New Site Discussion

[Jonathan Capps]

Ok, so let’s move all suggestions / issues for the new site here so I can gather everything in one place and give you all a bit more information on what I’m adding in and what’s planned for the future.

Unread comments – Never fear, this is currently my top priority, although it’s proving to be a massive pain in the arse. The old site ran on Drupal and one thing Drupal does as part of core is log every user’s page visit in the database, meaning that information than then be used to show new comments since you last visited an article or forum thread. I only realised in the hours leading up to launch that WordPress does not have this, so the only plugins I’ve found are cookie based and that’s not a very nice solution. It’s very likely I’m going to have to write something myself to solve this, so if you could bear with me a bit that would be great. I’m sorry this was overlooked, because it’s the one big feature everyone was obviously going to miss if it didn’t carry over.

Category nav – Currently the top of page shows you all the categories so you can easily move between them to find what you’re looking for. There are plans to expand on this significantly, so watch this space. In the meantime, though, I’d be interested to hear any feedback you have about the site’s navigation so this can be taken into consideration.

There are also various little changes that have been suggested and I’ll be fixing little bits and bobs as we go along and I’ll try to keep you updated in here. Feel free to re-state any suggestions for us to consider. The main two things I changed yesterday were comments based:

Edit Button – Now you can edit your comment through a nice pop-up. You have this option for 15 minutes after you’ve posted a comment, after which you’ll be locked out.

Reply functionality – Before if you clicked ‘Reply’ next to a comment it would just take you to the reply box. Now, it will take the content of the comment you’re replying to, wrap it up in a blockquote, and stick it in the reply box to make quoting someone a little easier. It’s something I added on a whim, so feedback is welcome.

That’s the basics, anyway. On the whole people seem to like the new site, which is gratifying, but the re-launch is an ongoing process so I’m keen to improve on the site in the future.

Topic

[Danny Stephenson]

Actually that can be done. but I did it by accident as I didnt close the blockquote tag and it created another nested reply within it. Cant’ remember exactly what it was that i did.

[p2p_productions]

The blockquote thing didn’t work for me initially (maybe I wasn’t doing it right?) For some reason, it just condensed *everything* into a grey box, despite copying in between the inverted commas. Will test now using Danny and HelloMabel’s last two posts. Hopefully two grey boxes can be seen:

[p2p_productions]

Ha, see! Nothing above. Weird.

[Jonathan Capps]

It’s very possible that the forum is filtering out the blockquote tags for normal, scummy users… I’ll get that fixed.

[HelloMabel]

Er… Some of the articles on the front page have swapped pictures.

[Jonathan Capps]

That’s a bizarre bug. Any chance of a screenshot?

The only thing I can think of is there’s some weird browser caching going on, because it looks fine for me on various different PCs…

[Danny Stephenson]

I don’t know what Mabel is referring to, but Ian was mucking round with the images a few days ago, maybe it could’ve been that. What exactly was swapped round, Mabel?

[HelloMabel]

It’s fixed now. :) It was Tanya’s review, The Noise from the Dwarf review and one of the Lemons articles.

[HelloMabel]

Sorry to keep bugging you. This is not how the discussion comments normally look.

[ADMIN EDIT: removed image link because Chrome doesn’t like that image hosting site]

[Pete Part Three]

Wow. What version of FF is that?

[Ian Symes]

That’s not how any comments have ever looked to me either! Is that happening every time you view that page, Mabel, or was it a one-off?

[Paul Muller]

I got this yesterday – either my iPhone is on the blink or this is some sort of hilarious cyber attack by Rob Grant.

[Jonathan Capps]

Ah, smashing, I knew that fucking slider would fuck something up for someone. Does it normally load ok?

And, yeah, Mabel it looks like you’re running a very, very old version of Firefox. I imagine it’s someone’s misplaces HTML tag in a comment that is automatically corrected in most browsers, but fucking up yours. Is upgrading to the latest Firefox an option for you, or is that on a public computer?

[Paul Muller]

Yeah it seems fine now, guess it must have been a one off.

[Jonathan Capps]

That’s because I removed this:

if ($client == 'Paul Muller's iPhone') then
FUCK EVERYTHING UP
end if;


Sorry, not sure how that got in there.

[Seb Patrick]

For a minute I thought Paul’s phone had been attacked by Dennis Nedry.

[Paul Muller]

[HelloMabel]

Rats, I had a feeling it was on my end of things. I’m on a public computer because my laptop was stolen. :(

[Jonathan Capps]

Well, that sucks! Maybe mention to the place this public computer is located that it’s in their best interests to keep all their browser software up to date? There are all sorts of security and usability problems with using old browsers.

[Ben Kirkham]

You’re such a wise Web-man, Mr Capps! I’m looking at getting some good antivirus software for my new laptop (didn’t steal it from Mabel!), what can you recommend? I heard that Norton 360 is good.

[Pecospete666]

Very slow! No photos? can not added a thumb pic?

