Subtle changes, bugs and feedback

it sounds, from your description, that it creeps over a little per comment until it's basically unusable?

that is pretty much what happens, as you scroll down, the page slides further and further over to the left, cutting off text as you go.

will try and grab a screengrab for you..

and now its not doing it..
when it happens again will grab a screenshot

@Velocio
Happening in this thread.
http://www.lfgss.com/conversations/177280/?offset=1025#comment11779453

Opened up the thread scrolled down and it went left, moved it back over to the right and stayed that way until I got to the end of the thread. Scrolling back up it moved left again.
Screenshot is below

1 Attachment

No worries, I'll check this evening when I get home... my version of that iOS is at home today (I don't lug every test device around with me).

@Velocio now worries whenever you get the chance, it hasn't been happening as often recently as when we first migrated, but thought I grab a screenshot whilst it was still doing its buggy thing

@Velocio Why is the Travel & Trips now Cycle Touring? A lot of the content in that forum area was nothing to do with cycle touring. Also, can we stop the forum list paging please?

I'd renamed it to encompass cycle touring in addition to travelling with bikes as a lot of the newer content was touring related and seemed a little lost around the forum and out of place in the Travel & Trips.

And paging stays... it's going to get worse as well... the "Create Forum" button has been enabled for all (on the home page, on the bottom of the side bar).

Well, if you're gonna make it really annoying can we split Travel & Trips and Cycle Touring?

@Velocio Is there any intention to fix this issue https://www.lfgss.com/comments/11762374/

It seems to happen in Firefox, IE10 (not tried others) and Chrome. Windows 7 & 8

Cheers

Happy to extend the amount of the URL that is in the tooltip, but there is no intention to show the full and unedited URL at any point.

That we can do... if you want to create the other forum go ahead, you can move things too. Whichever way round you want to do it is fine by me.

A longer tooltip would be useful but I'm surprised that that is the approach you're taking given that you're generally fairly security conscious. With this approach you're effectively clicking on links blind other than seeing some of the domain. You can often get an idea of what you're about to click on from the URL which is no longer possible on this site.

Out of curiosity, is it an aesthetic choice or for another reason?

It's for multiple reasons.

We do strip the protocol "http://" bit from the front as an aesthetic thing, but that isn't why we don't put the full unadulterated URL up.

The reasons start with security, then enhancing the content, and finally our business model:

• Prevent spam:
  
  • We can shut down all links to a domain centrally, without requiring us to edit the affected comments.
    
  • We can identify how many people were affected, which clients (mobile apps or web sites) generated most traffic to those, and which comments contain the spam. Meaning we can remove it easier and manage any fallout.
    
• Prevent malware/phishing: Much like the spam argument, we can analyse destinations and use the redirection service to warn people about the destination before they reach it.
  
• Media embedding: When we detect new domains rising in popularity (clicks via the redirect) we can go look at whether there is extra info that we could be showing along side the link. i.e. the video next to a YouTube link, a map next to a RideWithGPS link.
  
• Affiliates: Microcosms only revenue right now is affiliate links. We both want to ensure that these are used, and also that the reporting from our partners reflect the click-throughs that we see (that they're being honest). If this isn't working, we're going to have to consider display adverts and everyone prefers the forum without display ads.
  
  

The affiliates is important, but could've been done client-side so wasn't enough to force this. Nor was media embedding, which we could figure out vaguely from client-side scripting.

But the spam and malware prevention are both very real issues that are important. Those weigh heavily in this, and that it then simplifies the other things helps too.

There's a lot of forum spam. Hell, there's even this http://www.stopforumspam.com/ and if you look on there you'll see the most recent additions are at the rate of 2 spammers added to their database every second.

Each spammer will try and hit as many forums as possible. It's an absolute deluge of spam.

Not publishing links in full, and being able to disable all links a spammer makes from a central switch... is a lifesaver and a very big deterrent (they go for easy targets).

I've created Travel & Trips but I don't seem to be able to move my Hawaii thread into it.

Travel & Trips doesn't appear in the dropdown list after I select Move.

Any ideas? Permissions or visibility wrong on the forum or something?

Heh, only LFGSS has this many forums.... I edit the HTML of the dropdown in Chrome dev tools and change one of the forum IDs to the one I want to move it to.

No worries, I'll shifty things around.

Cheers, I don't have issues with any of the above but assumed that the tooltip wouldn't replace the actual url you're clicking on ... micro.sm/whatever

All I was looking for was the tooltip to show the full URL. I assumed that as it can already show a portion of the URL (which you can extend the length of) then the information must be there so showing the full URL shouldn't be an issue.

I can't imagine that many people are going to type in the URL from the tooltip to bypass the redirection so I'm not sure if I'm missing something with regard to why the tooltip cuts off most of the URL. Surely people are more likely to click on spam/malware if they can't see the URL.

Nothing wrong with a good ziptie fix.

Cautious and smart people check the URLs, but the vast majority of people just click. Besides, even without our redirector it's trivially easy to mask URLs. As an example I offer Rickrolling and Goatse.cx .

By having the redirector, and by masking the URL, we ensure two things:

1. We can visit the end destination of any posted URLs to discover if people are masking something like spam and malware using perfectly reasonable things like the rickrolling trickery.
   
