Subtle changes, bugs and feedback

Here's another one. When I go to https://www.lfgss.com/profiles/?q=m and then try to jump forward a few pages by typing e.g. 5 into the page number box , it takes me to https://www.lfgss.com/profiles/?offset=100 instead of https://www.lfgss.com/profiles/?offset=100&q=m

I've noticed a lot of double Youtube embeds recently.

I asked about the albums a while back. Velocio says the images are in the database but the feature is not written yet. Whenever it is, I expect it won't be an exact replication of the vBulletin feature but it would be nice if the old album-image urls redirected to the new ones, whatever they are.

The URLs will redirect.

The albums were exported, but not imported. So the images aren't yet on the Microcosm servers.

When the Gallery feature is written, the images (and albums) will be imported. At which point the URLs will redirect.

me too...

I guess you were more of a UserCP fan.

So far - yes. Here's hoping!
: ]

Have uploaded the gif of the palas cat seeing the camera but all that the little photo of the beginning of the gif.

When I add the gif it works but hitting save means just the still image.

Your comment is only half a comment.

I'll try and guess the rest.

You were trying to upload an animated .gif file as your avatar?
And it is much larger than the size it appears at?
And so it is resized?
And when resized it is no longer animated and is just the first frame of the animation?

Also, your comment appears to be an observation and not a question... but you're wondering why and how to resolve it?

OK, so the display dimensions for an avatar are 64px wide by 64px tall. If you upload something larger than this we will resize the file. We do that because avatars are loaded on so many pages and we want to make sure that the file sizes are reasonable so that they do not slow the pages for people accessing on a mobile phone.

When we resize the avatar, there are some limitations already declared:

• If you have a .png file and it uses a "progressive" algorithm or a custom colour palette outside of the RGB default... then we may reject the avatar altogether.
  
• If you have an animated .gif or .png, then due to differences in the animation algorithms we can only safely resize the first frame of the animation.
  
• If you have a non-web-safe image format (.bmp, .tiff, etc) we will reject the avatar.
  
  

You fell foul of the second of those.

You can have an animated avatar, but you should perform the resize using dedicated image software that understands the wide number of animation algorithms and palettes used by animated images.

That's the resolution: Resize your animated .gif to 64px x 64px before you upload it.

Patience of a saint.

My feelings on private messages.
When you send a PM it shows in your inbox as a new unread message.
One its not true, I have read it.. I wrote it.
Two its silly, i'm sending a message and means I might actually miss when it responded to for real.

Also the today filter shows my private messages along side public comments.

Scares the hell out of me, as it makes think the private message is now public.
I understand the logic.. it is content that happened today but its unnecessary to include in the filter as private messages are easy to find in my inbox.

Scares the hell out of me

Everything you see, you are allowed to see.

Anything you cannot see, you are not allowed to see.

This applies to everyone individually.

Following.. can I see how many and who is following me?

No.

I keep losing the scroll bar in IE 11 (64 bit) - it randomly disappears from view, leaving only the darker grey background, and doesn't reappear until I click anywhere else on the screen. Google Chrome 37.0.2somethingorother doesn't appear to do this - does it count as a bug worth mentioning or should I just do the obvious and not use Explorer?

@Velocio as user7208 wrote, there is great confusion after posting a PM, because of the "1 new message"

There isn't any new messages.

We're not doing anything weird with scroll bars, sounds like an Explorer bug. Not sure how you report bugs to Microsoft.

The bug is a synchronisation issue.

Basically... the page reloads too fast and the code that marks it read happens in a different transaction.

Either we slow the page down by adding some wait time into reloads that happen after you send a PM.

Or we leave it fast and people get used to it.

Adding wait code is really easy... but seems utterly bizarre.

We chose to do neither... instead we'll wait and see whether increased traffic on hot servers naturally slows down the pages enough that the issue vanishes without adding cruft.

@Velocio If adding 500ms wait makes it right, then it's worth it.

Can't you put the message creation and the marked read operation into the same transaction scope?

That's freaking bizarre.

I have no idea where those extra images are coming from... I'm going to go code spelunking to figure it out.

On the "who can access this forum" page, there are two "banned" groups. One is a default group and the other isn't. What's the difference?

The issue of weird images being shown in some posts has now been resolved.

By and large, you were the person whose posts were most affected. Most people who attached images did not also embed them as an image within the post (they left the thumbnails at the bottom), but quite often you would insert the full image as an inline image in addition to the thumbnail.

There was a bug, but others wouldn't notice as much (attachments directly stuck on things work fine).

The bug was that for a given URL:
http://www.lfgss.com/attachments/47812d1326332953-vumachrono_ring_v2.png

We parsed that using this regex:
attachments/([0-9])+d[0-9]+-.*$

Which should have returned the value:
47812

But... there is one character out of place in the regex and so we got:
4

And instead of embedding the image you wanted, we redirected to whatever attachment #4 on vBulletin was.

The fix:
attachments/([0-9]+)d[0-9]+-.*$

Which now correctly resolves vBulletin attachment URLs.

The images will still be duplicated within the post... once within the post content, and then we show the attachment too.

I keep losing the scroll bar in IE 11 (64 bit) -

http://www.lfgss.com/conversations/252828/?offset=100#11762200
it's a bug in IE11. use scroll wheel, or trackpad gestures.

Adding 500ms is never worth it.

Solved by some trickery.

Our code is way too generic for that.

We kept things really broken up into microtransactions. When we need to do away with PostgreSQL and put the bulk of the documents into something else, it will be relatively easy to do so.