Feedback/Suggestions/Bugs+Changelog

So I finally got around to checking adventures for the post count mismatch.

Again, I just checked against my old list - though it seems I completely overlooked the adventure Monstrous in that list, as I didn't have it in either category and it would have existed at the time. It's got the issue, anyhow. Also, another thread has disappeared. The fanart thread corrected itself somehow, though.

So here's the list for the Adventures forum:

SpoilerShow

Jub-Jub
Assimilate
Rat
title
Enemy Territory
Eight You Live
Crypt
Gropaga
BREW
Blend
sokrates
Ronin Dragsters
Patrick Spaulding and the Land of Wonder - FSEAC
Boxborg's Webquest [Textastic]
Hip-Hop Squirrel Epidemic: Chinese Cardboard Revolution
Pleasant Prison Planet - FSEAC
Monstrous - FSEAC
GreyGabe' WebQue t [Texting, Texting, 123]
Pics or it Didn't Happen [Photoventure]
Jackbot: Partial Eclipse
Sleepytime - FSEAC
Institute (TWS)
and the cold waiting (TWS)
Bureaucracy (TWS)
the Tower Insurmountable (TWS)
Zoologic (TWS)
Novus Agnitio
War for the Cowboy Throne (TWS?)
Viva La Brea: Morituri Te Salutant [TWS]
Falling Down (TWS)
A Very Serious Adventure
The Road To Arctic Base Winnipeg (TWS)
Restlessness (TWS)
Business Bird
Prehistory 101 [TWS]
Man and Machine (TWS)
This Guy's Problem (TWS)
The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
Duke Dashing and The Train of Infinite Death!
Pete the Peasant's Alphabet Funtime
The Solaris Files: Dominican Republic
We Sons Of Daley [Manhattan Blues]
Palavra (Revival Contest)
FIGHTEMS
The Write Stuff: The contest is OPEN! Sign-ups are closed.

Dereliction - FSEAC - thread has disappeared. I found a link to it and that link goes nowhere.

images in posts/signatures dont show up for me, instead its just giving links that look like [Image: link]

That looks quite similar to the problem wheat described here. iirc Schazer may be able to handle that in the ACP

i sent a pm

edit: it is fixed

This is probably a nitpick, but when I unsubscribe from a thread by clicking the "Unsubscribe from this thread" button at the top of the page of a thread, a box shows up telling me it's going to return me to the thread subscriptions list. Instead, it just takes me back to where I came from (the thread page). Should the message be changed?? I dunno

I remember other people were having this problem, but all of the images have broken from my point of view.

They look like " [Image: blahblah] "

For some reason, the javascript in the posting system is utterly broken for me; tested across opera, firefox and chrome. Clicking the smilies does nothing, no frames for code, etc. I'd like to be able to use formatting without typing the tags by hand or reverting to html. Sorry if this has already been noticed, just putting it out there.

ye, the report button's broke too rn.

I'm not entirely sure if it's needed, although I would throw in my hat for suggestion if we do want a Younger Moderator (although I'm relatively not much younger than Schazer). I'm also not entirely sure what I would be responsible for.

I would help, since I know a bit of HTML + JavaScript, but I don't think I would have the time. I think you'd run into that issue for anyone still in college/high school, which most younger users are.

I always think of admin as being higher up than moderator, just based on the words themselves. And I didn't realize having more admins cost more money??? That seems wild to me.

I only know a pittance of Javascript/Html so probably I'm not the best choice.

There's been a lot of spambots posting muscle growth hormones or whatever in specifically the Forum Games subforum and I can't help but feel like I'm somehow responsible.

Like, I guess I'm reporting it though everyone knows but I also want to know why the specific subforum and content.

Yeah I reckon the issue would mostly be finding someone that knows how to tinker with forum code and who also has the time/enthusiasm to do so.

Oh yeah, I could definitely help out with that. I'd be more comfortable being more of a html monkey/handyman than a proper admin or whatever. (And just taking a look at the code and trying to fix stuff is the sort of thing I would like to do anyway.)

But before we talk about this further, we should probably contact Pinary/Schazer and ask their opinions?

Hey gang, I've had a chat with Pinary and have been keeping abreast of the conversation that tbh has been going on for well over a year now. We decided the first step toward implementing newer features folks were asking for would first require a forums software upgrade, so that happened back in August last year.

Unfortunately as we're all aware, doing so broken stuff all over the show (bbcode shortcuts, smilies, front page links, etc etc etc). Fixing all this stuff is not really doable through assigning more Moderators or Administrators (as admins' code-wrangling is primarily restricted to CSS and some templates). What we'd need is essentially a new webmaster.

Whoever's gonna fix this would require file and database access, which is a level of access we can't really fine-tune to make a sandbox at the likes of dodo.eagle-time.org. At this stage Pinary acknowledges he's not going to have the chunk of free time necessary to make major fixes, so if there's someone we can trust (both with Our Child and also to get fixes done in a reasonable timeframe) then we'd be willing to hand the keys over.