2. If someone can get a person to install a browser extension, or gain some other control over the browser... they still can't manage to auto-trigger a link without us knowing they've done so (they couldn't swap the title attribute with the href and click the link, as the link would be useless).
   
   

Basically, we want the ability to always detect nefarious stuff, and to be able to kill it really effectively and quickly.

We don't want to find ourselves in the position, for example, that someone else could've used our platform for fake display ad clicks against advertisers, given that we need affiliate relationships to be quite strong for the business model to function. And this is feasible, given that third parties can make clients for this platform, we could detect whether they're f*ing with links by comparing the click-through rate against more trusted clients.

It all gets a bit complex... but the value of the redirector and not publishing the full link, for spam and malware prevention... is too high for us to not do it.

Everything you see, you are allowed to see.

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

This applies to everyone individually.

I assumed.. however still scares me.
I'd think it might scare others.. why scare anyone?

Following stats seem like good feedback for users to know if others find their posts interesting.
If made public it would also reward them with status.
Is it just functionality not yet developed or is there an active philosophy against driving engagement through 'gamification'

Its ironic that vbullitin had 'friends' which served no functional purpose other than status.

Even more ironic that I think hippy won the game and I still think its a good idea.

There is probably a good reason some people are more scared of having their PMs made public than other people are.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61ocE12lWOs

however still scares me.

It genuinely scares you? It causes you a great fear, creates a nervousness, it frightens?

And even understanding that it uses permissions, it still scares you?

Does it trigger palpitations? Brings on hot sweats of anxiety too?

I don't doubt that the first time you noticed it you might have been subject to a little consternation as a result of a temporary confusion... but scared?

Yes it's different from how it used to be.
Yes it doesn't drive a hard wedge of separation between the concept of "private" and "public" whenever you view search results ("today", "following", "search").

But it's a really super simple concept:

1. If it's in a forum the permissions are: Whomever is permitted to read this single forum.
   
2. If it's in a private message the permissions are: Whomever the message is shared with.
   
3. If it's anywhere else (every page when you're not explicitly within a single forum or your messages) then #1 and #2 apply and you see a collection of items based on those permissions.
   
   

That's it.

Nothing more complex, nothing sinister or "scary". If you're allowed to see it you do, if you're not then you don't.

On following, such stats are a very poor indicator of whether someone's posts are interesting. Some people follow others merely to witness the train crash better. Without knowing the reason for a follow, one could never draw a reasonable conclusion about the motivation behind it, and so how could it be determined that it was because of something "interesting"?

A better indicator would be a rep system in which the rep was semi-public and people could see the measure of a person and see which individual comments contributed to that.

It would be extremely effective at guiding new members of the community as to who is valued and who isn't, and it would be hard to game.

Therein lays my hesitation... you would be ripped to shreds and your reputation destroyed, without a chance of choosing to make changes to your behaviour in future (as the measure would have been made and a strong measurement would survive such changes in behaviour).

Other members would be put on a pedestal and given authority through their status. Thus making them somewhat immune from being absolutely vulgar and horrible people to others, knowing that their reputation would survive and protect them.

I know how to build such systems, and the best ones are not there to cynically drive engagement through gamification... they genuinely offer a good measure of what the community appreciates and likes. The issue is that all such systems that quantify behaviour lead to a drop in the quality of behaviour as they merely reinforce the historical behaviour rather than truly encourage new and perhaps better behaviour. Communities stagnate rather than evolve, as existing behaviour becomes codified and forms a feedback loop that amplifies it.

It genuinely scares you? It causes you a great fear, creates a nervousness, it frightens?

And even understanding that it uses permissions, it still scares you?

Does it trigger palpitations? Brings on hot sweats of anxiety too?

It is clearly a phobia and should be treated with immersion therapy, perhaps you can embed a widget that displays his personal email in line too.

But assuming he just forgot to use the past tense, there is a kernel of truth in his observation. It could be off-putting to new users not to have their private and public content clearly segregated, without that everything feels a bit public, a bit like those anxiety dreams where you find yourself turning up to work naked. I suppose the question is whether new users will understand the layout quickly enough that it isn't a problem, or whether people will get discouraged from using the forum before finding out how it works.

I suppose the question is whether new users will understand the layout quickly enough that it isn't a problem, or whether people will get discouraged from using the forum before finding out how it works.

That is the key question.

The answer has been that new users, who were not conditioned in the way that our customised vBulletin worked, have not raised this at all and that engagement on the other forums Microcosm hosts has been above the measured levels that we saw on vBulletin.

The issue (if it can be classed as one), has only been raised by a few people who were very familiar with the distinct separation that the vBulletin version of LFGSS enforced in the past.

This is why I'm not concerned, new users are not exhibiting any discomfort from this functionality, neither by communicating it or through any impact on any of the metrics we have. Additionally new users were very comfortable with this in UX testing.

So the question changes to whether the users who migrated from something they knew, to something that is different, are able to adapt to those differences.

Some of the differences are obviously better, some feel worse (but we're working on those), and some (like this one) are just different... it's that last class of differences where adapting behaviour comes into play.

Something distinctly underhand about using testing and actual real world statistics to defeat my noble (idle) conjecture.