 20th and while I won't be able to dedicate all that time to working on the site I should be able to get some things done. If no such list exists than maybe a poll on the topic would be useful.

Okay, since no one else did anything bout it here goes:

1) Some old posts' content isn't being shown, presumable because of "bad characters" in them. These posts can still be quoted or edited, but are not displayed in the forum body.

2) There are huge (107 pixel wide) gaps between the forum body margins and the vertical edges of the screen. I've attached a screenshot of what it looks like on my PC here. It's certainly not because of forum software, as the default IP.Board skin does not have this problem.

3) Loading times for pages are still somewhat slow.

4) You've fixed the old links to forum threads, but old links to individual posts within threads still redirect you to the main page. I'm not pressing this issue, as it is not very important, but would be nice if that was fixed too.

5) PM system is a mess. Messages that I have deleted years ago are suddenly back, and everything is reorganized in a GMail manner (messages are linked into "conversations"), making it difficult to keep track of everything. Also, new PM notification doesn't seem to work properly.

[athanasios]

Same problem here: Receive notification for wrong PM.

[SandChigger]

What'd I miss? (Was I involved? Pooh... I always miss all the fun. :( )

About the "invisible posts": I've just edited a couple of mine and fixed some things...

- One post had a couple of long dashes (—) in it and they were showing up as the little diamond-with-a-question-mark-inside "character not in this font" symbol. Once I retyped in the dashes and saved, the comment became visible.

- Another comment was visible but I'd used HTML-style angular brackets instead of the BBcode square brackets so the part I wanted in boldface wasn't displaying correctly.

- Some of the old smilies aren't displaying correctly. (Not a biggie unless you're a smiley/emoticon junkie like me. :) )

It seems this sort of glitch would be easy enough to fix by running a few find/replace searches over the database. Gobalopper, do you command-line it or use something like phpMyAdmin to manipulate the database? (Or just use the stuff I presume is built into the boardware?)

[MrFlibble]

- Some of the old smilies aren't displaying correctly. (Not a biggie unless you're a smiley/emoticon junkie like me. :) )

Right, I forgot to list that one :)

[Edric O]

Ok, so, are these warn points recorded somewhere or is it a case of a handwritten note on your desk? I ask simply to clarify "people involved," I'm not sure all the posts deleted were point-worthy. Honestly not trying to start anything, but if this is a new regime then it would be useful to know things like this as a point of reference.

[c=#00dd00]Hm, that's odd. Making warnings invisible kinda defeats the point of warnings... Gob, is there anything you can do to let people see their own warn levels?

For the record, the people who received a warning point for the now-deleted flaming in this thread were ErasOmnius, Dante, Wolf, and SandChigger. But all of those points have been removed since then, because a week passed without incident.[/c]

[SandChigger]

For the record, the people who received a warning point for the now-deleted flaming in this thread were ErasOmnius, Dante, Wolf, and SandChigger. But all of those points have been removed since then, because a week passed without incident.[/c]

Yippee!

So, how many have I racked up now, Big Boy?

[Edric O]

[c=#00dd00]+1 for this thread, -1 for a week without incident, then again +1 for that other thread I PMed you about. Your total currently stands at 1.[/c]

[SandChigger]

That's not terribly impressive, now is it...

Under matters board-related: Had an issue with double posting of a comment on someone's profile page. (I reposted it because it wasn't showing up, but it turned out it had gone through.)

On the shores of Glitchy-gloomy...

[athanasios]

If NoScript is enabled and you post a comment it takes ages to go back to the thread. OK, flash/scripts are needed for long structured comments, but for a quick reply? I love my NoScript.

[Gobalopper]

I've just updated the forum software to a newer version, nothing major just 3.1.2 to 3.1.4. I've also bumped up the memory on our VPS to 500MB so hopefully that helps some with page load speeds. More stuff over the next week or so.

And athanasios why do you need NoScript enabled for this site?

[athanasios]

It is just on by default. Just in case.

OK I am trying to make it a habit to allow this site before I log.

[SandChigger]

I've just updated the forum software to a newer version, nothing major just 3.1.2 to 3.1.4.

Gobalopper, I can't see how this has anything to do with the update, but for the last day or two the login pop-up has been giving me this error:

[#10193] We encountered a problem processing your login request. Please try again.

If I click the "Click here to login" link, Safari fills in my user name and password and the login proceeds with no problem.

The first time it happened, I figured I'd mistyped my password or something (the values don't fill in automatically in the pop-up window), but after five or six times now, I'm thinking it's something else.

Just to let you know!

[Lawliet]

Gobalopper, I can't see how this has anything to do with the update, but for the last day or two the login pop-up has been giving me this error:

If I click the "Click here to login" link, Safari fills in my user name and password and the login proceeds with no problem.

The first time it happened, I figured I'd mistyped my password or something (the values don't fill in automatically in the pop-up window), but after five or six times now, I'm thinking it's something else.

Just to let you know!

I'm having exactly the same problem. Well, it's not really that much of a problem. Just something annoying.

[Dragoon Knight]

Ever since the update, the workaround for using the correct spelling of "color" in the colour tags has disappeared. :(

[athanasios]

Strange: Sometimes name and password fields are empty. I have to either fill them or press Sign In to return to same page to appear. Does this have to do with Firefox or the Updates?

[Gobalopper]

Ok, I've fixed the sign-in problem. I found a way to prevent the pop-up box which I remember most people saying they found annoying anyway.

Dragoon do you mean using [ colour ]? I think I've fixed that too.

btw, has anyone noticed speed differences the last few days? I'm thinking I may need to switch to a dedicated MySQL server as I'm guessing that is where the current bottleneck is.

[Dragoon Knight]

[colour=#005FFF]Yeah, that's what I was on about. Testing it out in this post, will preview now to see if it's working again.

It is indeed! Splendid. :)

As for the speed increases, I've not noticed anything different. Every time I want to do something - whether it be check all unread content, or simply reply to a thread - things take quite a while. On the old SMF boards, there was always a message at the bottom of the screen that let you know how long it took to load the page. While that's gone now, I can take an educated guess at it being much, much longer.

For example, when I reply to a thread, the icons for Bold, Italic, Smilies and whatnot; they load afresh every time. There's no local caching from what I can see. It's as if every page I load in FED2k has an automatic Ctrl + F5 applied to it before it shows. In reality, I know that some of the content is saved (most of the stuff on the main page is stored locally once loaded for the first time), but when you ask the forum to do anything that requires thought, it slows to a crawl. I'm no expert in forum software, so I have no idea where the bottleneck would be, but something is taking too long. The sluggishness combined with the extra clutter / unused space is only making the overall impression of the site that of pained torpor.

Gah, just previewed my reply again before posting - took a good nine seconds to load. :(

EDIT: 12 seconds to post, 4 seconds to load up this edit pane.

EDIT 2: 15 seconds to apply the edit. [/colour]

[SandChigger]

Ok, I've fixed the sign-in problem. I found a way to prevent the pop-up box which I remember most people saying they found annoying anyway.

Yea! Thanks!

btw, has anyone noticed speed differences the last few days? I'm thinking I may need to switch to a dedicated MySQL server as I'm guessing that is where the current bottleneck is.

I've noticed it being a little slow, but I'm on an ISDN line at home.

(I noticed in the Safari Activity listing that there are two GIFs in the custom theme (border_left and border_right) that are 209 KB each ... and all they are is solid black stripes. I'm assuming they get cached after the initial load, but they probably slow things down when you first come to the site again after a few days. Probably not even a hiccup for someone with really fast access.)