Ars forum updates are now here!

[DovePig]

Just testing, only curious...
Does this still work properly, including the ponies?

Spoiler

EDIT: Darn, why ditch the marquee tag? Why?!? ;-)

 

[DovePig]

strike test in BB code posting mode, am I doing it wrong?

Changing to "fancy pants editor" mode and selecting the strike option does work correctly.

 

[DovePig]

With the fewer comments per page, do we have to change the Page 10 rule to the page 20 rule?

Given some threads, I might actually welcome the SF pony brigade coming in two times faster, if still going by the old Page 10 rule ;-)

 

[DovePig]

This is obviously very off‑topic, but will be sorely missed – sighs ;-)

 

[DovePig]

Is it possible to make automatic media embeds when pasting a link optional? When the backend detects a pasted link with video, it tends to automatically use the [ MEDIA ] tags on it, instead of [ URL ] or just plaintext. Often I don't want to embed media when posting video links (it adds to clutter), especially as I am having big problems with Telegram videos (even the embedded ones!) in some browsers (the whole tab just freezes and I had to edit it out in another browser).

 

[DovePig]

Oh, and just discovered another problem – NO‑BREAK‑SPACE (U+00A0) doesn't work, as shown here:

adsfsdafasdfsdfsdafasdfsd afsdafsadfdfasdfsdfsdafsdfsd afdsafasdfsdfdsfsadfsdafasdfsd afsfasdfsdafsdafasdfdsfasdfdsafasdfdsafsdafsadfdsfsdafasdasdasdasdasdasdasdasdasdasdasdasdasdasd

adsfsdafasdfsdfsdafasdfsd‑afsdafsadfdfasdfsdfsdafsdfsd‑afdsafasdfsdfdsfsadfsdafasdfsd‑afsfasdfsdafsdafasdfdsfasdfdsafasdfdsafsdafsadfdsfsdafasdasdasdasdasdasdasdasdasdasdasdasdasdasd

All the spaces between asdfs are non‑breaking. The hyphens are non‑breaking as well, but these work correctly. Both Safari and Chrome on Mac OS, forum view. Previously, NBSP used to work correctly.

 

[DovePig]

View attachment 46250
FYI, there seems to be tons of spam posts on the Audio Visual forum.

Edit: it’s all cleared out now. Nice!

Please, could you all post screenshots inside spoiler tags, especially from long mobile screens? Even on my 4K screen with HiDPI, it takes up three screens just to scroll through that image. At least until Ars (hopefully) implements image scaling or something like that...

 

[DovePig]

I think default embedding is the better behavior. I don't know anything about Telegram videos, but if someone posts a YouTube it should embed by default. That's not clutter, that's convenience.

I recognize not everyone will agree, but as a site policy my preference is towards rich media being easy to access.

Oh, I was only thinking of having it optional as in being an opt‑out feature, on by default. But it's not a priority, one can always switch to the BBeditor I guess. I quite liked the media feature for previewing the content as well. One nice thing about it previously was the "click to show embedded" link, though. Well, I'll see myself out ;-)

 

[DovePig]

New change: the dropdown arrow next to the FORUMS link was confusing people, and nobody could find the "Your threads" option, which is very popular.

We've broken all that stuff out into their own line for easy access without hunting or drilling down. If you have feedback let us know, but I think this should help.

You asked for feedback about it, well then: one thing I don't like about the new sub‑header line is that it takes up even more of valuable vertical screen estate, especially on 16:10 displays (even more so when individual posts are already a bit too tall with the extra stuff on top and bottom of each).

I guess there's no pleasing everybody – damned if you do, damned if you don't ;-)

Perhaps having a clearly labeled dropdown (not just a tiny triangle, but a full word label that shows a dropdown anywhere you click the word) back on the frontpage/forums/new posts/subscribe floating header line might be a good compromise between clarity and valuable screen space?

