Subtle changes, bugs and feedback

Did you visit the last post on the page? And then see that it wasn't lined up with the top of the screen?

The last post may not have enough space below it to have allowed the page to scroll down far enough to align the top of the comment with the top of your screen.

On the great information highway, everyone is suspect until shown to be otherwise.

Definitely running a lot better since yesterday.
#famouslastwords

Did you visit the last post on the page?

..second to last I think.

I think.

I would place a fair bet that you're on a computer with a reasonably high res monitor and that it was the last post, and it couldn't scroll down until the comment was aligned with the top because there just wasn't enough content below the comment to allow it to do so.

Please stop reporting this. It isn't a bug, it's how web browsers work and I cannot fix all the web browsers. I've tested the prior page, in several browsers, on large screens, and none of them exhibit the issue because all page assets load in time and there is adequate space at the bottom... or, we're talking about the last 2 posts as my monitor is large.

It really is not a bug, it cannot and won't be fixed.

And if anyone suggests an onLoad() JavaScript function that applies a scrollTo(), please fuck off. It doesn't work, and would upset far far more people than just acknowledging how web browsers work.

And finally... LFGSS on vBulletin never had a workaround for this, the issue was there too, nothing has changed in this regard. It is how browsers work.

Yeah, it seems certain it was something to do with CloudFlare being in front of the API. A proportion of connections simply couldn't read, despite being established without issue.

I'm sure they'd love a bug report from us if we can compile the right info.

Hah, I wonder if it was the challenge/response. We'd never respond to the challenge.

Ok, sorry if I pissed you off.

I'm pretty sure it was the second-to-last post.
I tried to recreate this by manually typing http://www.lfgss.com/conversations/131364/?offset=4974
in the adress bar, but this is giving me "server error".

I'm on 1366x768 at the moment, by the way.
So if a last post on a page is just one line of text you do have a point, but that was not the case.

Of course I shut up about it if that's what you want, problem still persists, and it sucks, sorry.
Hard to believe this is not fixable.

Hard to believe this is not fixable.

by manually typing http://www.lfgss.com/conversations/13136­4/?offset=4974
in the adress bar, but this is giving me "server error"

Offsets are multiples of 25, for the 25 comments per page. To allow caching and to prevent bad requests we only permit offsets that produce consistent page-size chunks of 25, whereby going back to page 1 would also have a page of 25 comments.

Page 199 = https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/131364/?offset=4950
Page 200 = https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/131364/?offset=4975

The entire issue you are describing is NOTHING to do with the offset.

You are talking about the anchor, which is pages that have a # in the URL, like this one:
https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/131364/?offset=4975#11859111

That links to your comment, the important bit is the #11859111.

What that says to the browser is that once the browser has loaded everything before the # ( which is https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/131364/?offset=4975 without the # bit... then the browser should do what it can to see if something exists on the page with an id or name in the HTML that has the value 11859111, and if it does then the browser should position the scroll bars (vertical and horizontal) such that it is in view.

Most browsers determine this to mean... do your best job to put the HTML whose id or name is 11859111 at position: 0,0 which is the top left hand corner of your screen.

Where it fucks up, what you are complaining about, is when it either fails to do this (because it's physically not possible, there isn't enough stuff on the page to make it scroll), or when it has done this and something else then shifts the page a little.

Right now you're complaining about the impossibility scenario. But before you were complaining about the "something moved my page after the browser had jumped to the right place" scenario.

In the case of the "something moved my page"... it was images. If a HTML image has a tag like <img src="foo.jpg" /> then the image physically only reserves 1px wide by 1px tall. Then when the image has been fully loaded by the browser the browser might say "Oh fuck, it's actually 1024px high by 800px wide"... and the browser will resize the image. If you happen to be at an #anchor further down the page, then the page just got shifted downwards by 1024 pixels.

There is absolutely NOTHING I can do about this.

