Subtle changes, bugs and feedback

No, I'd failed to hit the reply button but was still rambling at motter and the inline code snippets markdown.

Yes, I know the issue. Unfortunately the fix is hard. To fix it, instead of looking through a comment for what looks like a hashtag, we'd have to contextualise where we look. And it's not even as simple as "not within a code block", because you could nest this stuff.

We have the same problem with unbalanced HTML (invalidly nested elements), in that we'd need more context than we currently have.

The fix involves created a balanced tree out of the comment HTML instead of parsing it like an input stream of tokens. It's DOM vs SAX... we use a more SAX way.

That's going to be a lot of careful work... and the edge cases are so few and far between that people will rightly ask us to fix other things first.

The RGB workaround should see you fine until we get to it.

Are you able to remove private messages from appearing in the following seciton. I find it a bit messy and confusing. I'd rather just go to the private message section, as before.

I can do this.

But it would be for everyone.

Others have reported confusion at PMs appearing in there.

I'm inclined to agree... that private messages should only ever be in the messages area, or in search results. But not in Following (as they presently are).

Maybe have a poll?

I'm strongly for it being removed from following. It clutters up two separate feeds into one.

It blurs the lines between private and public and given that already-read items aren't excluded from following, it'd be easy for the message to be missed.

Hmm.

I'll work on filters instead.

The Following page has a purpose "Show you everything that has changed that you are interested in".

So if you're following a forum and new things are created... put them in there.
If you're following a person who updates their profile... put it in there.
If you're following an event that has new comments... put it in there.
And if someone has replied to you... put it in there.
If someone @mentioned you... put it in there.

Those last two... those could be in messages, but if we didn't show you on Following then we'd never show you as that's the only place we're showing this stuff.

And then... it is possible to follow a private message, and that should go somewhere... on the following page because it's an update to something you're watching.

It is right. I just need to offer the ability to filter by type of update.

We do know the difference between:

1. New comments in non-PMs
   
2. New comments in PMs
   
3. Mentions
   
4. Replies
   
5. New items in forums
   
   

So we should filter on that basis.

We can additionally introduce a "read/unread" filter, as I have been looking into that and it's not so insane.

If the message could be missed when it additionally appears in the Following section, then you're definitely miss it if only didn't at all appear in the following section.

The messages icon would still go orange and increment the unread count.

I quite like that it appears in following - as I like that it is an overview of all the content that I am interested in (which includes messages and mentions rather than just followed posts)
A filter for those that don't like it sounds sensible to me.

For me it's the difference between public and private.

Following can be all public. So a reply to a post witha tag in a thread is following.

But if someone wants to message you off public list then that's a private message and should not appear in following. As it's a new action.

In the new 'Today' page list, could we please include a bit of info about which sub-forum a post comes from. Would be hugely helpful for scanning relevance/interest..?

Thanks

If you @ someone and then edit the post to remove the @ the edited post shows up in following.

I am sure this is intended behavior but I can foresee this somehow leading to confusion and possibly abuse - but I am not quite sure how... spam perhaps?

Is there a limit to the number of @ you can have per post?

and it would appear that if you edit a post to add an @ to someone then you don't get an alert or it show up in your following page...

fwiw, I agree.

Probably mentioned already but there is a disconnect between Preview and what actually shows up.
For example, I can do a third level header like so:
###I am a smallish header, I head things.

which shows up cool in Preview but does not in the actual post.

Oh also, during a search for this thread I got one of these:

Error 502 Ray ID: 15bf7d3449840f75
Bad gateway
You
Browser
Working
Frankfurt
CloudFlare
Working
http://www.lfgss.com
Host
Error
What happened?
The web server reported a bad gateway error.
What can I do?
Please try again in a few minutes.
CloudFlare Ray ID: 15bf7d3449840f75 • Your IP: 217.110.52.178 • Help • Performance & security by CloudFlare

@Velocio should some areas of the site always/only load in https?

I'd still love it if the entire site could be https, but natch, no can do due to embedded maps and stuff on non-https domains.

As to some areas being https when others are not... and should some be https always. Again... desired, but I can't easily force that in this product without leaking the existence elsewhere (in the source code, on github).

That can happen if you're unlucky enough to hit a page the precise instant we're pushing code. It blips for under a second when we push code, but given that we can do a few hundred pages each minute that means that a couple of people might see one of those messages each time we push code.

For me it's the difference between public and private.

But the line between public and private isn't a line, it's possible to have fora that are for small groups or even excluding individuals, and it's also possible to have messages with loads of people in...

In case it's not obvious I like following in the same way I used the cp... Which included messages.

What about mirroring the whole ForumTodayFollowingPeople bar onto the bottom as well? (desktop version)

What about using more of my screen? I'm looking at a 900px wide image which has been scaled to 762px wide (FF31/Win8.1), which is actually a worse display than the old forum where everything up to 1024px was displayed at its native size.

I guess it's just that people aren't familiar with Markdown yet, so it's going to take a while before people realise what is going to happen when they have multiple ` in a line, or multiple * in a line... i.e. strange mysterious things.

Would it be possible to reduce the markdown that is processed to the most commonly understood and accepted subset - e.g bold, italics, m-dashes, etc?

Markdown wasn't a particularly good choice for a social forum. That you are forced to learn the Markdown syntax in order to avoid your text being marked up is a fundamental usability issue. At least with bbcode you need to explicitly mark up your posts in order to style them. You can't do it by accident. Markdown might be popular among geeks but it isn't suited to general purpose posts by a non technical community.

This is in the works, I'm just adding "forum search", "conversation search", etc first.

You are able to right click and open image in new tab to view any image at the native size.

Unlike the old forum, we are no longer physically removing images from posts when they exceed 1024px. Instead images are optimized automatically if they are attachments, and the benefits of compression and a better cache network for images mean that we're confident we can send larger images to devices on smaller screens too (which used to be the reason to strip them).

Markdown will remain fully featured, we do not wish to deviate from the commonly accepted features of Markdown and to introduce a new flavour different from everyone else's.

Markdown was chosen because:

• It is the easiest to format on mobile devices
  
• Avoids the need for a WYSIWYG tool that would break on most mobile devices and be fragile on others
  
• The HTML produced is great for the email notifications, which means they better represent how the comment is actually rendered
  
• It allows us to accept emails authored using Markdown (and with email quoting > working in all email clients) so that we can add obviously missing functionality like replying to notifications via email and having those replies end up in the right conversation, messages, etc
  
• It actually is more universally understood than Wiki markup, BBCode or HTML... because Markdown stems from email and doesn't require specialist tags (outside of links which I still think are quite horrible)
  
  

The issue (if that is even the right word) with Markdown on LFGSS comes from people being very conditioned into how vBulletin and their flavour of BBCode operated. It's more about unlearning, and using plain text, than learning something new.

That said... we still support BBCode, so as long as you use minimal plain text to format your comments then there is no issue.

Of the 15,000+ comments since the switch over, only a couple have been badly formatted when newly authored, and about 10 have been badly formatted when trying to quote older hybrid and complex BBCode comments (big lists with lots of quotes and links).

Given we've just changed the input syntax, this is an incredibly low error rate.

I disagree with your view that there is a fundamental usability issue, and with most of your post TBH. It's not even true that BBCode was fully explicit, given that some things were automatic (linking, inheriting formatting including bold, italic, etc from pasted text, and so on).

I am quite amazed how much I use the bookmark link http://www.lfgss.com/trending/ - maybe it was too early a call to remove the button. The Newton algorithm seem to work really well for me.