UH why the red?

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stet?

BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Monday, 5 March 2007 17:52 (nineteen years ago)

my first thought was that NOT WORKSAFE in big red capital letters is a fairly ironic way to deal with non-work-safe content!

Tracer Hand, Monday, 5 March 2007 17:54 (nineteen years ago)

Uh oh... should I pack for the Sandbox again?

Ben Boyerrr, Monday, 5 March 2007 18:04 (nineteen years ago)

I think that the NOT WORK SAFE thing doesn't have its color tag closed properly.

Chris H., Monday, 5 March 2007 18:12 (nineteen years ago)

Bizarre - it's working fine here?

Pashmina, Monday, 5 March 2007 18:12 (nineteen years ago)

works on firefox, broken on ie

Edward III, Monday, 5 March 2007 18:14 (nineteen years ago)

aha

BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Monday, 5 March 2007 18:25 (nineteen years ago)

hence the gfs lack of trouble

BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Monday, 5 March 2007 18:26 (nineteen years ago)

Haha so the "not work safe" tag is broken on the browser people are more likely to be using at work.

nabisco, Monday, 5 March 2007 18:30 (nineteen years ago)

hoosteen has a gf on ilx.

g®▲Ðұ, Monday, 5 March 2007 18:32 (nineteen years ago)

broken on firefox here.

chaki, Monday, 5 March 2007 19:10 (nineteen years ago)

what version of firefox are your running chaki

Edward III, Monday, 5 March 2007 19:16 (nineteen years ago)

I want some running chaki! ;_;

HI DERE, Monday, 5 March 2007 19:18 (nineteen years ago)

1.5.0.10

chaki, Monday, 5 March 2007 19:18 (nineteen years ago)

works on firefox 2.0.0.2

Edward III, Monday, 5 March 2007 19:34 (nineteen years ago)

nope. just installed 2.0.0.2. still happening.

chaki, Monday, 5 March 2007 19:42 (nineteen years ago)

hmm. what os are you running?

Edward III, Monday, 5 March 2007 19:46 (nineteen years ago)

Someone mentioned this before, I think through IE. I'm fine in Firefox. I have fixed the bug, but just getting a test server to run stuff in parallel with the main site so we can test stuff before it goes live, as there are a whole bunch of other changes too.

Keith, Monday, 5 March 2007 19:58 (nineteen years ago)

these changes - can we eat them?

Tracer Hand, Monday, 5 March 2007 20:11 (nineteen years ago)

I'm not sure I understand that...

Keith, Monday, 5 March 2007 20:14 (nineteen years ago)

i'm not sure i do either.

can we have a vote on big changes like this one? some of the new ideas have been great - polls, for instance. we could even use the poll feature to run your new whizbang hoonja doonjas up the flagpole. i know i would feel more included.

Tracer Hand, Monday, 5 March 2007 20:21 (nineteen years ago)

Tracer,

Yes of course you can. That's actually why I wrote polls in the first place, because it was becoming clear that no-one could make their mind up how to prioritise stuff.

If you're going to do this, can we discuss what goes in the poll first? Because some things are not possible and others not desirable for a variety of reasons, and then have a vote.

Keith, Monday, 5 March 2007 20:24 (nineteen years ago)

An IM conversation might be a good idea so as you follow what I mean just there, if it's perhaps confusing.

Keith, Monday, 5 March 2007 20:26 (nineteen years ago)

I love how Keith subtly delegates this suggested task to the suggester. ;)

Ms Misery, Monday, 5 March 2007 20:27 (nineteen years ago)

can we have a vote to make emoticons turn sidey like in googlechat?

Jimmy The Mod Awaits The Return Of His Beloved, Monday, 5 March 2007 20:29 (nineteen years ago)

Hehe... Well, it's because I've spent about five months trying to do it, with limited success.

Keith, Monday, 5 March 2007 20:29 (nineteen years ago)

hi keith! sorry i had to go away and tend to some fish. yeah, i think you're the only one in a position to start a poll (or stet?) cause i don't know what kind of shenanigans are in the works.

