Subtle changes, bugs and feedback

Preview is an approximation of what actually happens.

I.e. preview doesn't show embedding of YouTube, doesn't show bbcode.

It's good enough to be mostly useful

Probably not directly a forum thing, but I get intermittent cloudflare DNS lookup errors browsing and posting through one of my proxies.

Which I didn't screenshot or copy, and now is working fine...

If you provide me with the Ray-ID that should be visible I can look into it.

It shouldn't happen... but then perhaps the proxies are allocating you IP addresses that have previously been used for spam, etc by other people and so those IP addresses temporarily have a poor reputation with Cloudflare and thus they get blocked and you see an error screen for the block.

Or perhaps something broke. Hard to say :shrug

But if you have the Ray-ID I can at least try and check (within 24 hours of it happening).

Like an idiot, I didn't note the Ray-ID down before swapping proxy & reloading.

It's not the first time that it's happened on that IP either, and not just on LFGSS (scan.co.uk consistently has a problem with it).

As for spam, it's my own VPS, which I've had for many years - Nobody else has been on it. It's not part of any blacklists, as far as I know.

Nobody else has been on it

that you know of

mwuahahha

Hey @Velocio, don't know if this has happened to anyone else, but a post in the clouds thread, when viewed on my mobile phone, has an upside down photo attached

Yet the same post via desktop is fine

2 Attachments

Hangs for a long time then throws an error: https://www.lfgss.com/search/?q=%23different

Works now.

Hypothesis: Extremely common word, slow query? Then once it's executed it is cached and works fine.

The database search timeout is 30s, it would return an error... but in the background even though the query stopped the operating system and database would have already loaded the relevant parts of the index into memory. So the subsequent query works.

Though this is another reminder to me that implementing hashtag search via standard search is not efficient at all.

Hypothesis: Extremely common word, slow query?

Hmm, except that #different isn't very common (only appears twice), but different is a lot more common and returns in 6 seconds.

Edit: looks like different was just cached

Yup, they are both the same full text search. Then the one with the hashtag additionally filters the results.

Is there any way to expose the underlying links that are obfuscated by microcosm.app/out

When people link to instagram, I need to see the underlying link to be able to parse it to a third party website (as I don't have an instagram account)

Better still... what's the third party?

If it's a better destination for Instagram then I can rewrite all outgoing instagram links.

Yes please!

Better still... what's the third party?

I've just gone with the first one that I founds, searching for 'instagram story viewer'

insta-stories.online works well enough (for what I want it for)

It might be nice if there was a visual indicator on the Following page which let you know the follow-type of threads being displayed. ie some threads appear because I've followed them individually, and some threads appear because I've followed their entire subforum. Perhaps with the forum icon appearing instead of the standard chat bubbles.

If I directly message someone on here, do they automatically get an email notification?

By default yes.

However... the answer is no if:

• They've opted out in their notification settings.
  
• Their email address is no longer available (i.e. if they signed up a while ago with a work place email, and now no longer work at that place and the email address was deleted).
  
• Their email server rejects it (i.e. inbox full, corporate policy, spam folder, etc).
  
  

For the emails we send, >99.99% reach an in box. The <0.01% that don't usually bounce for ephemeral reasons, but occasionally there is an old email address that is no longer available.

It's about as guaranteed as you've got, and if it doesn't work then I cannot do better (as I would try and email the person, but I only have the same email that failed).

Thanks. Hopefully the member in question will reply soon. I've stalked them and they were posting on here 18 hrs ago.

Usually I check the Today list of changed threads and I just would like to go straight to the latest message in a thread.

For a over year I was clicking on the thread title, then the highest page number and scrolling down, a three-step process every time to check the latest message. Then I discovered that by clicking on "replied" next to the posters name it went straight there. Perhaps the word "replied" could be in bold or a different colour, then it would hint at this special behaviour.

@Velocio - Can users be forced to choose a user name on sign up, rather than default user12345 etc? There seem to be loads more unnamed folk on here recently and it's hard to recognise which are troll types easily and to recognise who you are responding to.

Difficult to do as the username is created once they authenticate.

Originally (a long time ago) I tried to have a smarter default, i.e. the first part of the email address used to authenticate. But that's obviously a privacy nightmare and would fall foul of GDPR now.

I did experiment with a forced flow to prompt to set a username when replying, but that typically lost someone's reply... i.e. the more hurdles you introduce the fewer people bother jumping them and some very notable members stayed as user76845 style names for a long time.

I do think there's something that can be done though... perhaps to change the reply box itself to show the current avatar and username on the left as a kind of "you are posting as" reminder that their identity is currently crappy.

Thanks. Was just a thought - not a biggy.

Difficult to do

Pretty much every sign-up form I've ever used (which doesn't use email address as username) has asked me to create a username in the first field. It might be difficult to change your code to do this, but it's obviously very easy in general.