Subtle changes, bugs and feedback

That's one school of thought.
Another is to simplify interfaces by removing that which you cannot do, to not confuse users by offering options that are not available to them (in whatever the current context is).
It's the difference between a menu that says "These are choices you can make right now", and one that says "These are all the possible choices, but some of them are not available to you right now".
But anyway... I have work to do.

Mm, without wanting to get into a fussy UI/UX argument, I do think in the case of the pagination control it's currently rather confusing to show and hide the first/last button at the end based on current page context. A disabled button is a useful visual flag in that context. I've found myself having to scan left and read all the numbers to find the total number of pages indicator (which is much smaller, and grey) and working out what page I'm on and whether that's the penultimate one, and is the one to its right the last one or what. I know it's logical, it's just unexpected.

Might also benefit from some indicator like a double line or a gap to show where pages are skipped in the order. At the moment it's styled as a single button group when it might help to do it as a button 'toolbar' with small gaps to indicate non-consecutive pages.

Fixed the bug wherein Firefox would not quote highlighted text.

You may need to CTRL+F5 or clear the browser cache to get the latest version.

This is now happening... is this a known bug?

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I had that massive box but it went back to normal when I refreshed.

CTRL+F5, clear cache, or whatever is appropriate for your device.

The HTML changed and CSS both changed, but the HTML is updated instantly and there's a chance that your browser may have cached the CSS for a while.

Fixed the bug wherein Firefox would not quote highlighted text.

Ah :)

The email option isn't ticked, but it does say I'm following which I'd have thought would mean the same thing. I'm guessing I need to tick it 'on' then.

Yeah, the global notifications is ticked, so I assumed that I would receive emails for everything. Going to manually tick each convo for now. Cheers.

Is the page count thing meant to look like this? If so, it's too big and intrusive and ugly.

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On a different thread it looks slightly different, but still seems over large and inelegant,

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if you control-F5 refresh it will disappear!

So it does, must be something to do with the way I navigate around, thanks.

Can't wait to opt out of the @ reply thing.

Ha! well here is one less @ reply.

Same

Yeah, it's weird wording. The global one means "allow any of the following email notification types to be enableable"

@MillWelling You're just trying to get yourself annoyed.

Are previously followed forums supposed to put thier whole contents into following?

I'm following what used to be forum 42, but the arts thread isn't in my following list. Will try unfollowing and refollowing... Later.

Checked your email prefs?

Yeah, it's weird wording. The global one means "allow any of the following email notification types to be enableable"

It's weirder than that.

The global one when checked means "allow any of the following to be enabled, and if you are following items with emails enabled then re-enable those.

The global one unchecked means "stop all emails, and prevent enabling of new ones".

The ones below for replies and mentions, etc mean "send emails when these happen".

But... the ones relating to "items in a microcosm you are watching" and "a comment has been posted in an item you are watching" actually mean "use this as the default email preference for future things of this type that I follow".

So unchecking those doesn't remove email notifications from conversations you already said you do want emails for. And checking those won't change your existing follows, but will make future follow send emails.

It's horribly complex behind the scenes, and the form does a poor job at describing what it happening. But this is as close as we can get to giving you fine grained control over getting emails when you want them, but not the rest of the time.

In summary: If you want emails make sure the global thing is checked, and then visit the item in question and make sure you're following that with emails. The form mostly relates to future follows, not historical ones.

If you prepend   to your username it will look about the same but it will be very hard to @ you.

Big fan of irony, are you?

He's kinda right.

It wouldn't stop reply, but if you wanted to stop @mentions you could use this character ​ believe me that there is a character in there. It's a unicode zero width space which you can copy from the input field on this page: http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/200B/browsertest.htm CTRL+A and CTRL+C within the field.

If someone put that at the front of their username, it would prevent anyone from autocompleting the @mention. Though they could still copy and paste name.

whoosh

whoosh

In computers, letters of the alphabet are characters in a big map of possible characters.

Numbers are characters too.

These character maps originally looked like this:

So the word Hello would be spelt out with 5 characters that were assigned numbers:

• H = 072
  
• e = 101
  
• l = 108
  
• l = 108
  
• 0 = 111
  
  

Thus, characters become numbers, and computers are good at representing numbers.

Notice the early part of that list... character 009 is a [TAB]. So characters represent all possible whitespace, line feeds, etc.

Characters also represent punctuation, etc.

After a while, the USA discovered that there were other languages in the world than US English, and after many decades of squabbling a system was established called unicode.

Unicode is just like the big table of characters above, except the unicode table is huge. It includes every character in every language in the world, as well as lots of emoji, and pictorial symbols, maths symbols, etc.

Getting to the point... there are characters in the unicode map of characters that represent very subtle things. These characters have codes that they can be referenced by, but do not print anything to a screen... a bit like a [TAB] that actually doesn't take up any space.

One such character is referenced as U+200B which is a "zero width space"... a space that has no width. Strange, huh?

I used another such character today to fix a bug: http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/00AD/browsertest.htm a "soft hyphen". That character is U+00AD and is a hint that a word may be hyphenated at that point... but if the word doesn't need to be hyphenated then the character will consume no space at all.

Anyhow, if you used such a character in your username... no-one could type it.

And if no-one could type it... no-one could @mention you.