Tracer Hand, Monday, 5 March 2007 20:46 (nineteen years ago)

Nothing controversial really; just a bunch of fixes, plus x-posts & revive markers (though no doubt people will dislike the way they look), some ropey thing to make logins survive over browser closes for now and a bunch of other stuff I've forgotten about.

Oh yeah, and "--".

Keith, Monday, 5 March 2007 20:49 (nineteen years ago)

Thanks to Tom for the "--" and the not Keith.

Keith, Monday, 5 March 2007 20:51 (nineteen years ago)

Oh yeah, and libcrypt for an automatic email address obscurer.

Keith, Monday, 5 March 2007 20:51 (nineteen years ago)

nice! yeah, none of those things sound too controversial. the red thing for NSFW thing i would have voted against, though, because it draws attention to exactly the thing you don't want anyone noticing: i.e. you are looking at NSFW stuff on your computer screen, at work. it could be fun to have polls about all these things, though. ILXors = be lovin arguin. afterwards you could just do whatever it was you were going to do anyway and pretend that's what had been voted for. that's how phone-in TV competitions work, as i understand it.

Tracer Hand, Monday, 5 March 2007 20:53 (nineteen years ago)

Maybe you're understanding the difficulty! Getting agreement is next to impossible. My favourite was the return to new answers after submitting an answer. I didn't originally have it like that, but others said it must go to new answers, and the instant we go live people are complaining that it obviously shouldn't go to new answers! Didn't surprise me, though. Spent months preparing myself for the reaction. It was actually less harsh than I thought it would be, if you can believe that.

The NSFW thing is a trivial stylesheet change and would take about two seconds to sort.

Keith, Monday, 5 March 2007 20:56 (nineteen years ago)

who are these others - and can we eat them

Tracer Hand, Monday, 5 March 2007 21:02 (nineteen years ago)

I'm just not sure how you would poll for changes other than having a poll for each issue with all options possible. That would be a lot of polls. maybe to live on a different board?

Ms Misery, Monday, 5 March 2007 21:03 (nineteen years ago)

I don't think it'd be practical in terms of actually what the solution to a problem is; no-one would ever agree on that, but it might be useful to get a list of things into a given order.

Keith, Monday, 5 March 2007 21:08 (nineteen years ago)

Maybe you're understanding the difficulty! Getting agreement is next to impossible. My favourite was the return to new answers after submitting an answer. I didn't originally have it like that, but others said it must go to new answers, and the instant we go live people are complaining that it obviously shouldn't go to new answers!

There's a simple answer for this: any behavior users can't agree on becomes a candidate for a per-user preference.

Edward III, Monday, 5 March 2007 21:12 (nineteen years ago)

And I just implement all possibilities!

Keith, Monday, 5 March 2007 21:13 (nineteen years ago)

Well, in practical terms, where do you go after posting? A) back to new answers, B) back to thread. Not C) to google, D) to horsecolonic.com, E) to noize board. Are you being wilfully obstinate? ;-)

Edward III, Monday, 5 March 2007 21:17 (nineteen years ago)

In seriousness, I actually tried to avoid having a lot of preferences, basically because it can complicate things, sometimes unnecessarily, and it certainly complicates dealing with people who have issues with the site, as you also have to understand exactly what their preferences are set to.

Keith, Monday, 5 March 2007 21:19 (nineteen years ago)

unfortunately its difficult to build a message board without implementing user preferences. they're a base user expectation for that breed of software.

Edward III, Monday, 5 March 2007 21:23 (nineteen years ago)

And so is the thing not falling over all the time under the weight of user preferences.

.stet., Monday, 5 March 2007 21:44 (nineteen years ago)

ideally it's both? it's kind of like saying "your mail client doesn't crash but by the way, it doesn't save any of your sent items." I understand you want to ensure stability but hopefully that won't be used as an excuse to *never* implement user-based preferences.

Edward III, Monday, 5 March 2007 21:54 (nineteen years ago)

screw preferences, everybody can get whatever color they want, as long as it's black. or red. or whatever we decide. this is all reminding me of the difference between the way europeans order pizza and the way americans do - in europe everybody gets their own. in the US you have a usually fun and occasionally mildly contentious conversation beforehand about what toppings to get on the giant, shared pie.