 

[DovePig]

Regarding posts graphic design, any idea if something shorter like this would be possible in XenForo? Basically put the now separate "liked by", "reply/quote" and "last edited" lines into one line? There is a lot of vertical screen space wasted currently, as all three seem to use separate lines. Compare these two, proposed first and original second (sorry Moonscript for using your post, it was just right there):

That's just a quick mashup (doesn't even conform to a grid, sorry) and could have obviously been done better, but something like it could save a lot of valuable vertical space on nowadays almost universally widescreen desktop displays, potentially at least a quarter of each forum page is just wasted vertical space...

I think having all the stuff like posting time, editing time and any other non‑interactive stuff together in the post header makes more sense (it's just links or non‑interactive info), while the reply/quote/report definitely belong at the bottom. The "liked by" info being slightly more limited in space (by being on the same line as the quote buttons) doesn't really matter, since it won't ever be overflowing (unless you want to do another FB – and I hope not, lol).

Oh, I forgot to say thanks – I do really appreciate the forum updates, that it all mostly worked through the whole (probably quite insane) migration and that you address the raised issues and bugs ;-)

EDIT: Since the "Last edited: XX minutes ago" line is pretty uncommon in most posts, why not have it on the left side of post header, something like:
"34 minutes ago (last edited 29 minutes ago)" or such? Would be more balanced graphically.

 

[DovePig]

A polite suggestion for the Insert Image function – how about making it insert img as a thumbnail by default, not inline? Or at least have an user option to only show thumbnails by default. The image viewer for thumbnails is rather nice and finally works pretty well, it's easy to just click a thumbnail (which is already big enough to see clearly) when you want to see the whole image fullscreen.

Now it always inserts the full image inline, which can be a humongous problem when people post (4K) screenshots or tall (mobile) images. The forum view, unlike front page view, always scales images to full tab width. That makes a big tall image take up to several (!) screens... This, coupled with the apparent inability to scale down inline images on HiDPI screens (on 4K with 2x HiDPI, imgs display at 1080p size), leads to any image or meme heavy threads being almost unreadable. Especially if your browser window is maximised.

Please compare the rendering in forum view and FP view – the latter at least has a fixed width, so a big image (in this case wide, taller would have been even worse) doesn't take up whole screen or several so often. Whereas in forum view, any big inline image is bound to take up one or more screens:

 

[DovePig]

Few things about the new fancy pants post composer to perhaps keep an eye on later (yes, I am aware I can just switch to the BBCode one, but...):

1. The "Remove formatting" button doesn't seem to work at all (Safari and Chrome, Mac OS).

2. Pasting in a text keeps its original formatting – IMHO pasting should default to unformatted (except URLs, these are handy) if possible. This is what I get after pasting a word from a Guardian headline and continue typing.​

4. The pasted style keeps getting applied to anything I write after, unless​

I press enter right at the end of line,

but not if the enter precedes some more styled text,​

i.e. mid‑sentence,​

or even if it precedes any extraneous (and invisible) space character like I did here.​

5. Could we please get ^sup and _sub tags appear somewhere in the formatting menu as buttons? They are quite useful for adding academic citations, things like ²¹⁰Polonium or H₂O and such. Probably more useful than the prominent "font size" button.​

 

[DovePig]

You have to highlight the text you want to remove it on, it doesn't just automatically blank the whole editor.
That's how rich text editors work. You always have the option to paste without the formatting. Since you're on a Mac that's "Paste and Match Style" or option-command-shift-v if you prefer.
I've added _sub and ^sup tags to the BBCode.
There is a way to add them to the rich editor, but it doesn't seem to be working for me at the moment. Still learning!

