Technical Issues and Bugs

Me too. Are we the Black Widow of celebrity gossip forums?

Maybe this place actually does maintenance to keep things running smoothly and that's all this was? /hopeful

That's what I'm hoping. We'll see if this is repeated.

I also got those messages while logged in last night. I assumed it was you, particle_person, changing settings. However, these messages weren't nearly as annoying as the ones on Forumer, and I could still read the new posts by liberally using the refresh button.

Yeah, I went away to Gloucester for the past four days and haven't touched the Admin panel in that time. (I did come by SF several times, but on my iPad, which is no good for modifying the forum.)

Yeah, I saw the message briefly but it went away and haven't seen it since Saturday night, which is as good a time as any to do maintenance (Saturday night yes, entire month of November no).

I am still baffled that the other board has been down for three weeks straight and no one at Forumer cares.

Unrelated: Can we go through and apply proper title case to some thread titles that are inconsistently capitalized, like "Advice columns"? (I may be the only person who is bothered by this.)

(particle_person - I reposted this in Questions about Topics)

punkysdilemma wrote:Saturday night, which is as good a time as any to do maintenance (Saturday night yes, entire month of November no).

I'd say that about sums it up.

Unrelated: Can we go through and apply proper title case to some thread titles that are inconsistently capitalized, like "Advice columns"? (I may be the only person who is bothered by this.)

You are not. :) (Well, I wouldn't say bothered exactly. But I do notice it every time.)

Improper thread titles aren't really for this thread (although I'm sure we can make them more consistent) since they are an issue with forum content rather than a technical problem. In other words, not my bailiwick. Can you guys take that to Questions about Topics? Which I just noticed has inconsistent capitalization...

Going to attempt to get rid of the redundant usernames in the post titles, and allow individual posts to be referenced by URL. (I think that last was a casualty of a prior modification, so I'm going to see if I can reverse things.) Forum will be wonky until around 2am EST, or about 2.5 hours from now.

Okay, done with modifications for now. It's easy to get rid of the redundant usernames at the top of each post, but impossible to allow the URL for an individual post to be selected AND have the redundant post titles be suppressed.

Whoever wrote the code for this forum made the really stupid choice to embed the anchor tags for each post INSIDE those redundant post titles' URLs. That explains why the "Jump to Latest Post" thing got screwed up when I suppressed them altogether (as opposed to making them invisible, which is how things are now). It goes to jump to the post with anchor #4456 (or whatever number), and I've told your browser to suppress anchor #4456 because that corresponds to an annoying title that we hate. Then your browser gives up and just stops at the top of the page. Long story short, I learn an Important Life Lesson and we carry on.

I think the only way to fix that issue is to override the script that builds the HTML for the page, but THAT is more surgery than I'm willing to do at the moment. The opportunities to screw things up with Javascript are legion.

Noticed that I left the "Post title" field on the post editing page, even though it doesn't do anything now, so I'm going to get rid of that. If all goes well, you won't notice any funny business except that it will vanish sometime soon.

Done editing for now. Didn't succeed in getting the "Post title" field to go away. (Or rather, I did, but it also made the title field go away on the PM editor and the Post New Topic editor, so it wasn't much of a solution.)

However, I DID manage to optimize the CSS, which should make the forum load faster. So it wasn't a wasted evening.

This is a minor issue, but it's important to me. You see, I'm in the habit of saving particularly funny or interesting posts. However, I can't highlight both username and post now. I can get one or the other, unless I start highlighting to the right of the name, but when I paste it into a document, the username appears several lines below the message, instead of above.

Is there anything you can do to make the name appear above? Thanks!

I could, but someone else asked me to remove the name above the post because it's redundant. I'm afraid this falls under "I can't make everyone happy" unless you can persuade people that it's worth keeping.

ETA: Wait, I just had an idea! What if I make the username INVISIBLE text? When you copy and paste, it'll be there, but we won't see it on the forum.

That's an interesting idea. If it works, that would be great. But ultimately, I'll cope with whatever you do, because I like this place enough to cope with the very minor frustration of it not being perfect. :)

Okay, it's there, but you have to be a little careful about how you select. Click right near the very top of the post near the center (in the horizontal direction) and drag down. You might have to fiddle with it a bit before you get the hang, but it seems to work.

Thanks, that's great!

I used the swanky mobile version on my iPhone over the weekend and couldn't figure out how to do two things: 1) click on a thread and go straight to the last page with the latest posts (I had to click through each individual page and eventually gave up for the longer threads). And 2) how to post a reply! I couldn't find a "post reply" button anywhere.

I could only do both of the above things if I switched back to the classic version. Am I missing something really obvious in the nice mobile version?

The mobile version is *browse only*, you have to access the page via the web on your smartphone if you want to post. The newest post feature I know less about.

It also says (in the admin console) that the mobile version is "beta" (whatever that means in this case). I suppose it might improve in time.

Ah, that makes sense. I just thought I was missing some huge "POST REPLY" button or something. Good to know, thanks guys!

Hey, do we want spoiler text color back? There is a spoiler tag under Others, but it doesn't have that effect. I found myself missing it in Current Reads just now.

Do you mean changing it back to whiting out the text? I so prefer this boards spoiler method of having the spoiler in a box because if you are reading on an iphone you can still read the spoilers because you can just click on the box.

Hm, true, hadn't thought of that. The reason I wanted it was because I only wanted to blank two words, but I guess I could have just put the whole thing under a spoiler tag...

Is it possible to do both? >>Lets see if this works!

eta: Because the color =white coding still works! So maybe that option for just spoilering a few words and still have the spoiler coding for bigger spoilers.