Tracer Hand, Monday, 5 March 2007 23:11 (nineteen years ago)

what the fuck are you talking about?

Edward III, Tuesday, 6 March 2007 00:05 (nineteen years ago)

user preferences vs. the same for everybody. fucker.

Tracer Hand, Tuesday, 6 March 2007 00:30 (nineteen years ago)

The red is doing my head in. So angry looking.

Hard like armour, Tuesday, 6 March 2007 03:30 (nineteen years ago)

Implementing user preferences is non-trivial unless you dump everything client-side.

HI DERE, Tuesday, 6 March 2007 03:34 (nineteen years ago)

if they're so difficult to implement and such a threat to application stability, why are they available on every message board out there? I mean, I hear what you're saying but it doesn't compute.

(beats tracer's unamerican shut up and eat yr porridge approach, though)

Edward III, Tuesday, 6 March 2007 03:58 (nineteen years ago)

Red=the mentalstration. Must avoid making NSFW query NSFW.

Abbott, Tuesday, 6 March 2007 04:41 (nineteen years ago)

OMG, did he just say....

Did he call you....

UNAMERICAN

http://i25.photobucket.com/albums/c91/zombichi/Image%20Macros/Nooooooo.jpg
http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a173/hameesh/Poirot1/nooooooo.jpg

Frogman Henry, Tuesday, 6 March 2007 04:42 (nineteen years ago)

Man what the hell happened to Marc Almond? He used to look so good.

Abbott, Tuesday, 6 March 2007 04:46 (nineteen years ago)

OMG, did he just say....

Did he call you....

UNAMERICAN


haha, tracer's the one who got all mr. patriotic pizza on me

R U COMMIE

Edward III, Tuesday, 6 March 2007 14:38 (nineteen years ago)

why are they available on every message board out there? I mean, I hear what you're saying but it doesn't compute.

ILX is seven or eight years old and packed the fuck full of messages. It runs on one relatively small computer. All the other boards near us on big board are running custom code, throwing servers at the problem, disabling things like search or are just damn slow.

One of this place's strengths is the all-text no-ads no-shit code. The new code's goal was to try and replicate that without also falling on its arse every time we were mentioned in a newspaper. The stuff that keeps it from falling down works by caching everything. That means not hitting the db. That bit of it at least seems to be working incredibly well -- most of the time it is seriously fast, especially compared to the old code (and we were mentioned in the Guardian again yesterday, heh).

Per-user prefs would either be done client side, or have to have their own cache. And would still be essentially pointless, because the log out thing is still in effect. First things first. I'm not saying that there can never ever be user-side preferences, of course. Just that they're not a "simple answer" to things ilxors can't agree on!

.stet., Tuesday, 6 March 2007 15:12 (nineteen years ago)

And also: do volunteers need an "excuse" to not do what you say?

.stet., Tuesday, 6 March 2007 15:28 (nineteen years ago)

I am happy with ILx, and the red writing! You guys! Honestly!

I am more shocked to hear about Tracey's pizza ordering madness. GET YOUR OWN PIZZAS for crying out loud. I often am in the terrible situation of eating pizza with vegetarians and frankly my deres I could not cope if I knew the meat option wasn't available - despite the fact that I usually have the Fiorentina anyway! Oh ,pizza!

Sarah, Tuesday, 6 March 2007 15:32 (nineteen years ago)

That bit of it at least seems to be working incredibly well -- most of the time it is seriously fast

I had a short exchange with Keith on an "experimental" thread I started. cache processed it in 2ms but it took 60 seconds to load on the client side. it was an extreme example, but it indicated there might be some potential bandwidth bottleneck issues down the line.

First things first. I'm not saying that there can never ever be user-side preferences, of course.

okay, that's reasonable. I'd imagine two top priorities right now are 1) persisting user state and 2) xpost warning. I could be wrong, though!

Just that they're not a "simple answer" to things ilxors can't agree on!

speaking broadly, that's usually the best approach when a consensus can't be reached on board functionality. progression is: half the users want X, the other half want Y, next logical follow-on = should this be a user preference? granted, it's not the answer in all cases, but that's the usual evaluation path.

