Me and my eyesight issues with that dithering issue when zooming in.

OK, I have an actual issue here:

In the full post reply editor, it used to be that if you selected a portion of text from somebody else's post and clicked the Quote button, it would quote only the selected text. Now it quotes the whole post no matter what.

keenmaster486 wrote on 2019-12-31, 17:57:

OK, I have an actual issue here:

In the full post reply editor, it used to be that if you selected a portion of text from somebody else's post and clicked the Quote button, it would quote only the selected text. Now it quotes the whole post no matter what.

Click on Review history, then click on the " button.

bjwil1991 wrote on 2019-12-31, 18:16:

Click on Review history, then click on the " button.

That's what I did. It doesn't work. Quotes the entire post -- try for yourself!

Oh, yeah. I remember that. There might be a bug somewhere.

Hi, here is another one of my big reply-to-everyone replies!

keropi wrote on 2019-12-27, 21:28:

I can't log in using my windows10 phone , I enter my credentials but the login page just refreshes and asks about them again
If I enter a wrong password I get a message about it, entering the correct one does not produce any result just the same login screen.
Maybe it's something that can be tweaked? Win10 mobile is a dead platform since some months though, a shame really.

I don’t know yet what could be causing the problem some folks are having with the login form. It’s just a plain old HTML form. The only changes to it from the old board are security-related: an anti-CSRF token which comes from phpBB itself, the login cookies are now SameSite cookies, and the optional 2FA field. I guess some browsers could be freaking out about the SameSite cookie extension but it should be backwards-compatible (browsers that don’t understand should just ignore it).

GigAHerZ wrote on 2019-12-27, 22:03:

Scrolling to an unread post is scrolling to wrong place (probably because images are loaded later) and it seems the unread post indicator from each post is missing... 🙁

Scrolling movement from layout due to image loads is outside of my control; Firefox 66 and later implement scroll anchoring which should keep this from happening.

Can you please explain more what you mean about the unread post indicator?

Shagittarius wrote on 2019-12-27, 22:06:

IE 5 and FF 2.0.0.20 (Windows 98 Versions) can no longer connect on secure and no longer login unsecure. Forgive me if this is a known sacrifice.

See Very New VOGONS on Old Systems: using the 2020 era forums on retro PCs. Eliminating support for insecure connections is intentional and will be increased later so there is no HTTP access at all. Follow the instructions in the linked post to proxy those browsers through a safe TLS connection.

ZellSF wrote on 2019-12-27, 22:52:

And if you go to a "Main" forum:
Heart of Gold
There's no path at the top (C:\Heart of Gold). Might be a design decision, but it seems more like an oversight.

This is intentional. You are at a top level category so there are no parents to display.

keenmaster486 wrote on 2019-12-28, 04:21:

A little CSS bug on my profile page here:
Screenshot_2019-12-27_21-20-47.png

Thanks, this has been fixed!

Stiletto wrote on 2019-12-28, 06:10:

Okay, yeah - the "you have something unread in this thread" indicator is quite subtle. Especially in the oldskool skin. Really hard to see the difference, in my opinion at least.

Couldn't you, I dunno, invert the colors on the icon to give it a full fill or something? I -think- I'd rather a bunch of "SOLID ICON - empty icon - SOLID ICON - empty icon" than these... font changes and icon colored outlines?

I’ve made some other changes to the visibility of unread topics since this comment. Do you still have trouble with the indicator?

krcroft wrote on 2019-12-28, 06:21:

The ASCII banner in the email notifications is broken (I sure like ASCII banners though! Maybe make the message HTML and then monospace-font the banner).

phpBB doesn’t know how to do HTML mail. (Yeah…) I did make the banner smaller in most emails so hopefully the important information is visible now. Let me know if it is better for you.

konc wrote on 2019-12-28, 10:35:

Maybe some emphasis on the arrow that indicates a thread you have replied to? Because of the different thread icons it's difficult to spot quickly when scrolling.

I’ll think about what can be done here. Colouring just the arrow isn’t so simple since the icons are font based, so they can only display one colour. Recolouring only the arrow would require using some overlay and that usually doesn’t turn out very well due to hinting/misalignment.

j^aws wrote on 2019-12-28, 19:14:

Can the subject headers in the white boxes and black text be changed to something that doesn't look out of place - something a bit more subtle that matches the colour scheme? Thanks in advance.

