Ars forum updates are now here!

[The Aloof Alot]

I can't access the Lounge (should be read-only for me). I get this message:

Page could not be loaded​

The requested page could not be loaded.

• Check your internet connection and try again.
• Certain browser extensions, such as ad blockers, may block pages unexpectedly. Disable these and try again.
• Ars OpenForum may be temporarily unavailable. Please check back later.

Reload

Edit: not disabling my privacy extension (Ghostery) for this.

 

[The Aloof Alot]

And now the Lounge works for me...weird.

 

[The Aloof Alot]

The new forum seems to be a bit glitchy. I can't edit my last post despite the edit icon showing (clicking the button does nothing).

Also, in the Lounge, are non-subscribers supposed to be able to do all the things they can do elsewhere except for replying/posting? I can like posts there too...

Also x2: If I reply to a thread, my own reply is shown to me as being a new reply to the thread. It doesn't have to tell me that, I know that already.

 

[The Aloof Alot]

Frontpage bug: The number of replies is not shown below the items in the overview.

 

[The Aloof Alot]

Be sure to check your Preferences in your user control panel. Profiles are set by default to be viewable to anyone, not just members... A lot of other options, such as all (and there are many) notification options are set to enabled by default.

 

[The Aloof Alot]

The voting is wonky. I just upvoted something that was at 3(3/3) and it went to 5(5/5)...

 

[The Aloof Alot]

Oh

Oh totally no. I had to reset password and I never use F or G for it. Please take care of these. We trust you with our log on credentials.

Unless I am mistaken, all of the people who have complained about weird stuff with accounts have had rather old (if not ancient) accounts. So perhaps something went wrong with converting those specifically?

 

[The Aloof Alot]

At least moonshark isn't eating the ponies. That's good progress.

There's two things that I found pretty funny about this upgrade (in a good way):
- That the Pony-thread in the Lounge is still there. Somehow the first posts in that thread gave me the impression people expected that the forum would roll back a bit after the upgrade, but it didn't
- That the upgrade was on a Wednesday, which fits in nicely with the "The forums will be upgraded on Tue..."-etc. joke.

 

[The Aloof Alot]

My account transferred perfectly.

To disprove my theory, we'd need a recent account where the password was somehow invalidated.

 

[The Aloof Alot]

The up-/downvoting has improved, but does not work consistently good. I just upvoted something after upvoting other things earlier without a hitch, and got this:

56(56/-1) => upvote => 57(57/57)

 

[The Aloof Alot]

What counts as recent? Mine is only ten years old.

On other forums I've seen similar shenanigans with accounts that were migrated several times to new forum versions, so I would say an account where the password glitch occurred that was created in the last version of the forum before the migration to XenForo.

 

[The Aloof Alot]

The reason I say they are overwhelmingly liked is that, when you scroll through, you see that most people here have adopted one. Maybe they don't actually like avatars, but have just succumbed to peer pressure?

FYI, the avatars that have a single color with your username initial in it are generic avatars generated by the forum...

 

[The Aloof Alot]

So...weird one. If you're logged in, then get disconnected from the internet, and try to go to another page, you get served the Ars Technica error page for something going wrong (that's not the Moonshark, I mean the page claiming there might be server trouble) or the actual forum page without any images and formatting, instead of your browser's "No internet connection" page. Which is pretty confusing.

 

[The Aloof Alot]

Something that keeps bugging me:

I type a reply, and then decide that I don't want to post it. Since the new forum will remember my draft reply next time I come to the same thread, I hit the save icon and select "delete draft". The button shows a green dot, but my reply remains firmly intact in the reply box. I'd expect it to disappear.

 

[The Aloof Alot]

Another bug: If a front page article has HTML formatting tags in the title, those show up in the forum thread title, e.g.:

https://meincmagazine.com/civis/threads/em-control-em-one-of-ray-tracing’s-first-killer-apps-is-getting-a-sequel.1487795/

The article uses the em tag to put "Control" in italics, but that fails in the topic title.

 

[The Aloof Alot]

Huh, at least we increased it to 40! This feels pretty edge case for sure, but maybe something to look at after the big issues are dealt with.

I just tried looking at another user's posts (here: https://meincmagazine.com/civis/search/22124/?page=3), and for me the pagination works correctly (Vivaldi on Mac). So that looks like another bug that only happens sometimes.

 

[The Aloof Alot]

While looking at Ars while being logged out on my work machine, I was able to see four subscriber-only forums (and also browse them) today. One of them was the PDF-link forum. Most of the posts in all four forums were from 2010 and earlier. Looks like some permissions issue?