[Ian Symes]

Ganymede & Titan bear no responsibility for the unrelenting stupidity of individual users.

[Jonathan Capps]

You’re such a wise Web-man, Mr Capps! I’m looking at getting some good antivirus software for my new laptop (didn’t steal it from Mabel!), what can you recommend? I heard that Norton 360 is good.

Oh, shucks!

I’m actually quite behind on anti-virus stuff. I’ve long since got sick of the increasingly bloated AVG Free and I just rely on Windows Defender these days. Never liked Norton, though.

[Jo]

I think a ‘block user’ button would be a lovely feature. KTHXBYE!

[Ben Kirkham]

I agree, AVG is vastly overrated. I’ve just got rid of a very destructive Trojan Horse from my system using a Norton 360 trial, so I think I need to shop around for some good, permanent software!

[mick]

Wow, suprised to see that public computers are running versions of Firefox THAT old, some of them have pretty worrying security issues.

Site displays perfectly on my Pentium II running Windows 98SE and Firexox 8 by the way:

[HelloMabel]

>Wow, suprised to see that public computers are running versions of Firefox THAT old, some of them have pretty worrying security issues.

I learned long ago that “Land of Opportunity” includes the opportunity to make stupid decisions. ;-) It’s one of our faculty computers at work, so I’m not allowed to install anything, but I put in a request and they’ve installed Chrome.

[mick]

Sounds much like our PCs at work, we’re locked out from doing anything now (despite the fact I put all these PCs and the network up here together) so we have vastly varying versions of chrome, firefox and ie on all of them :-/

They even disabled the USB ports meaning we cant run browsers off jump drives, however they have not disabled the DVD drives so we can boot them into any number of portable Linux distributions for shenanigans :-D

[Somebody]

Sounds much like our PCs at work, we’re locked out from doing anything now (despite the fact I put all these PCs and the network up here together) so we have vastly varying versions of chrome, firefox and ie on all of them :-/

Wait… I thought Chrome “phoned home” every time you ran it, and it refused to start if it found it wasn’t the latest version and the autoupdate failed?

[Jo]

>Wait… I thought Chrome “phoned home” every time you ran it, and it refused to start if it found it wasn’t the latest >version and the autoupdate failed?

I’ve NEVER had that happen and I always use Chrome these days.

[Pecospete666]

Why do some threads have a “REPLY” an others do not?

[si]

Comments on articles have the ‘reply’ button, forum posts don’t.

[Jonathan Capps]

Yeah, that’s something I want to fix. It’d be useful to have the same quoting functionality we have on the comments.

[Ben Kirkham]

Is anyone else having trouble with the forum? The text is off-centre and the sidebar bleeds over into the comments. I’m on Firefox.

[Sam Johnson]

Yeah, texts off centre for me as well, and I’m on Chrome.

[Jonathan Capps]

This is a hang over from updating the forum software earlier in the week and it over-riding some of my hacky template changes. I fixed it pretty quickly, but it seems the new stylesheets aren’t loading for everything. I suggest hard refreshing your page (Ctrl + F5 on Windows) so it forces it to read the new styles.

[Pecospete666]

All’s well on IPads! full and mini.

[Ben Kirkham]

” I suggest hard refreshing your page (Ctrl + F5 on Windows) so it forces it to read the new styles.”

Cheers, Cappsy, worked a treat. Is there anything about websites you don’t know?

[Jonathan Capps]

> Cheers, Cappsy, worked a treat. Is there anything about websites you don’t know?

Apparently I don’t know how to gracefully update WordPress plugins, so there’s that!

[Ben Paddon]

Lots of weird stuff happening with WordPress updates at the moment. They’ve broken the theme I used for PortsCenter. I’m no programmer… so I decided not to bother fixing it and had a biscuit instead.

[Jonathan Capps]

Oh, it that the WordPress 3.5 update? I was going to run that today, but I’m always nervous with the big updates…

[Blisschick]

My stuff is broke, too. I know it’s got to be your fault, since I haven’t been home all day. :P

[Seb Patrick]

One of the images on this page is causing Chrome to chuck up a malware warning, it seems…

[JamesTC]

Just got that too. I think it is the image on post #203377.

[Jonathan Capps]

Removed the image. HelloMabel, I’m not sure if Google are correct, but it seems the site you use to image host isn’t all that legit…

[HelloMabel]

You mean the site I found by googling “free image hosting”? How can that be???

:( Sorry, everyone. And I was so proud of myself for figuring out how to post a screencap.

[Jonathan Capps]

No worries, I doubt the site itself is dodgy but it’s just likely they’ve had some stuff reported so Google didn’t take any chances.

I think Image Shack is still going if you want to find a new place.

[Moonlight]

Imgur also works.

[HelloMabel]

Cheers, guys. :)

[Seb Patrick]

Imgur’s generally the quickest/easiest/stablest, in my experience. There’s even a Chrome (and probably Firefox) plugin where you can right-click and re-host an image there and then.

[Author]

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