I don't doubt that at some point user preferences will be implemented here. lord knows you and keef have yr hands full at the moment, but it might be more accurate to say "user preferences will be implemented in due time" rather than "user preferences will cause the site to crash."

Edward III, Tuesday, 6 March 2007 16:55 (nineteen years ago)

And also: do volunteers need an "excuse" to not do what you say?

hey, I'm not ordering anyone about. just trying to have a discussion about site changes. keep in mind I volunteered a bit of time myself trying to troubleshoot old ilx and keep the jalopy running - if we were operating on a platform I knew anything about I'd offer more assistance, as it is I can just offer some consensus-building approaches that are platform-independent ;-)

Edward III, Tuesday, 6 March 2007 17:03 (nineteen years ago)

individual pizzas are nuts.

Ms Misery, Tuesday, 6 March 2007 17:07 (nineteen years ago)

user preferences are not lunch

Edward III, Tuesday, 6 March 2007 17:12 (nineteen years ago)

Starry you can always ask for a pizza with half green peppers and olives and the other half sprinkled w/meats!

Tracer Hand, Tuesday, 6 March 2007 17:59 (nineteen years ago)

there are some vegetarians who would be very much not ok with that plan, tracer!

the schef (adam schefter ha ha), Tuesday, 6 March 2007 18:21 (nineteen years ago)

I had a short exchange with Keith on an "experimental" thread I started. cache processed it in 2ms but it took 60 seconds to load on the client side. it was an extreme example, but it indicated there might be some potential bandwidth bottleneck issues down the line.

there are more than a few of those! Drop me a line, if you wouldn't mind? I'd like to track that down.

.stet., Tuesday, 6 March 2007 18:28 (nineteen years ago)

ok, gimme some time to summarize the, urm, "findings"

Edward III, Tuesday, 6 March 2007 19:24 (nineteen years ago)

I would like to praise a feature that I haven't seen praised yet: the way that clicking an old link from somewhere to an ilx.wh3rd.net thread seamlessly opens the selfsame thread in nu-ILX. That is fantastic. It could have been a source of much trouble and complaint, and it isn't, and it works perfectly, and nobody mentions it.

eater, Tuesday, 6 March 2007 20:24 (nineteen years ago)

well I think that's b/c all the content from the old database was imported into this new one.

Ms Misery, Tuesday, 6 March 2007 20:25 (nineteen years ago)

But clicking http://ilx.wh3rd.net/thread.php?msgid=3385199 magically takes you to http://www.ilxor.com:8080/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?boardid=40&threadid=15443 -- that's acutely clever!

eater, Tuesday, 6 March 2007 20:28 (nineteen years ago)

every now and again i run into an old greenspun link that never made it over in the Great Migration of 200-whatever, but i agree it is magnificent that 99% of the links are doin their thing.

Tracer Hand, Tuesday, 6 March 2007 20:30 (nineteen years ago)

"user preferences will cause the site to crash."

Who are you quoting there? Not me, anyway... I wrote that user preferences would cause more support problems, because if someone had a problem, one would have to understand exactly how they had the board set up to deal with it. It's nothing to do with crashing or possibly performance.

You can thank stet for the old threads and their links, but 'thank' me for designing and migrating to a new code/database and forcing stet to have to deal with it seamlessly, which he did perfectly.

It is, however, nice to hear that after so many months of work that some people are happy with where a lot of the actual effort went.

Keith, Tuesday, 6 March 2007 22:20 (nineteen years ago)

Heh, poor Keith -- months slaving on this, for plenty grief. I bosh that up in a night or two and get all thanks! Thanks.

Problem is that the coolest new feature -- fast-as-fuck operation, no server load -- is really hard to see, so it's really easy to take as a given. Even looking at the new answers page on the now-empty sandbox is slower than this busy place. There's no comparable site moves at this pace, on this level of hardware. Looking at things on the server side, before and after, is genuinely amazing.

(Er, until one of the many pipeline gremlins makes it slow-loading, that is. But they're largely out of our hands)

.stet., Wednesday, 7 March 2007 00:32 (nineteen years ago)

(I think the "user prefs will cause crash" is a paraphrase of me talking about their load. Which isn't necessarily true, assuming they're all cached. But cacheing all them = yet more work, which is why I say it's not necessarily simple)

.stet., Wednesday, 7 March 2007 00:36 (nineteen years ago)

Did you write the caching framework yourself?

