The Switch
Discuss the new forums and how much you hate them here.
The old forums are accessible here, though I disabled posting.
I guess it goes without saying that the main reason you like these boards is that they are a barren wasteland, therefore less can go wrong? Sort of the DOS perspective on web forums.
…what?
Just curious: Will AnRedio be coming here, or is it dead?
I hope to get AnRedio working in one way or another, but I haven’t decided how quite yet. It probably won’t be soon. First order of business is probably going to be getting some sort of “quote this post” button working.
She is saying that this new board is very minimalist and thus there is little that can go wrong with it. From what I can see, that isn’t why you like it. I think that this appeals to the geek in you. Instead using a ready made package, you get to build this one yourself, feature by feature. I’m sure that you have all kinds of ideas for unique things you want to eventually add, and maybe, in a few years, you will have built something as good as what we just abandoned.
Personally I don’t like it. Somewhere you mentioned the method this board uses for posting pictures. Not being a computer geek, I didn’t even recognize the term let alone know what it was. I’m not really interested in learning a whole new system just to talk with you goofballs. As I said before, it’s your board, AB. You’re paying all the bills and doing all the heavy lifting so I’ll support you in this, but don’t make it too weird.
On the contrary, though it’s minimalist on the front end at this point, there is a whole lot that it can do - so therefore a whole lot that can go wrong. I would say it’s more like Unix than DOS.
As for posting pictures, if you’re confused by the new text formatting method, just use the formatting buttons. That’s what they’re there for.
Yes, it’s different. The best way to make it work is to just post interesting stuff like normal, and let me know what needs to be fixed. So far I’ve got post editing and quoting on the agenda, with AnRedio somewhere a bit further down. There’s also at least one lingering layout issue which is plaguing me - you might be able to spot it…
Yeah, that works great.
Daikun:
There’s some kinda weird glitch with the Quote button.I thought I’d try to quote one of my own posts:
Instead of seeing my name and message, I got this:
Um… Okay, what the hell?
That’s hilarious. It’s only happening on that one post as far as I can tell, because I just tried quoting you there and got the same thing. “Diamond is the hardest metal”, lols.
KJI:
Hmm… so quotes/bold/italics here are the same as on the *ch(an)s. Interesting.
The formatting markup system is Markdown, which I believe may predate 4chan by at least a little bit - it certainly predates regular formatting on it, I’m sure. But the idea is that it uses standards that were already in use by people using text-only email and bulletin board systems, such as angle brackets for quoting and asterisks for emphasis, so the likelihood of overlap between independently-designed markup systems is high.
It also uses the SmartyPants algorithm (by the same overachiever that made Markdown) to change straight apostrophes and double quotes into “smart quotes,” turn three consecutive periods into proper ellipsis characters, etc. Just in case you didn’t notice your typography suddenly improving.
Still can’t say I like the colours though…
Find me a color palette(s) you prefer and I’ll set up some alternative themes when I have some time. If you want to go all out and make a mock-up in graphics software of your choice, that’d be even better. Kuler is an interesting tool for exploring and sharing color palettes and was what I used to pick the colors for early designs of the new forums, though I eventually ended up with something closer to what the older forums had.
I fixed the quoting issue, by the way. It was a one-character bug in the JavaScript which didn’t cause the script to fail outright as would have been ideal (because then it would be obvious that something was wrong), but merely return an incorrect result in certain circumstances. In computer programming, we say those circumstances are “worse than failure…”
Albright:
Find me a color palette(s) you prefer and I’ll set up some alternative themes when I have some time. If you want to go all out and make a mock-up in graphics software of your choice, that’d be even better. Kuler is an interesting tool for exploring and sharing color palettes and was what I used to pick the colors for early designs of the new forums, though I eventually ended up with something closer to what the older forums had.Daikun: What colors? It’s a white background with black text.
It’s more “light grey” than white on mine. However, I guess I’ve gotten used to it now. Either that, or my monitor angle/room light makes it look different (better) than it did when I wrote that. :p
I might still try and come up with alternate palettes if I’m feeling particularly bored, though.
Albright:
The formatting markup system is Markdown, which I believe may predate 4chan by at least a little bit - it certainly predates regular formatting on it, I’m sure. But the idea is that it uses standards that were already in use by people using text-only email and bulletin board systems, such as angle brackets for quoting and asterisks for emphasis, so the likelihood of overlap between independently-designed markup systems is high.
I thought that was probably the case. I was just too lazy to look it up before posting.
All right, we’ve got signatures back, as well as a live preview function. Open up the “Live preview” fieldset thingie underneath the body field to view it. The live preview doesn’t quite work as well as I want it to; it’s not immediately visible after you expand it; you have to type something new first. Also, I want it to “remember” when you’ve opened it and always make it visible from page to page until you close it again. But it’s a start. (I don’t want to just have it open all the time because some might find it annoying, and since it’s doing all the processing in JavaScript, it very well could choke the browser with large amounts of text and/or on slower computers.)
What’s next? Any suggestions?
Yeah, that’s a caching thing. It’s kind of hard to explain, but basically, it’s set up so that if you’re not logged in, it doesn’t update those times every time the page is viewed. It just updates it once the first time it’s viewed after a change (a new thread or post), then keeps re-serving that cached page to anonymous (non-logged-in) visitors over and over instead of building a new one. I’m not sure if/how I should fix it short of disabling the cache for anonymous visitors, which I don’t really want to do, but that issue is further on down the list of my priorities at this point anyway.
Another solution might be to just switch back to normal, absolute dates and times instead of “X minutes ago,” but I kinda like “X minutes ago” - it always works no matter what time zone you’re in.
You can, but the edit link is in a different place; it’s underneath the thread title near the top of the page. I’ll probably see what I can do to get that moved down into the same place it is for comments.
Okay, I applied a patch to fix the new comment link behavior. Since this is an unofficial patch, it might revert in the future when I upgrade the system. If it starts happening again, let me know and I’ll re-do the patch.
Also, the live preview feature now works when creating a new thread.
I’d like to make a suggestion:
After browsing through the “What the…” thread, I’ve found that having to scroll to the bottom of a page just to find the page numbers is rather tedious. Can you maybe insert the page numbers at the top of the thread so we don’t have to scroll through the whoooooooooole thing?
