Few minor additions / bug fixes

[scifista42]

Linguica said:

What?

This. In every subforum, right now.

Also, again to the new date format. It bothers me how parts of it are connected by spaces: "Month Day Year Time". Time shouldn't be separated from a year in the same way as year from a month or day, because day-month-year are related together as one information, and time (minutes:hours) is another information. Separating the Time with a comma instead of another space would help. I'd still rather change the date format anyway.

[Sharessa]

Nice coding, Ling. Now the forums look less like an abandoned project from the 90's.

Let's see if I still have a signature here.

[Sharessa]

Wow, I just noticed that the email tied to my account is one I probably haven't used since 2005. I forgot it even existed. Good thing I didn't need a password reset or anything.

[Linguica]

scifista42 said:

I'd still rather change the date format anyway.

The old format was:

06-07-15 12:34

That's a nonstarter to returning to. It was always kind of rude to international users to assume they would read such a date as June 7 instead of July 6. So the current one is

Jun 7 2015 12:34

Which is similar, just with a three-letter month and some other minor changes, because

Jun-07-15 12:34

looks dumb. We could use the ISO 8601 standard and write it as

2015-06-07 12:34

Which... is okay maybe? I don't really like the aesthetic of having the year first, but it's not really WORSE than the current way. There's always also the possibility of doing something like:

Jun 7 2015 at 12:34

Or maybe even a reddit-esque:

4 days ago

[scifista42]

Please no 'ago', 'today' etc, I prefer exact date and time everywhere. So what about the comma between date and time?

Maybe also slightly shrink the space between month day year, via different font only for the space, or put double space between date and time instead of that. Or separate month_day_year with underscores.

[40oz]

Can we get a preview post button for private messages? I (and other people too, apparently) often forget to paste URLs when asking someone to download something. Sometimes when I include italics and bold words in my message I copy it, post reply to a random thread,paste it in the field and preview post there. Very risky!

Also the "x days ago" thing sounds cool to me. Could there be both?

[Gez]

scifista42 said:

Please no 'ago', 'today' etc, I prefer exact date and time everywhere.

I agree, it's awful. I could accept something like this, however:

Jun 7 2015 at 12:34 (5 days ago)

Also I've noticed something odd that didn't happen before. I use View New Posts heavily and when there's more than 25 threads with new posts I use Re-Pagination to get all results on a single page. Recently it has started to behave oddly because after the last page of results it starts loading pages from the last multi-page thread in the results. It didn't use to do that so I figure there's been a change that is making it confused. It's not very important in any case.

[Linguica]

Gez said:

Also I've noticed something odd that didn't happen before. I use View New Posts heavily and when there's more than 25 threads with new posts I use Re-Pagination to get all results on a single page. Recently it has started to behave oddly because after the last page of results it starts loading pages from the last multi-page thread in the results. It didn't use to do that so I figure there's been a change that is making it confused. It's not very important in any case.

I'm sure it has something to do with the fact that I added multi-page links to the multi-page threads in search results.

[FireFish]

Its things like this and people like Linguica whom keep these fan sites running.
fantastic.

[kb1]

I like 2015-06-07 12:34, as it's properly alphabetically sortable. Also Jun 07 12:34 GMT is nice.

I know you recently remove extraneous linefeeds, which is awesome. But I suggest also inserting a single linefeed before the horizontal quote line, just to group quote and response a bit better, visually. Now it's just a bit cluttered looking.

Thanks for working on it - it's getting better all the time!

[Linguica]

I just noticed

Last edited by scifista42 on Jun 11 2015 at 09:26

My god... it's been in front of me all along...

[Linguica]

Fixed an incredibly edge case bug.

When making a new thread / post, the forum software has to insert / update rows in several tables. Specifically, it puts the timestamp into an entry for the post itself, and it updates the "last post" timestamp for the thread it's in, the forum it's in, and the user it was posted by.

What I discovered (because it actually happened today) is that each of these timestamps is independently generated by a call to time(), so if the code happens to be running juuust when one second is turning into the next second, some of these timestamps can be 1 second different from other timestamps, which caused problems with the code to show a new post icon on thread listings. Why the coders did it this way instead of just setting a single "timestamp" variable at the beginning of the process I will never know.