 

[The Aloof Alot]

Just pointing out that the user who was banned from replying earlier today seems to be replying just fine on the front page. Ban glitch, or do bans only apply to specific threads and/or forums?

If it's the latter, maybe you should amend the text indicating the kind of ban that shows up on their avatar.

 

[The Aloof Alot]

And another bug with how the votes work on front page comments:

1) Say there are three comments in a row. You want to upvote all three of them.
2) You upvote the first one, 1 is added to the total of the first comment.
3) You upvote the second one, 2 is added to the total of the second comment
4) You upvote the third one, 3 is added to the total of the third comment

I don't think that's supposed to work that way...

Edit: Indeed, could be coincidence.

Edit 2: disregard, can't reproduce that in an older thread (although that one dates from before the transition)

 

[The Aloof Alot]

Okay, I definitely need the ability to Ignore more than 1000 people. The Musk threads are just filling up with trolls.

Or you could wait until auto-hiding posts with too many negatives is rolled out, or try not reading stupid posts (or teaching yourself to not do that).

Unless you're a Musk fanboy and want to put everyone who says something negative about Musk on ignore.

 

[The Aloof Alot]

Way to just jump to the dumbest conclusions possible. No, I'm blocking the Musk fanboys who just jump in to claim everyone is simply jealous of his "genius" as he drives away all his workers & advertisers.

"Try not reading stupid posts" is the equivalent of telling someone to just put their fingers in their ears the instant anyone around them starts talking. That's not a useful comment at all.

Two points:

1. As you might have been able to surmise from the

   :P

   smily I put in my last line, my last line was a joke. Apparently that went over your head.
2. So, whenever you're presented with a page of text, you musty compulsively read all of that text, do I understand you correctly? You can just skip text that seems like drivel, you know. Just like you can not pay attention to people making stupid comments while they stand next to you. If both of those things are a foreign concept to you, then maybe the problem is with yourself. Note that I am assuming here that you do not have OCD. Most humans can selectively ignore specific inputs (and I say that as someone who has some issues with that).

Edit: As to avoid further discussion on this, the easy way to ignore something is to pay attention to things that are more interesting to you. Using the classic "Try not to think about the pink elephant", actively trying to ignore that thing that you wish to ignore does not work because that requires you to think about the pink elephant, instead think about something else than the pink elephant.

Now back to forum bugs.

 

[The Aloof Alot]

You're not wrong. And again, we are hearing that people miss that. More than we expected! It's not something anyone ever gave us feedback about until it was missing, but sometimes that's how it goes, you often only hear complaints, not people being content.

But what I was trying to get at was if you downvoted something, and you picked "disagree" vs "abusive" it didn't change anything. It was just a downvote still. And I think people felt better, that they were voting "appropriately". But it felt a little bit like a trick since we just didn't do enough with that info on the back end.

Maybe it doesn't matter and the positive parts were more than enough reason, it's good to have the feedback now. Nothing has to be a permanent change, we're certainly willing to rethink bringing it all back.

But might be nice to also ponder making it feel like it was worth more.

So what the sort option did was taking all of the posts that were (e.g.) tagged "Funny", and sort those from most votes to least votes?

I still think the "Like"-function could be used as a replacement for the tagging. Then write a custom post sort function that allows sorting by filtering on the selected icons in the "Like"-function and sorting the resulting query results by most votes first.

 

[The Aloof Alot]

When I click on "upvote" the counter has been incrementing twice. This was a single click, not double click. Typical logitech mouse on a Windows 10 PC using Firefox 107.0. I have observed this double upvote several times. I do not believe that the mouse is sending double click events since in other contexts a single click acts like a single click.

This also caught me out, but comes from the fact that new up-/downvotes are only tallied the moment you click the button. So 2 new upvotes are yours, plus someone else's.

 

[The Aloof Alot]

Is it possible to add an option to frontpage threads with which I can downvote all posts with a score beyond a certain negative votes threshold at once? Clicking on each minus 1 vote option separately is hard work...

 

[The Aloof Alot]

It was 'slow' before too, but we updated the visuals immediately to make it feel snappy. Probably something we can look into again.

I noticed it seemed slower when going from a single digit to two digits (and probably also from 2 to 3 etc.).

