Subtle changes, bugs and feedback

Why is it that sometimes when I revisit a thread, I'll be taken back to a post I've already read before?

I have no real idea how this works, does the site somehow know when you've 'seen' a post, or does it know how many posts there were when you last looked at the page?

The forum knows how many posts were in the thread when you last looked at the thread or which was the last page of the thread you looked at if there are further unread pages, so when you next visit the thread it tries to position you at the next unread post.

The problem is usually images. The HTML page tries to tell the browser where to scroll down (probably using html element references) but pictures loading (or not loading as expected) screw up the positioning and the browser tries to minimise jumping around so it ends up with you looking at the wrong thing usually.

I have no real idea how this works, does the site somehow know when you've 'seen' a post, or does it know how many posts there were when you last looked at the page?

The site keeps track of the timestamp of the last comment on a page of comments. It knows you have "seen" up to there.

But... if a new comment is 20 comments down a page, and comments higher have inlined images from slow 3rd party servers... then when you arrive at the new comment, it may be pushed down the page by the loading of images higher on the page.

For real freakiness you should see how we track the stuff you mark as "read".

That's where it gets messy.

Lots of things have suddenly gone bold for me. What's up with that?

Lots of things have suddenly gone bold for me. What's up with that?

Did you accidentally zoom your page in your browser?

Nothing has changed at my end. Try a force refresh or cache flush.

I've noticed this a couple of times since the new auth; if you have an access_token cookie set, but the token is invalid/expired, and you go to https://www.lfgss.com/updates/, you get a 500 error.

You'll probably see it in the logs. Obviously not a major issue, but I thought I'd mention it.

Oh, I am aware.

But the error handling around it is very weird, and it's Django, and I'm not a total wiz at Python.

After fixing all of the auth stuff on all sites I'm going to re-write the whole of the front-end to work on a Go server so that I basically understand it better and can fix things like that quickly.

I know that seems backwards (doing auth stuff before web stuff) but that is due to Persona being switched off very soon and driving a hard deadline.

I know it looks also like a sledgehammer to fix a small issue but actually there are lots of issues with the Django site of which this is one, and the sheer number of small issues combined with the unsupportable old version we're using means it's a lot safer and saner to make a bigger investment in a rewrite to something far more proven for us (and Go on the API has been flawless and required virtually no maintenance in 2 years whilst also having had major features added without causing headaches).

So yeah, I know... but can't fix at the mo', and won't fix in the future as I'll just replace instead.

Cool. Makes sense.

I've tried, but I just can't cope..

Homepage vs sub fora

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What's up?

Need an image on the Wanted? I hesitated on that... price tags make sense for selling stuff, wasn't sure about "wanted" adverts.

That said... images are just an experiment. I'm playing around.

ordering different?

Presumably due to one being popularity based and the other static?

Oh God, yes.

Must fix.

Known bug.

Annoys the hell out of me.

Should be ordered by number of comments in both places, with pinned items first. The way it appears on the homepage is broken.

Half-fixed.

Note to self: the nightly cron stats on a microcosm item and comment counts do not include the COUNT(*) of the items and comments of child forums.

Yes it was the ordering, its a minor thing but gets me every time.

I like the new images though. Nice and subtle.

Icons are nice though!

Ooh. Icons. I like the gh*st.

Are they bespoke David? I love the track icon.

They're not actually.

Brixton CC forum added them, and I asked the same question.

They all come from https://www.icons8.com and I've used only the Material design ones just to make sure they are consistent with each other. They are very close to what I did want designing, and I figure I'll see how it feels and if it feels good I'll go pay for the SVG versions to make them even nicer.

Nice find, thanks (and to Brixton CC).

I noticed the icon for polo was a bit... plain, so I had a crack at making something more relevant

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Nice work, perhaps propose them in the polo forum?

He's proposing them where he might catch the attention of someone with the access necessary to make the change.

I like the little man with the big feet.

Thanks I'll use the first one when I get back on Sunday.