Bruninho wrote on 2023-05-19, 19:22:

Just a curious question, in which platform is this forum based? phpBB?

You can see references to phpBB in the html source. 😉

I just noticed that i can't access the vintage wallpaper thread, i need to recover a bunch of wallpapers i posted there since i lost the original files.

I recently had one of my posts deleted by a moderator without any notification or reason given. After I raised a report, it was explained that my post got deleted because I had replied to a spam account. To clarify, I quoted exactly three lines from that spam post. They were simply the names of three games (various Duke Nukem 3D editions to be specific). To the best of my knowledge, there was nothing offensive or otherwise rule-breaking in that post of mine. Yet it got unceremoniously deleted without any notification.

IMHO, this is bad policy. If quoting the spam account was the problem, the moderator could have simply edited my post to remove that part of the quote. Deleting legitimate posts from regular users (not including spam accounts) without any notification is really bad practice. Just my $0.02.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-06-04, 07:06:

I recently had one of my posts deleted by a moderator without any notification or reason given. After I raised a report, it was explained that my post got deleted because I had replied to a spam account. To clarify, I quoted exactly three lines from that spam post. They were simply the names of three games (various Duke Nukem 3D editions to be specific). To the best of my knowledge, there was nothing offensive or otherwise rule-breaking in that post of mine. Yet it got unceremoniously deleted without any notification.

IMHO, this is bad policy. If quoting the spam account was the problem, the moderator could have simply edited my post to remove that part of the quote. Deleting legitimate posts from regular users (not including spam accounts) without any notification is really bad practice. Just my $0.02.

+1

My simple post about "Stargunner using tracker music during gameplay" that complemented yours on that thread was deleted too, which is quite sad. At least it could be used to provide additional information.

I think we're lucky to have mods at all, and a site for that matter.

Get over it.

badmojo wrote on 2023-06-04, 23:00:

I think we're lucky to have mods at all, and a site for that matter.

Get over it.

I'm fine with the moderators deleting the post made by a spam account. What happened was an accident and I reposted the information without any further problem.

badmojo wrote on 2023-06-04, 23:00:

I think we're lucky to have mods at all, and a site for that matter.

Get over it.

I am thankful for Vogons being an invaluable repository of knowledge, and I do know that mods are unpaid volunteers. But I will still call them out when they make objectively bad decisions.

Even more so because this has happened a few times before (not to me) i.e. valid posts by normal users getting nuked during so called "thread cleanups". My point is, mods should not simply delete everything that comes after a single spam post. Especially when it takes just a little additional effort to do things right.

badmojo wrote on 2023-06-04, 23:00:

I think we're lucky to have mods at all, and a site for that matter.

Get over it.

What a silly reaction to legitimately constructive criticism.
This is the sort of behaviour that made me give up on trying to get the forum improved for accessibility by getting rid of those atrocious custom cursors, because I was also just told to "deal with it".

And it's only gotten worse, on 4k displays I can barely even see the cursor.
That I need to use uBlock or a CSS editor plugin to even be able to comfortably browse the site is silly, let alone for those with hampered eyesight who might use large or specifically colored cursors on their OS which the site will happily override.

Why browsers don't outright block it or phase that CSS feature out, is beyond me.
But I guess we can just get over it 😒

Daniël Oosterhuis wrote on 2023-06-05, 08:57:

badmojo wrote on 2023-06-04, 23:00:

I think we're lucky to have mods at all, and a site for that matter.

Get over it.

What a silly reaction to legitimately constructive criticism.

Totally agree.

Would like to give a thumbs up for your reply but that is also a feature that got a lot of hateful reactions...

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-06-04, 07:06:

I recently had one of my posts deleted by a moderator without any notification or reason given. After I raised a report, it was explained that my post got deleted because I had replied to a spam account. To clarify, I quoted exactly three lines from that spam post. They were simply the names of three games (various Duke Nukem 3D editions to be specific). To the best of my knowledge, there was nothing offensive or otherwise rule-breaking in that post of mine. Yet it got unceremoniously deleted without any notification.

IMHO, this is bad policy. If quoting the spam account was the problem, the moderator could have simply edited my post to remove that part of the quote. Deleting legitimate posts from regular users (not including spam accounts) without any notification is really bad practice. Just my $0.02.

This thread is for feedback for when the vogons website was updated not for complaints on how the forum is run. If this is something that you feel deeply concerned about then I suggest either creating another thread and/or a PM to moderators.

What may seem simple to you from your perspective may be a rabbit hole from another perspective. I'm not going to go into any detail on how we moderate since that can be used to learn how we do things and figure out how to operate under the radar. If we receive a complaint or complaints then we handle it. If there are several of these then we make a judgement call on how important the posts are before deleting them instead of spending a lot of time on each individual post that shouldn't have been posted anyway (replying to spam), the posts in this case really weren't very important although to you they may be.

P.S. If this post is replied to I'm not going to respond since this isn't the thread for such discussion.