JW, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 00:38 (nineteen years ago)

Is there a list of features that have been requested, so I don't bore/exasperate others be requesting the return of autohotlinking of URLs?

Also, cosign the praise for the db work, which can't have been fun!

caek, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 00:42 (nineteen years ago)

JW: No, that's all Keith's heavy lifting.
caek: that's in the pipe right now.

.stet., Wednesday, 7 March 2007 00:47 (nineteen years ago)

Er, sorry caek, mis-read you as asking for something else. Your one isn't in the immediate pipe, but it has been mentioned before.

.stet., Wednesday, 7 March 2007 00:49 (nineteen years ago)

Thanks. While I have your ear, is the CSS fix for the horizontal scrollbar in the immediate pipe? And doubtless this has been posted elsewhere, but could you say a little about the change from HTML to bbcode for post formatting? Was HTML seen as a usability problem for posters, or was it to make things easier for the coders?

caek, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 01:08 (nineteen years ago)

Also, what's with the extra <br>s being appended to posts? E.g. my last post.

Doubtless this is easier said than done, but is there any chance of the other <br>s being replaced with <p>s, as God intended?

caek, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 01:10 (nineteen years ago)

Horizontal scrollbar: yep.
Switch to K-Code (it's not actually BBCode, Keith just chose square brackets by coincidence) is because HTML is basically insecure. Browsers, and HTML codes, evolve, so you either have to keep updating the code to make sure nothing can pass through, or you ban it altogether. Since there are only a few things that are worth doing here -- bold, itals, links, images -- it's much easier to write a tight parser for those tags.

It's evolving though. Libcrypt has written something to obfuscate email addresses it finds, for instance.

That said, I was surprised by the amount of people who liked the formatting help. I never realised so many people had problems with that sort of stuff, so it did turn out to be a usability boon -- if not for people who do HTML by reflex. It still trips me up.

.stet., Wednesday, 7 March 2007 01:13 (nineteen years ago)

xpost. ooh dunno. will chuck it on the mighty pile

.stet., Wednesday, 7 March 2007 01:14 (nineteen years ago)

Coolio. Thanks for the HTML explanation. Any chance you can add <blockquote>-like behavior to K-Code? I like that tag.

caek, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 01:22 (nineteen years ago)

use [ quote ]

.stet., Wednesday, 7 March 2007 01:24 (nineteen years ago)

Yes, just spotted that. Can you add <i are idiot>?

caek, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 01:25 (nineteen years ago)

Keith, that was in repsonse to stet:

unfortunately its difficult to build a message board without implementing user preferences. they're a base user expectation for that breed of software.

Edward III on Monday, 5 March 2007 21:23 (Yesterday)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And so is the thing not falling over all the time under the weight of user preferences.

.stet. on Monday, 5 March 2007 21:44 (Yesterday)


thanks for the old threads! there was some talk of not moving over the old db and that would've sucked.

Edward III, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 01:32 (nineteen years ago)

haha gremlins be gremliny

Edward III, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 01:45 (nineteen years ago)

:)

stet, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 01:51 (nineteen years ago)

I like the formatting help, and I like the annoying red reminder not to use HTML,

But here's what happens. I click a thread to see the handful of new answers. Of course, I am logged out, so I don't jump immediately to the #unread. Or even if I am logged in, I might have been logged out when I first read the thread, so it thinks I haven't read it yet and so there is no #unread to jump to.

So I do a quick cmd-down to get to the bottom of the thread. Then there is a huge "Formatting help" and some diagnostics, and I have to go up a few screenfuls to figure out where I left off.

Which is to say: Perhaps "Formatting help" should be a link (next to "Submit response" and "Clear" that causes the formatting help text to -- I dunno, appear CSS-style or pop up or something?

I'm also more used to the "New answers" etc links being at the bottom, under the "Post a response" box, but that's not a biggie...

Casuistry, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 02:25 (nineteen years ago)

User preferences are all cached.