Yes, I’ve put this on my TODO list.

j^aws wrote on 2019-12-28, 20:00:

I have a new request: By switching between mobile and desktop browser modes, I'm forced to re-login each time. I'm sure on the previous forum this was transparent and I used to switch modes depending on how I wanted pages to be displayed. Could this be disabled? Cheers.

Getting logged out isn’t anything that is intentional on this side. I’d guess that the browser is proactively deleting all the cookies since badly programmed sites will sometimes use them to persist whether a desktop or mobile version should be served. This is just a guess, though—I’d have to do testing to know for sure.

640K!enough wrote on 2019-12-28, 21:36:

Did anyone else notice their time zone setting change? I am sure I had it set correctly before, but the first time I looked through my settings since the update, it was configured for a custom time zone, with the time one hour ahead.

The old version of phpBB did not actually support proper time zones, just fixed time offsets with a manual DST toggle, so the upgrade from that old version just did a literal mapping of the fixed time offsets into the special fixed offset Misc timezones. You (everyone) will want to go into your global settings and pick your actually correct time zone.

keenmaster486 wrote on 2019-12-28, 22:25:

I have another suggestion:

The page numbers for posts are not very obvious. It is kind of confusing which one is the current page (perhaps it should be highlighted or bolded rather than just an icon next to it?) Also, they should be above the "quick reply" box and not below it!

I’ll look at if there is a decent way to mark the current page in pagination more clearly. I feel like I tried this differently before and it didn’t go too well, but I’ve put it on my list of things to look at.

I agree about the quick reply being in the wrong place. This was the order of elements in the original phpBB theme which is how it ended up there. I’ve moved it down.

precaud wrote on 2019-12-29, 13:40:

The new color scheme is nearly as unreadable as the old one was. I really like my purple and violet shirts, but displays that have background colors with lots of red (and blue) are really bad for readability and eye comfort. This is because our eyes' contrast sensitivity is primarily in the green part of the spectrum. So screens with predominantly purple and violet color tones (which have very little green) causes strain when reading the white text.

Suggestion: Either choose a background color scheme that is more comfortable and friendly to the users, or how about making the background color a user choice?

Do you have some research that you can point me at which supports this assertion that backgrounds with a low green component cause eye strain? I’ve done quite a lot of research on accessibility and colour and have never seen anyone making this claim.

As far as background configuration goes, there’s no plan to add such a feature. You can use something like Stylus for yourself if you’d like.

Stiletto wrote on 2019-12-30, 20:22:

This forum has some sort of feature to automatically truncate internal VOGONS.org links to only display "viewtopic.php?" etc. in the post's text instead of the full http or https link. (The actual URL is complete, of course)

BUT

It doesn't always work.

I’ve added a TODO to look at what is going on here. If the truncations were hardcoded in old version of phpBB it probably won’t be possible to fix those, but certainly if the board is still doing weird link truncation today, I can at least look to figure out what is the logic behind it and see if it is relatively easily fixable.

Grunt wrote on 2019-12-30, 21:07:

What about video support?

I was asked to not add this by the team.

bjwil1991 wrote on 2019-12-30, 23:22:

I also notice after I create a new thread or reply to it, when I look under my posts (or your posts), it shows up 5 minutes later.

You’re right! The new board uses a proper search engine which works better in every way than the old one. Unfortunately, because phpBB is… not good…, instead of using the realtime indexing feature of the new engine, it instead requires the engine to poll for new posts to add to the search index. As a result, there is a delay of a couple minutes before new posts or changes to posts will be reflected in the “your posts”, “unread posts”, and regular free-form searches.

keenmaster486 wrote on 2019-12-31, 17:57:

In the full post reply editor, it used to be that if you selected a portion of text from somebody else's post and clicked the Quote button, it would quote only the selected text. Now it quotes the whole post no matter what.

I’ve put this on my TODO list.

Snover wrote on 2019-12-31, 19:21:

GigAHerZ wrote on 2019-12-27, 22:03:

it seems the unread post indicator from each post is missing... 🙁

Can you please explain more what you mean about the unread post indicator?