1. Highlighting the text before hitting the Remove formatting is the first thing I tried – that didn't help... Might be a browser issue, but it persisted even in latest Chrome and in Safari with all my extensions disabled.
2. Playing around in the composer, it seems "Remove formatting" only removes the formatting applied in the composer itself, not any of the styles inherited from the pasted rich text – that's the likely culprit why the Remove formatting seemed not to work for me – is there any way for it to apply the default font, size and weight when invoked? That would be the expected user experience. Might be just a local browser issue, could somebody else test it please? Paste some large and bold big headline text from elsewhere and try invoking the remove formatting function on it...
3. Thanks, I completely forgot about the Paste and Match Style option. Apologies! I'd still say a default plaintext for any pasted text would have been better from the user perspective, but that might be quite difficult with keeping all the other rich text functionality, like intact URLs and such. I am quite fine with using "paste as plaintext" myself...
4. Big thanks for adding the _sub and ^sup (and all the others, including marquee, LOL) BBCode tags back – I noticed ;-) I just thought it would be nice to have them as buttons, but I can appreciate the difficulty of modding the fancy pants editor for that.

Example of #2: (pasted bold and large rich text)

Spoiler

italics, bold, large – highlighting and remove formatting does nothing.​

italics (applied here in post composer), bold, large – highlighting and remove formatting only removes the italics applied here, not the inherited font size or bold style.​

Expected behaviour: Highlighting and remove formatting removes all the styles, showing the text like this.

Obviously, that's quite a low‑priority issue all the other things considered, so thanks for all the really fine work in what must have been quite a nightmarish migration ;-)

 

[DovePig]

Ars now self hosts! Not sure if it's here to stay, but obviously awesome if it is. Just hit the image button in the editor and follow the instructions (click to open file browser or drag an image into the area - someone mentioned copy-paste earlier, not sure if that works).

Please do remember to either resize any really big added images (just click on it in the text and choose resize) if using Copy/Paste or Insert Image functions, or even better use the Attach Files function with its "insert thumbnail" function. Currently – at least in my browsers when logged in – images scale to the full width of the forum's page, which can make scrolling through any vertical 4K phone screenshots really bothersome (a HiDPI phone vertical screenshot takes up to three browser pages to scroll through) ;-)

The thumbnails are really cool now, they display a full‑width image viewer with easy scrolling through multiple images and such, it's a pity it's not the default even for insert image or paste image as well. Sure, sometimes full‑size inline images make perfect sense (Pony brigade or graphs), but when the forums already support both modes, the thumbnail should be the default IMNSHO – especially if currently, inserting a thumbnail takes a couple of extra steps (should be the other way around – inline images should take a couple of extra steps)

Consider this example (warning, very long image, hence spoiler):

Spoiler

Easy to identify thumbnail, one simple click to see fullscreen correctly scaled to window size in a rather cool media viewer:



Versus this, initially showing up inline at god knows how many pixels high:

 

[DovePig]

FYI, if you're on a 'retina' device or something high DPI that creates huge images when you embed and click on the image it will take % as an argument.

Since I'm on a 5K iMac screen most of my time I've taken to embedding my images at 50% so they show up a 'normal' sizes.

View attachment 46796

Thanks for pointing that out!

Any way to autoscale embedded images on Retina displays in posts? Since you already have that really nice seamless‑scaling image viewer? Although from my cursory purview of web and HiDPI scaling, it still seems like quite a mess, unfortunately :-(

 

[DovePig]

On the front page (of Ars, not the forums) there's a link all the way at the bottom on the left side:

https://meincmagazine.com/?view=mobile

(Just noticed a nice little feature to prevent url's from being previewed inline: edit the bbcode and set unfurl="false" in the URL parameter.)