DosFreak wrote on 2023-06-05, 10:14:

What may seem simple to you from your perspective may be a rabbit hole from another perspective.

I was a moderator on a phpBB based forum a long time ago (during the mid 2000s) for several years. I'm sure many things have changed on the software side since that time, but I remember deleting individual posts (even those sandwiched between other posts) and splitting/merging threads being very straightforward, at least back then.

But if the moderation team here considers mass deletions of posts easier, that's their prerogative. For my part, that will dissuade me from posting here more frequently, and limit my contributions to this community. That's all I have to say on this matter and I will not bother you or the mod team any further.

I won't reply because apparently that's frowned upon, but:
"This thread is for feedback for when the vogons website was updated not for complaints on how the forum is run. If this is something that you feel deeply concerned about then I suggest either creating another thread and/or a PM to moderators.

What may seem simple to you from your perspective may be a rabbit hole from another perspective. I'm not going to go into any detail on how we moderate since that can be used to learn how we do things and figure out how to operate under the radar. If we receive a complaint or complaints then we handle it. If there are several of these then we make a judgement call on how important the posts are before deleting them instead of spending a lot of time on each individual post that shouldn't have been posted anyway (replying to spam), the posts in this case really weren't very important although to you they may be.

P.S. If this post is replied to I'm not going to respond since this isn't the thread for such discussion."

This is the kind of post from someone with ultimate control that makes me leave forums. It's akin to saying "If you don't like my forum, go create your own." Yeah no, I want to continue to have discussions, just not have to go through a dictator to do that. I don't contribute here that much honestly, but for something so small and niche, you'd think there would be a little more lax rule set to follow. It's not like this is Reddit or anything.

Daniël Oosterhuis wrote on 2023-06-05, 08:57:

And it's only gotten worse, on 4k displays I can barely even see the cursor.

Which is definitely a scaling problem with your operating system, because I can see it just fine on my 4K monitor (Chrome, Windows 11).

Although I do agree that not having an option to use the regular system cursor is a weird decision. I don't think it would be that hard to add a little conditional CSS to this forum software.

schmatzler wrote on 2023-06-05, 17:36:

Daniël Oosterhuis wrote on 2023-06-05, 08:57:

And it's only gotten worse, on 4k displays I can barely even see the cursor.

Which is definitely a scaling problem with your operating system, because I can see it just fine on my 4K monitor (Chrome, Windows 11).

Although I do agree that not having an option to use the regular system cursor is a weird decision. I don't think it would be that hard to add a little conditional CSS to this forum software.

When you can use a CSS override plugin to fix the mouse cursor issues, then it is definitely easily doable on th backend. There could even be a setting in the user preferences that could set it how the user wants.

schmatzler wrote on 2023-06-05, 17:36:

Daniël Oosterhuis wrote on 2023-06-05, 08:57:

And it's only gotten worse, on 4k displays I can barely even see the cursor.

Which is definitely a scaling problem with your operating system, because I can see it just fine on my 4K monitor (Chrome, Windows 11).

No. This forum uses custom bitmap for cursor that does not scale based on operating system's settings.

GigAHerZ wrote on 2023-04-27, 12:36:

On high DPI screens the overridden mouse cursor in this forum becomes quite tiny.
I understand that it is the retro cursor, but in retro time, there were no high DPI screens on which the operating system could also scale all ui elements.

It would be nice if there would be an option to enable/disable custom cursor or set the size to 100%/150%/200% or something.

GigAHerZ wrote on 2023-06-06, 18:26:

No. This forum uses custom bitmap for cursor that does not scale based on operating system's settings.

That is not true, the custom cursor does scale with the global scaling options on Windows 11, for example.

100% scaling:

175% scaling:

schmatzler wrote on 2023-06-06, 19:19:

That is not true, the custom cursor does scale with the global scaling options on Windows 11, for example. […]
Show full quote

GigAHerZ wrote on 2023-06-06, 18:26:

No. This forum uses custom bitmap for cursor that does not scale based on operating system's settings.

That is not true, the custom cursor does scale with the global scaling options on Windows 11, for example.

100% scaling:
Clipboard02.png

175% scaling:
Clipboard01.png

Mouse settings scaling...

schmatzler wrote on 2023-06-05, 17:36:

Daniël Oosterhuis wrote on 2023-06-05, 08:57:

And it's only gotten worse, on 4k displays I can barely even see the cursor.

Which is definitely a scaling problem with your operating system, because I can see it just fine on my 4K monitor (Chrome, Windows 11).

Although I do agree that not having an option to use the regular system cursor is a weird decision. I don't think it would be that hard to add a little conditional CSS to this forum software.

I use a non-css compatible browser with this forum and everything works great

rmay635703 wrote on 2023-06-10, 04:48:

I use a non-css compatible browser with this forum and everything works great

Where do you even find a browser that doesn't support CSS? Unless you're only browsing VOGONS on retro computers?

Well we have Lynx, Links, eLinks and w3m.

And to an extent, Netsurf - which only supports CSS2.