Orange sheet

robertmo wrote on 2019-12-31, 19:59:

Snover wrote on 2019-12-31, 19:21:

GigAHerZ wrote on 2019-12-27, 22:03:

it seems the unread post indicator from each post is missing... 🙁

Can you please explain more what you mean about the unread post indicator?

Orange sheet

Exactly.
When reading a topic, every post in topic had a white (read) or orange (unread) sheet icon. I don't see such indicator for every post any more. It was really nice feature...

It was a shock for me the first time I went here since the new theme, but quickly adopted it. I just posted a message and I'm impressed about the meticulous placement of every details, it is impressive. You must have spent countless hours working on that, snover, I'm thankful for this updated version of the forum.

There is something I do although that maybe can be done less bluntly now. At job when I want to read the forum while I'm working, I usually load browser dev mode and scrape out the CSS so it's unattractive black and white. My desk being next to the water cooler, everyone like to peek at what I'm doing. Now that I see we can have preset please allow me to suggest this old boring "boss key" or "redmond" theme ?

edit : also I'm not sure about the drop shadow on avatar, people can add that if they want, it should be optional. Or detect the presence of alpha pixel and if it's the case, don't apply the filter ? just a thought ...

@Snover, regarding the email banner - it's looking leaner (thank you!). I'm not sure how to address the misalignment without monospace, so suspect it look broken for most folks.

In list view, most email clients show one or two lines of preview.. and this where the vogons banner also eats precious screen space that could be better used to inform the user (so they don't even have to click the message.. could just delete or archive it). Screenshots attached.

Also big thanks overall - the site just keeps getting better! (and over holidays no less..)

While the forum's getting changes, all I can suggest right now is collapsable quotes. Some are chronic big quoters that leave tiny posts (not naming names)

was a like button ever suggested?
I know I know this is not social media BUT there are several posts where you want to say "wow nice" and the forum fills with this kind of posts. Clicking a like button may be less clutter and provide more emphasis to useful posts on the matter.
Obvious posts for likes are the "got this retro hardware today" or "486 build" or "repaired this thing doing this check it out"

leileilol wrote on 2020-01-01, 12:59:

While the forum's getting changes, all I can suggest right now is collapsable quotes. Some are chronic big quoters that leave tiny posts (not naming names)

keropi wrote on 2020-01-01, 16:41:

was a like button ever suggested?

Agree with both of these. Perhaps per post.

One more thing I'm noticing: when you click "quote" on a post in the "review history" tab, it prepends the quote to your message text. Doesn't it make more sense to append the quote?

keropi wrote on 2020-01-01, 16:41:

was a like button ever suggested?
I know I know this is not social media BUT there are several posts where you want to say "wow nice" and the forum fills with this kind of posts. Clicking a like button may be less clutter and provide more emphasis to useful posts on the matter.
Obvious posts for likes are the "got this retro hardware today" or "486 build" or "repaired this thing doing this check it out"

No thanks 😉

A Thank you button would be very useful indeed.

kolderman wrote on 2020-01-01, 20:55:

keropi wrote on 2020-01-01, 16:41:

was a like button ever suggested?

No thanks 😉

I sure wish we knew how many vogoner's agreed with keropi vs kolderman. Answering that would involve some form of reader feedback to a given post 😀

Perhaps a less-psychologically-harmful alternative (to prevent vulnerable users from chasing up-votes or feeling bad after a flood of down-votes) would be to allow users to create polls. Then keropi could have created a poll knowing full well the idea is going to be judged.

I am not seeing this as a like-chasing contest that only a 12y.o. would care , this is a means of saying "nice/wow/I like it" without cluttering the thread with posts that serve nothing other than showing appreciation. A "thanks" button is also the same either would work fine since "like" is apparently stigmatized from facebook and does not shit well with people 😉

How about a like button then that only the post author sees? I.e. The count is hidden from everyone else? If you just want to send appreciation to the post author this should not be a problem correct?

I also think polls are good, but quite unrelated to liking a post.

A Like button discourages posting and doesn't keep a thread alive and bumped up, so a simple comment posted in a thread is more thoughtful and beneficial. Besides, if you really like something then you'd take the time to post it. And that's not really spamming a thread with posts. You can just skip positive and complementary posts if that really bothers you.

A Poll option is something different though, and could encourage posting and discussion.

/me likes j^aws post 😀