[URL unfurl="false"]https://example.com[/URL]

Thanks – I had some problems with the previewing/media embedding inline, as I was trying to insert some tweets without them showing up as MEDIA. But it looks like XenForo is "too smart" for that ;-)

Even if I use "Insert URL", XenForo still embeds it whenever it detects a supported MEDIA site. Actually, even if I select "unlink" to insert it as plaintext – or just type it as plaintext right in the middle of a sentence – it still detects it and embeds it as media with no way to disable that. I really get the reasoning to keep the forums a media‑rich experience (and I actually do kinda like the feature), but it looks like XF's implementation of it can be a bit wonky at times...
Example:

Spoiler

1. Plaintext media URL mid‑sentence – still gets embedded – IMHO looks ugly and messes up the whole text flow:

BlahBlahBlahBlah BlahBlahBlahBlah

2. Insert Link, changed title:

a tweet

3. Insert Link, kept title:



4. Insert Link, added unfurl=false in BBmode (Yay!)

https://twitter.com/HaysKali/status/1593452247379083265

Oh, BTW, I really hope you have a system to change all the MEDIA tags back if/once Twitter implodes on Monday, so we could at least search for them by URL on Archive.org

 

[DovePig]

Just a quick question about the media embed feature – would it be possible to automagically strip out any tracking URL parameters like Twitter's ?cxt=something from the link?

While I am running a URL tracking param stripper extension myself, people often just copy/paste the whole link including these. I am aware that unless there is a very actively maintained XenForo plugin for that, it might be pretty hard to do that without breaking other functionality at times. Just askin'...

 

[DovePig]

I think I saw it mentioned in another feedback thread, but since I can't find it now...

The two asterisks formatting text as italics doesn't just mess up ✱exclamations✱ and ✱scratches head✱ comments, it also messes up a still pretty common^✱ citation and note format. I'd vote for turning it off, but I know this ain't a twitter poll ;-)

✱: Well, at least I think it's still common, and definitely easier^✱✱ to write than ^[1] and ²
✱✱: much easier than typing [ sup ] asterisk [ / sup ], instead of just hitting * & **

 

[DovePig]

Given the zee25 drive‑by‑trolling just two posts above, can we get an automated banning for ALL‑CAPS first ten posts please? ;-)

 

[DovePig]

This thread does seem to attract the spam bots. I guess it's linked from the FP

Just let it attract them – it's kinda ironic the spam bots (not Russian and other trolls, sadly!) seem to be most active on the very thread that's definitely most directly watched by any and all mods at all mod levels ;-)

 

[DovePig]

Oh my, another spambot

 

[DovePig]

Speaking as a moderator, but the H&FF is not my forum: Please don't do this—call attention to obvious spam posts in your own posts. Just ignore them. The volunteer Fora moderators have the blessing of the powers that be to roam across the Fora and the front page comments and remove obvious, know-it-when-you-see-it spam using the spiffy new tools XenForo offers us. Once we act, the spam is gone without a trace and your "HAY LOOK AT THAT SPAM" post becomes an off-topic non sequitur.

I promise we're on it, we just can't monitor every thread 24/7. Spam drives me up a tree and I take particular joy in burning those accounts to the ground. No I don't know why this thread in particular attracts so many of them. Probably because they're not very smart.

Apologies – that was really stupid of me. Lesson learned...

Out of interest, does reporting the more obvious ones via the report button work well enough for spam, or should that be reserved for the more egregious violations of the forum code? Wouldn't want to inundate mods about obvious spam posts they might be already dealing with, if everybody reports it (I guess a thousand separate notifications about a single post might not be exactly helpful). Thanks!

 

[DovePig]

At this point it is what it is. I can take away markdown support, or we can live with the minor edge cases. I honestly have no idea how many people are using markdown, I can't go by any data, all I can say is I feel like the downsides are all navigable. Nobody seems to be actually citing footnotes in their posts on a regular basis, and if they are we have lovely support for superscript tags and they work in the editor interface, so I don't think it's a big deal.

Honestly, in my opinion?

Given how any :/ in e.g. typed https:// URL rendered as (or whatever emoticon it was) previously (before you very quickly removed it, kudos!) I'd be all for taking down all emoticon markdown myself... ;-) ;-/ ;-\ and similar work just fine, if not actually better.

Everybody understands ASCII emoticons anyway, they don't break line spacing (as the below xxxD: example, which renders at 1.5 lines in some browsers) and for the cases they aren't sufficient, Ars still supports Unicode emoticons (or rather translates them to inline pixel image ones, I believe).