There are about six separate caches, of which I wrote all of them. They behave in different ways based on what's required.

However, one of the caches makes use of an open source cache, just because it used soft references. I might remove this, though, as I don't think using soft references is any sort of use here now.

Keith, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 09:01 (nineteen years ago)

Oh and I had never heard of BBCode, I just made the thing up below, but it's hardly rocket science.

For the next thing, I've got rid of hline and replaced it with pre.

Keith, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 09:02 (nineteen years ago)

In terms of security, you have basically two options with this sort of thing.

- Use HTML as the basic formatting mechanism. HTML is a complex beast, implemented in inconsistent ways across browsers (see the 'red' problem on some browsers at the moment; if it's working correctly, it's because your browser has done something to clear up my mistake in missing out a close tag).

So it order to deal with making it secure, you have to start with all the things you don't want (an awful lot) and prune it to be sure that you only get what you do want. You also have to deal with the fact that some browsers might let you get the 'desired' malicious effect in different ways from others.

- Alternatively, don't allow HTML and only support a small set of easy-to-translate, consistent tags that allow users to do formatting. This way, you control what's going on yourself and aren't at the mercy of browser updates etc.

This is what I have done, and what (it appears) other message boards do, for the same reason: it's the only way to guarantee it's secure in the face of external factors.

Keith, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 09:09 (nineteen years ago)

Alternatively, don't allow HTML and only support a small set of easy-to-translate, consistent tags that allow users to do formatting.

This is fine, but can't you have your HTML-markup-like language use angle brackets rather than square brackets? And can't you have the syntax overlap with HTML, so people can paste HTML from elsewhere and have it work. (e.g. the HTML that Flickr gives you, which is a pig to translate into this code).

caek, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 10:09 (nineteen years ago)

Or, for that matter the HTML or bbcode that Imageshack gives you to copy and paste. Maybe I'm wrong, but the markup you've implemented seems to be gratuitously different to HTML.

So much so that it's become sufficiently time-consuming to generate links/proper images, that it seems people aren't bothering, and are just pasting a URL (which isn't turned into a linked anymore!). So I go through threads about comics, and half the comics are actually plain text URLs I have to copy and paste. So I don't bother.

caek, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 10:15 (nineteen years ago)

i think that's a great question!

Tracer Hand, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 12:09 (nineteen years ago)

It's easy changing it to look like sort of HTML, though angle brackets complicate things, and I'd rather not do that. Hard to go into right now as I have to leave in a minute, but in a nutshell, you then have to determine what's HTML and what's your markup language, which obviously becomes trickier is you're making it look even more like HTML. HTML's a lot subtler than you might think...

So <img src='image.jpg'></img>

is the same as

< img src = 'image.jpg></img>

is the same as

<img src='image.jpg/>

has no different noticable effect from

<img alt='hello' src='image.jpg'/>

or

<img alt="hello" src="image.jpg"/>


And this is not legal in XHTML, but most browsers won't care and make it work anyway.

<img alt='hello' src='image.jpg'>

etc. etc. etc. So as I explained above, it's hard to pair this down to what's legal, and still works, and ensure that things stay secure, especially given browser differences.

I have written stuff now to automatically turn links into hyperlinks. It's not deployed yet. Forgive me, but there's a lot to do and I have little time to do it in, so am spending what time I can in between work on it. I am having to work days and nights, right now.

I think there are other things that can be done too, like turning image links directly into images perhaps (I think libcrypt is looking into this), that might make things easier without just risking going back to exactly the problems we used to have.

Keith, Wednesday, 7 March 2007 18:34 (nineteen years ago)

Fair enough. Obviously HTML is a syntactically complex language, and cloning the entirety of a language you've rejected for perfectly good security reasons is silly. I do think it would useful to support a subset for us fogies/copy-and-pasters. E.g. <img src="" />, <img src="" alt="" />, <a href=""></a>. However, this obviously involves complex design decisions and is non-trivial to add to the existing markup language you've designed. So I guess it goes in the "nice to have if someone someday gets paid to do this full time" column.

caek, Thursday, 8 March 2007 14:03 (nineteen years ago)


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