If I try... I will make a far more miserable experience for everyone. i.e. if I do use JavaScript to say, hey, after the page is loaded just confirm #anchor is at the top left. Then in the vast majority of cases when everything is hunky dory and you start reading and scrolling a page... a late firing event is going to cause the JavaScript to execute and it will jump the page around.

So I won't do that.

This stuff is not a bug.

I won't fix it.

I shall now place you on ignore whilst I have some hairs that are not grey.

You've made ignore work?

It's been working for over a week.

https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/255481/

The last thing, coming imminently, are the buttons for you to ignore stuff. Performance stuff and fundraising distracted me from that, should arrive today but there's another bug I'm working on in the meantime.

I must have ignored that conversion.

Jesus Christ,
my intention was to give you feedback on something that isn't working properly (call it a "bug" or call it something else - it doesn't matter, does it?) to maybe help make this place better - not to give you grey hairs by bitching about stuff.
Thanks, and have a nice day!

to maybe help make this place better

See, that's the thing. You keep coming back to the same issue even though it's been addressed multiple times in this very thread.

Along with your other passive-aggressive and off-topic posts, it starts to seem like an effort to frustrate and annoy, rather than one of help.

Please don't post anything else in this thread. I need to get some actual work done.

Excuse me, I was really just trying to help.
I'll stop posting in here all right.

I came out to have a good time and I'm honestly feeling so attacked right now.

I came out to have a good time and I'm honestly feeling so attacked right now.

Not a bug, #wontfix.

#scoblerep for appropriate meme usage.

And there was I thinking my Mozilla Persona credentials all present and correct would be the equivalent of the friendly raised eyebrow.

Do you never tire of moaning?

You're a web developer aren't you? So you must have some awareness of web security too.

Stuff like Web Application Firewalls or extensions like mod_security?
Or the risks of XSS or CSRF?
Or even things like URLs that suddenly go up paths like http://example.org/path/../../../../etc/passwd ?

It's the job of a WAF to stop all that craziness before getting into the network, to sort the bad and let the obviously good through.

And WAFs help deal with some DDoS traffic too (the bits that look OK to hardware but are still iffy), and WAFs deal with things like the Shellshock situation.

But what is the right thing to do when an IP address sends a load of dodgy stuff and then a good request in the middle of it?

What would you do? Would you observe an IP sending lots of traffic that looks like attacks, and would you just let it through?

Feel free to answer that.

And in the meantime I'll say what I would like, and what we pay CloudFlare for: Stop the obviously bad stuff, let through the obviously good stuff, and in that small space of fuzziness issue a challenge and temporarily whitelist that person (whilst still stopping bad stuff).

I am curious though... what would you do?

And for reference, CloudFlare has caught 5,217 attacks on LFGSS.com alone, in the last 7 days. Most of those attacks are SQL injection attacks, a fair few are XSS, some are brute force password logins, and then there's things like Shellshock.

When you have a solution, let me know.

Christ David, do you have to act like such a dick? I asked a question, the reply didn't make sense, I followed up with a joke. Get off your high horse.

And for reference, CloudFlare has caught 5,217 attacks on LFGSS.com alone, in the last 7 days.

Blimey, so many people posting pictures of their first fixie.

You can understand his reaction though. Since LFGSS went live on Microcosm there has been an unending stream of complaints about the font size/style, too much whitespace, not enough whitespace, people having to use their fingers and actually scroll... *

I can imagine it's very frustrating to have worked very hard on something only to have so much negative feedback from the very people you're working hard to benefit so when someone complains about something that has been implemented for good reasons you can understand not getting the most polite response.

I actually think @Velocio is doing a good job of explaining the issues in a non-technical manner, so most people can understand what he's done and why but doing this is very time consuming (and therefore stressful when you're busy).

*Not saying there haven't been bugs but the transition has been pretty good especially seeing as it was brought in ahead of the planned schedule.

Actually I'm impressed that this is the first time David has shown any kind of frustation at your endless opinions on site design and implementation. And let's not forget the snarkiness either.

The man has the patience of a saint.