Otherwise you might run into more and more edge cases that break things, IMHO...

Case in point:

PMID: identifier in scientific citations renders as PMI
DOGBERT SAID: shouldn't really render as DOGBERT SAI either...

When the dumb XenForo parser renders any emoticon markdown shorthand even when not bracketed by spaces or similar characters like EOL, it's the parser itself that's IMHO broken. The Ars forums are often technical, with people quoting scientific papers and other stuff that might have all sorts of : / \ ! characters inside words that don't really belong in code or icode brackets...

 

[DovePig]

Since this somewhat morphed into a Forum support thread, I'd like to write about a pet peeve of mine:

Unwatch thread. Even after I set it to "Unwatch", it always defaults to "Watch" whenever I write a new post in there.

Especially in some (fast‑moving front page) threads, I don't really want a twenty notifications that someone wrote a snarky comment in there, I can read the thread at my leisure already (and only interested in notifications about somebody quoting me or such). Now after writing a new post in a thread I had unwatched previously, I have to refresh the whole page, scroll to the top, click unwatch again, ad nauseam.

This behaviour also stomps out any notifications from any older watched threads that I might still be interested in.

Is that intended behaviour and can it please be changed in some way? Best would be making the Watch/Unwatch sticky and not to change state everytime you reply after you set it manually once. Thanks. If not, I'll just have to keep refreshing and unwatching again, of course ;-)

 

[DovePig]

This is controlled by options in Preferences-- you can set it to automatically (or not) watch content you create and content you interact with, and configure the defaults for email notifications for each.

Oh, was I just that dumb? It wasn't entirely clear to me what the options meant when I last set up the prefs.

Do I get it right then that setting:

Automatically watch content you create… FALSE

would still let me see notifications on quotes of my posts, but not automatically re‑watch the thread every time I create a new post there?

And any idea what 'interaction' in the second option means?

Automatically watch content you interact with…

Cheers!

 

[DovePig]

Are you using two different font or font sizes between an article and it's comments? For some reason i have to have an article page size on 200% to read comfortably yet when i go to the comment section or forum the printing is ginormous and i have to scale to page back to 170% to read comment or forum.

Check User/Preferences/Font size setting.

 

[DovePig]

I am getting random errors trying to post or edit a post (that finally got through, but cut in half). Usually connected to only a specific article, like this one now.

Console:

[Error] Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 404 () (shepherd.min.js.map, line 0)
[Error] Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 403 () (iframeResizer.contentWindow.map, line 0)
[Error] Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 403 () (edit, line 0)
[Error] PHP: <html>
<head><title>403 Forbidden</title></head>
<body>
<center><h1>403 Forbidden</h1></center>
</body>
</html>

    defaultAjaxError (core-compiled.js:42:512)
    l (core-compiled.js:39:302)
    c (jquery-3.5.1.min.js:2:28300)
    fireWith (jquery-3.5.1.min.js:2:29041)
    l (jquery-3.5.1.min.js:2:79836)
    (anonymous function) (jquery-3.5.1.min.js:2:82256)
[ICODE]

 

[DovePig]

That would be this issue, where posting 'system' followed by parentheses fails.

Cheers, thanks!!! That's quite an insidious bug! Never would have thought of it, and I even saw the issue you posted at a glance in the thread list, but never connected the dots

I was always wondering why some of my posts had this error, looks like I shouldn't be trying to be too eloquent with systems and parentheses

 

[DovePig]

Our redesign launch has been delayed by some behind the scene issues, it's basically done except for those, so once we resolve it all one of the things coming with it is system settings from light and dark on the front page.

But for the forum I'm not sure.

