Aug-2014 HSers Upgrade thread

[Sherman Davies]

Originally Posted by Xorlof

Nested quotes are back!

Great, although I'd still like to know which genius decided to get rid of them in the first place. My neg-rep trigger finger is itchy.

[Porkins]

Originally Posted by Sherman Davies

Great, although I'd still like to know which genius decided to get rid of them in the first place. My neg-rep trigger finger is itchy.

Easy, SD. Just give the nice Smurf a cookie

[Xorlof]

Originally Posted by Sherman Davies

Great, although I'd still like to know which genius decided to get rid of them in the first place. My neg-rep trigger finger is itchy.

Go ahead and hit me with the negrep. There is a bit of story behind nested quotes vs. no nested quotes. When I created the test server earlier this year to try out this newer version of vBulletin, it didn't have nested quotes (same behavior as you've experienced the past couple of weeks). I thought, "stripping nesting must be a new feature of vBulletin that I didn't read about." Anyway, the feedback from the all of the testers who chose to weigh in on the "non-nestingness" was one of approval.

Fast forward to the install earlier this month--going live without the nested quotes--and the negative feedback from the larger membership. I started to investigate and it turns out that the old version of vBulletin we upgraded from didn't support nested quotes either. It must have been a long-forgotten hack Xotli or bunjee hand-coded to make that the behavior. (When you think about it from a programming perspective, it is easier to make quotes nest, so vBulletin considers a feature that they get rid of the nesting).

Anyway, no hacks are needed anymore. vBulletin still doesn't support nesting out-of-the-box, but there is a nice, simple, free third-party plugin available to make it do nesting. That's what I installed. Should we ever upgrade to the vBulletin v4 branch, (we're at the latest of the v3 branch), the plugin supports that as well, so it shouldn't break again at the next upgrade.

[Porkins]

I just noticed that when I am typing a reply, formerly the Tab key moved the highlight from the cursor in the text area to the "Post Quick Reply" button.

Current behavior is when quoting someone else's post which contains a smiley, the Tab key moves the highlight to the smiley in the text area instead of the Reply button.

This is on IE.

[El T]

@Xorlof , @Sherman Davies et al.

While I was initially a big fan of the non-nested quotes as a tester, I realize now that both snipping out older quotes and nesting all the quotes have their flaws.

On the one hand, nested quotes offer, within one post, everything that has been said in one conversation. That's obviously good for going back to reference things as you read or reply. Snipping out nested quotes makes it harder to find things that have been said a few posts back in the conversation, especially if those post are on earlier pages.

On the other hand, snipping out nested quotes is a great antidote to those massive quote tunnels that occasionally build up. Those tunnels, among other things, make mobile viewing a chore.

I think a solution that would satisfy both parties would be to simply collapse quotes that are nested on the second level or further, similar to a spoiler. The old quotes would still be there, but quote tunnels wouldn't take up so much space. Is this doable?

[TGRF]

Originally Posted by El T

@Xorlof , @Sherman Davies et al.

While I was initially a big fan of the non-nested quotes as a tester, I realize now that both snipping out older quotes and nesting all the quotes have their flaws.

On the one hand, nested quotes offer, within one post, everything that has been said in one conversation. That's obviously good for going back to reference things as you read or reply. Snipping out nested quotes makes it harder to find things that have been said a few posts back in the conversation, especially if those post are on earlier pages.

On the other hand, snipping out nested quotes is a great antidote to those massive quote tunnels that occasionally build up. Those tunnels, among other things, make mobile viewing a chore.

I think a solution that would satisfy both parties would be to simply collapse quotes that are nested on the second level or further, similar to a spoiler. The old quotes would still be there, but quote tunnels wouldn't take up so much space. Is this doable?

Hopefully it's doable, because that sounds like an excellent suggestion. I wouldn't have to do it by hand anymore.
Also, I've noticed that on the profiles, the group memberships are just in a big list with no separators. We might want to put some semicolons in there or something.
~TGRF.

[A3n]

There used to be a link at the bottom to a page that would display all Heroscapers members. How do we get to that now?

[DanieLoche]

I just discovered something about the rep box when I'm with my phone...

We already noticed that the box disapears when we tap on the comment zone, thus it's not possible to give rep with a comment from a mobile phone...

Well, in fact it's possible ! When I tap on the text zone, the rep box is hodden, but I still have my keybord to write something... and when I tap "go" on my keyboard... the forum saus me that I just sent some rep !

So even if the rep box is no more here, you can write your comment and semd your rep... ^^

So, @Xotli , if you see that you received some rep with a strange amd unsignificant message, it's me ! ^_^

[TGRF]

It is far from a major issue, but I was editing a post today with different fonts in it. When I selected the text, the font box went blank like it normally does when encountered with multiple fonts, but it also narrowed to about two millimeters in width. This did nothing to performance, as I selected the correct font and it applied it just fine.
Just a bug.
~TGRF.

[Sheep]

Also, my pictures aren't re-sizing when previewing a message.

[lefton4ya]

How do you see the list of users or search for a user. I also like seeing new users and/or sorting user list by date joined or posted. Probably just not finding it.

[Xorlof]

I'll try to get to some updates today.

One thing I've already done today is put in place a replacement for the old image resizer we used to use. Please let me know if you are still seeing images that are too big anywhere. I'd like some feedback on the way I did this image resizing to see if it meets your needs.

The old resizer used to have the page load with all of the images huge, then after the page was loaded, would resize them down to a maximum of 400 pixels wide, creating a link that you could click on to view the image full size. This slowed down display and resulted in the screen "flickering" during load, but worked pretty well.

The new resizer eliminates the short period where the images load super-big, auto-resizing them to the smaller size as the page loads. This is great, with better performance and no screen flickering. That's an improvement, but the see-full-size experience is arguably not as good in two respects: 1) You get no indication that you can click on an image to get the bigger version, and 2) to see the bigger image, you click and hold. (It would be easy to change this to just hovering over the image if that's better). See Johnny Shotgun Sulivan's card for an example. One side benefit of this system is that we can have different resize standards for different themes (width vs narrow theme), but right now they're all setup uniformly.

Does this work for y'all? This is an area we should get "right," so if you don't think it is "right" then I'll work on the issue more and code something closer to the old system. The old version was a hack, and I'm trying to avoid hacks where possible (to make future upgrades easier), but if we need a hack, we need a hack.

(BTW, I also increased the maximum image width to 600 pixels in threads since monitors are bigger and higher resolution these days.)