 

[The Aloof Alot]

There's something weird going on with the front page comments. I was in the middle of reading a comment (i.e. screen stationary, no scrolling) when the screen moved up and down on its own a few times, like some part of the comments or article collapsed themselves and then reopened.

 

[The Aloof Alot]

Editor bug I just noticed: there are superscript and subscript buttons hiding on the toolbar with no icons:

View attachment 47879

You get a whole lot of additional options that don't show up in non-dark mode (but seem to be missing some I get):

The hidden sub-/superscript icons don't exist here...

Edit: wait, no, there are two options for getting additional buttons...that's confusing. Can't that be collapsed into a single button for additional options?

 

[The Aloof Alot]

More things collapse onto each of those two menus as you resize your browser window to be smaller, so I'm not sure how much flexibility there would be to combine them. Seems like the first three-dot menu is the overflow for character styles, and the second three-dot menu is the overflow for inserting block objects.

I get that, but why aren't those combined in the first place? In real software with (visually) single button bars there's only a single expansion button, not multiple. Maybe add separators between the button bars, if they're separate and a single expansion button can't hold all of the additional options?

 

[The Aloof Alot]

Thanks Aurich, its better now.

Maybe another complaint, not sure if already reported. I'm viewing on dark mode and in the below comment, RockDaMan is quoting the article and adding bold. However, the words do not appear.
View attachment 47902

However, i can select / highlignt the words that are missing.
View attachment 47903
Is this also an issue with my settings?

They do appear, but are very dark blue on black by the looks of it.

 

[The Aloof Alot]

It's a browser bug, searching is funny for some in iFrames. Not much we can do about it right now.

I think we'll bring back the preferences to just read comments straight in the forum easily for anyone having iFrame problems or just a preference for the full interface.

IIRC, in some browsers you need to explicitly click on the are you want to search in when frames are used.

 

[The Aloof Alot]

Okay, just noticed this:

Someone quoted someone else in dark mode, and in light mode I get the dark mode colours in the quote.

 

[The Aloof Alot]

I dunno how they're happening, there should be a flood control to stop basic ones.

I'm pretty sure this is working, as I triggered it some days ago by double-clicking the reply button.

 

[The Aloof Alot]

This is something that should be happening by default, we'll take a look into what's going on there.

It worked properly before the change that makes the "Like"-button text turn red.

 

[The Aloof Alot]

Hmm, putting smillies into URLs like that is not desirable.

For the moment I've moved it to needing a back slash, not sure if that will create problems too.

It doesn't actually break the URL, tho.

Another thing that fits in with the inconsistent behaviour already mentioned: Since this week, if I refresh a page I end up back at the top of the page instead of the post I was reading further down the page.

 

[The Aloof Alot]

Do you have more than 1 tab with comments open at a time? The new software uses a site-wide value to keep track of your scroll position; so if you last scrolled in tab A and then reload tab B without doing anything else it doesn't remember where you were.

They're not monitoring any events that fire when a tab is reselected or a reload is requested that would set it when you go back to an open page and reload to check for new replies.

The best work around there is right now is to jiggle the page position up/down using the scroll wheel, etc and then reload. If you're refreshing multiple pages at once because of a browser restart though there's no way to have it remember where you were on more than one page.

No, I'm using a single tab, AFAIK (will check).

It could also have something to do with the new version of Vivaldi, as I've noticed some minor glitches elsewhere, too.

 

[The Aloof Alot]

[size=0] also works, and is equal to [size=1].

Negative values do not work.

Using pixels as the units allows for smaller and larger text than is possible through using 1 to 7

 

[The Aloof Alot]

Heavily downvoted comments don't seem to be disappearing anymore. Is this deliberate?

Oh, so it isn't just me...

 

[The Aloof Alot]

Non-subscribers can vote in polls in forums where only subscribers can post.

(my choice was "Desserts", incidentally)

 

[The Aloof Alot]

Thanks! Glad sanity rules the day.

Both posters now seem to have non-animated avatars.

With no option to change it again, if I read Aurich's reply in the linked thread above correctly.

Of course, they really ought to be stuck with their animated avatar permanently set to some embarrassing animation frame...

 

[The Aloof Alot]

Something is broken in how ignored users are handled (possibly to do with the "hide posts with low score" for the front page, since it appears to be broken since that works again). For me, posts by ignored users in normal threads don't show up at all in a thread, except in quoted posts featuring the ignored user, where I get the 'message not displayed because ignored'-message.
When I click the link provided in such a quote, all messages by the ignored user suddenly show up, fully visible, instead of only the message I wanted to see.