[Linguica]

Also changed the "go to new post" link to actually go to the first post you had not read according to your cookie for the thread, instead of the first post since your "last visited" cookie time, which is the time you first visited the forum in the current browsing session. So now if there's been ten posts in the last half hour and you've already seen the first nine, it will actually jump to the latest post instead of jumping to ten posts from the end.

[Linguica]

Also made it so when you click on a "#" link or "said:" link that jumps to another post on the same page, it jumps / updates the url bar accordingly with javascriptery (in modern browsers).

[Zed]

Sorry, I can't see italics in posts, I'm using Chrome right now (works fine in FireFox).

Nothing serious, but I thought you'd like to know.

[Linguica]

I can see this just fine in Chrome

[Zed]

Weird, I can't (I had to open Firefox to see your reply).

Maybe I have to update? Let me see what happens.

EDIT: Well, it seems that was the problem. Sorry for the inconvenience, and good day sir.

[scifista42]

Links to specific posts stopped working in Internet Explorer, in the sense that they bring me to the correct thread and page, but not the particular post. Same happens when I post a new reply, it no longer takes me back to the post I've just submitted, only to the beginning of the page. Is it a Javascript error?

[Gez]

scifista42 said:

Links to specific posts stopped working in Internet Explorer, in the sense that they bring me to the correct thread and page, but not the particular post. Same happens when I post a new reply, it no longer takes me back to the post I've just submitted, only to the beginning of the page. Is it a Javascript error?

Yes, because Linguica prefered to have links like http://www.doomworld.com/vb/post/1382190 with javascript instead of the more reliable http://www.doomworld.com/vb/post/1382190#post1382190

[vdgg]

Like scifista, I dislike the new date format. I often search for a particular user's post among their posts, knowing the date (I have an .lmp or .txt and I look for the post when they attached it) and it's more difficult now.

[Linguica]

scifista42 said:

Links to specific posts stopped working in Internet Explorer, in the sense that they bring me to the correct thread and page, but not the particular post. Same happens when I post a new reply, it no longer takes me back to the post I've just submitted, only to the beginning of the page. Is it a Javascript error?

I just (re)tested in MSIE 11 and it works fine. If you turn off Javascript or something then it's obviously not going to work.

[Linguica]

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[esselfortium]

Sweetness. Tweetness!

[Scuba Steve]

I can I link my MySpace account?

[Reisal]

What about adding Facebook, Instagram and maybe other popular ones?

[Linguica]

Glaice said:

What about adding Facebook, Instagram and maybe other popular ones?

I feel like Facebook and Insta are too "real life" for default inclusion on Doomworld profiles, honestly. Also I don't want to go overboard with how many I add.

[Linguica]

I changed the way the "new post" icon works so now the forum actually internally keeps track of which threads you have viewed and how far in them you are, even across devices and without worrying about session timeouts. I think...

[scifista42]

I've noticed that you've recently changed the "Profile" button and "online/offline" Doomguy's face icon under each post. Now there is only the little Doomguy's face that indicates whether the user is online or offline, and when you click it, it links to the user's profile. This is fine. But it hasn't been changed everywhere. In Post Hell, it's still the same as before. Slightly more importantly, in PMs, there are now 2 Doomguy's icons next to each other, one clickable and one not. Just wanted to report it.

[Linguica]

Bump to mention the new search page here, also to say that I've started adding a new feature that will make absolutely no difference to anyone: encrypting your PMs. Currently they're all stored in plaintext in the database, but I've been changing the code so they will all get encrypted / decrypted on the fly. Starting now all new PMs should be stored solely in encrypted form, and once I make sure everything seems to be working right I will encrypt all the old existing PMs and delete the plaintext versions.

For any amateur cryptographers, I'm using MySQL's built-in AES_ENCRYPT, using a salted and hashed key for each user. I doubt it would stand up to the NSA but it's certainly better than nothing.

[Memfis]

The old search page seemed to have a little more options...