MyBB is built on PHP and MySQL, so those and CSS would be the useful things

Given where we've been at on progress on fixing things, I'd happily pay out of my own pocket for someone to get in there and make some fixes. Pinary has backups (and can answer questions pretty promptly even if he's got no time to tinker himself), so it doesn't need to be a pro! Just someone with the know-how and time to fix things even if it's through trial and error would make faster progress than what we've got now.

I'm not too advanced in php and css, but may i try looking at the code? it's fine if i can't do so, though!

I'm certainly not a professional webmaster, and I'm more experienced in Front-End than Back-End Web Dev. Even so, this is something I'm actively studying right now, and it dovetails pretty well with work I'm doing (or hope to soon be doing) professionally.

If nothing else, I'd be happy to commit regular hours to ironing out problems and implementing new features, even though I'll definitely need to learn as I go.

Is it possible to build a fork of the site for testing and the like? It will be safer for the main site if a parallel codebase was used for this sort of thing in the future. For now, the usability of the site is such that if you can rollback the changes to the last unbuggy version (it at all possible), it would be appreciated.

I'd love to be able to just tinker with it occasionally, but if timeliness/high access levels are an issue, it's probably best you just stick with Spoids.

A private fork, like CSJ suggested, would be great since multiple people could help here and there, but we'd have to make sure there weren't any security issues -- either with what's available on the fork, or with what changes people made.

Dodo.eagle-time.org is essentially one such fork, so to speak. The only trouble is that giving access to the backend of that without also giving access to eagle-time.org isn't feasible (according to Pinary, who knows this shit waaaaay better than I do).

Timeliness as a factor is currently at "ideal, but doing so probably requires paying a pro to do it" which conflicts pretty heavily with my personally important factor of "try and keep this a community thing instead of outsourcing it, both for security reasons and giving members of the community an opportunity."

If Pinary could wrangle a way to log changes to the forum's backend (to notice+undo unwanted changes to the main site), then giving out access to several trusted people and making the site-fixing a more sandbox experience would be doable? I'll have to discuss that with him.

Yes, the tech definitely exists to do that (e.g. a git repository). It’s kinda involved tho.

Git is good. I put everything in git repos. I'm keeping SixtyFour Pixel Colonists in a (local to my computer) git repo. I put my creative writing stuff in git repos. I put my configuration files in a git repo. Everything in git repos!

If Eagle Time's backend code had a private git repo hosted on GitLab or something, that would be cool. (Or GitHub, but you have to pay for private repos there.) But that doesn't solve the problem of deploying those changes to the actual server.

If you have shell access and the tools installed (that is a big if), it’s trivial to just pull a branch when desired. The technical details are one thing, but can be learned or worked around.

To clarify: it’s specifically the vetting process that takes time and can’t/shouldn’t be avoided. Trivial changes to templates and stuff aren’t likely to wreck the place up, for instance (I did that for a phpBB forum I posted on a lot when I was like... 13 or 14), but coders write all sorts of security flaws, most of them unintentionally.

And then some things people might desire, like adding emoticons, is more of a frontend thing anyhoo.

it’s trivial to just pull a branch when desired.

Sure, but someone still has to actually do it. Or at least set up a cron job to do it automatically. And what if someone wants to test their own changes?

I agree about the vetting process.

Talked it out with Pinary; installing Git isn't going to be feasible given the fact our "server is co-hosted through a provider".

What we do have is a whole extra copy of the forums at dodo.eagle-time.org, so Sunspider+Pinary can make changes there and be sure there's no bugs before changing the equivalent files within Eagle Time's stuff. While rolling back changes on Dodo will probably just be a matter of "save a copy of the original and replace it back in if changes break things" rather than an automated version control, that at least allows Sunspider the responsiveness they're going to need.

To folks who said they would like to tinker: While I would have loved to open up the software so lots of folks could try and help, security and ease of testing+implementing is going to be too difficult to make it work - given my lack of techspertise, Pinary's unavailability, and Sunspider's preference to not mix managing+facilitating a team on top of their own coding efforts. What we can maybe-hopefully do is copy and redistribute chunks of code for various forum elements (the broken javascript for the smilies popup box, or the post editor come to mind), once Soli knows what they'd like to work on.

---

For now, Soli/Sunspider's been given admin permissions on Eagle Time (so they can see what tools are available in the ACP) and will be given webmaster access once Pinary can set that up. We've discussed compensation for the time they're going to spend working on the site, and agreed a tip jar system is best. That way, Sunspider can keep everyone up-to-date on changes they've made, and people can support them in a zero-obligations way.

Sunspider will be accepting tips here: https://ko-fi.com/dayhold (requires paypal)