Just to add an anecdotal n=1 datapoint, I do switch between the themes quite often when I keep a lot of threads open in tabs, as the sun sets ;-)

But at least the manual switch at the bottom still works somewhat good enough, even though you can't switch easily while reading a forum thread without losing your scroll position in it, which is indeed a bit of a bummer there. Would be nice to have it as a part of the floating header, though that might introduce other issues with dynamic sizing...

 

[DovePig]

If I click the back arrow in an attempt to see the rest of RetrospectZ's quoted post the entire comment thread gets replaced with a giant black bar. I suspect the problem is related to the post being deleted because I can't find the message on that or the previous page, and farther down someone says that the downvoted to oblivion post is furry porn.

I guess the poster was a spambot that tried to do the old bait & switch of "post something offensive to gets lots of quotes, then later edit the post adding lotsa spam links instead" or some other trash like that, but got instabanned and their post deleted by the mods before they managed that. The ban‑hammer nuke option?

The only real issue is that outright banned and deleted – but still referenced to – post links (in any quotes, i.e. the banned poster's name link in the quote block) lead to a 404 page, which is fine (yes, please extirpate banned content outright!), but doesn't indicate that the poster was banned and their post deleted, which can be a bit confusing. XenForo used to show a yellow moderation notice for banned posts instead, but perhaps not when outright nuked by the ?

 

[DovePig]

Yeah, if you scroll up you'll see the black bar is actually a 404 page.

I didn't handle this one, so I can't tell you what happened, but it looks like a spammer/griefer had their post deleted by a mod. We don't normally do that for "content reasons", only things like spam, porn, etc.

It would be invisible except that someone quoted them.

So nothing nefarious or hidden here, moderation wise, just run of the mill garbage content.

Yes, it was a porn image, most probably a spambot trying to get attention and angry quotes for later link injection, or just a griefer, as the post content had zero relevance to the thread and pretty generic language.

Though it would be nice if any accidental quote blocks of the (nuked) spam could be automatically replaced with a moderation notice or something, to lessen any confusion.

 

[DovePig]

There's no easy way to do that, quotes are just text, there's no real link between them.

If people could just not quote dumb spam posts that would be the best thing.

Weird, I thought XenForo did have a functionality to link quote blocks to individual posters, as that's how I thought the "new", but rather excellent and much appreciated feature of hiding quotes from posters on my blocked poster list worked ;-)

Anyway, obviously the best way is not to quote the spambots, idiots or griefers in the first place...

 

[DovePig]

XF doesn't really link things on a deep level, as in the quote that's in your post is just text, but it's parsed in real time, so that things like ignore work.

But if you quote someone, and then their account is deleted the quote in your text is still just text, and not some kind of dynamic object.

Ah, thanks. One more reminder not to quote obvious spambots and idiots then ;-)

 

[DovePig]

Can a click to expand, similar to what's done for long quotes, be applied to embeds similar to this one? 3x the height of my 4k screen is a bit excessive for default display behavior:

View: https://gist.github.com/timvisee/fcda9bbdff88d45cc9061606b4b923ca

The embed code likely interprets Gist similar to code tags?

Totally agree, though – it should default to click to expand.

 

[DovePig]

One more related facepalm. I linked your message about fixing the issue back to the thread it originally happened on, but the embed showed the first post on this page of the thread, not your specific message.

https://meincmagazine.com/civis/threads/ars-forum-updates-are-now-here.1487650/post-42874028

Works OK for me just now? Either fixed already, or just another weird quirk on your end (sorry!) ;-)

Sorry, I misread your post.

 

[DovePig]

This is what I'm seeing [...]

Ah, sorry, I misread your post. Yes, the embed preview of the quoted forum post itself shows a totally unrelated post text than it links to – apparently the very first post on the very page (61st) the actual linked post is at, because it's the first thing the code sees?

I suggest disabling embeds for Ars Fora post links as well might help? I vaguely recall the embed link feature relies on some metadata, and it sounds potentially pretty taxing to create relevant metadata for each and every Ars Forum post in some of the longer threads (1600+ pages and counting in a certain one).