Microcosm Feature Suggestions

@Velocio Can we have a quote function back? Even if it just cascades or hides the quoted quotes.

Threads make so little sense without the ability to quote. It's really messing with the conversation.

@Velocio, probably not the right place for this, but when the logo goes black can it link to the relevant rider down thread? just a suggestion...

Thought about that before... it's not a bad idea, but it falls down as soon as there are two incidents at the same time (it's happened a few times), and it breaks general usability as people expect the logo click to go to the home page regardless of the logo colour.

Could you add a small date under the logo, also in black, that links to the relevent thread?

I had initially though a name, but that's often not available (for very good reasons) within 3 days.

@Velocio I really think .gifv should be supported. It kind of encapsulates webm and mp4 if I understand correctly. http://imgur.com/blog/2014/10/09/introducing-gifv/

More and more gifs are actually embedded gifv videos and the bandwidth savings are pretty intense. If we could just link to them as images or if regular links to them became embedded a la youtube it would help things.

Not sure it can be done on here.

Have you seen what it is? It's not an image format at all, it's a web page embedded as an iFrame of the size of the video, and then containing multiple tags for different browsers of different capabilities.

Instead of just asking you for a .gif URL, I'd have to ask for a URL of each type of media that each browser supports, including the .webm and .mp4 and the original .gif.

Then, if the image was 3rd party hosted I wouldn't know the size to display it at, so I'd need to ask you that too.

ImgUR don't have to do this, as they just take an upload and do a whole load of video conversion work.

So to support .gifv as ImgUR does... it means adding a video transcoding platform to the backend, and then storing all versions of the output, and producing the embed widget, and using that in the page.

It's an extremely convoluted 'spec', and the whole thing is just a set of hacks and workarounds for their specific scenario.

It works for them as the bandwidth costs are so severe that the savings are worth this mess. They literally have millions of dollars spare to pay for all of this because they save that bandwidth. For us as a small site, this bandwidth save won't save us even £1, so any investment in the video transcoding is a further loss we'd have to incur.

It just makes no sense, technically or financially.

How do you handle the youtube embeds? Could you just special case the imgur urls and embed them in the iframe? Or gyfcats?

for example:

<iframe src="http://gfycat.com/ifr/NippyMessyApisdorsatalaboriosa" frameborder="0" 
scrolling="no" width="450" height="360" 
style="-webkit-backface-visibility: hidden;-webkit-transform: scale(1);" ></iframe>

Edit: Failed to reply so I will @Velocio you

How would I know what width and height the frame should be?

how do you know for youtube videos like here: https://www.lfgss.com/comments/12153952/ ?

Is it just a hardcoded value?

The world is looking more and more gifv/webm/mp4 y than it used to. I have read opinions that this is a bad thing, but I don't see it going backward.

Oh, also I don't think you would need your own transcoding library would you? Could you not just use the multiple <source></source> inside the video tag for the .webm and .mp4 and then lastly for plain gifs? I thought that was the majycks of the "new" html5 video stuff.

It is hard-coded because all YouTube videos are available in a consistent set of dimensions.

Once we use an iframe for a widget, I have no way to query the dimensions of the source, and I need to know the dimensions before writing the iframe.

Widgets and iframes only work when the size is known in advance, none of the gifv/gfy formats solve this at all.

webm and mp4 are fine, we could presume the dimensions for YouTube are appropriate as the video player would resize appropriately. But this is a different thing from gifv as gifv is just a web page with multiple versions of a video on it, and the size is extremely likely not to actually be of video portrait dimensions.

If you can actually find a technical resource that solves third party embedding of videos derived from gifs that allows a URL to be translated into an embeddable iframe that includes dimensions... I'll use it.

But none of the above have that.

I would need a transcoder, if the proposal you have is that if someone uploads a gif that I take care of it.

And I would need a transcoder, if the proposal is that the user provides a single URL for a .gif or other format and I take care of producing the other versions needed for ImgUR's gifv format.

The only way I wouldn't need a transcoder are in these two scenarios:

1. I ask users for iframe URL, width and height.
   
2. I ask users for every video format URL.
   
   

I can't do number 1 at all, as all of the embeds we do support are trusted. I can't go and put an untrusted embed in a page. Besides, people will fuck up the width and height.

I can't do number 2, as people will fuck it up.

OK I will do a better job of looking into it before I bug you again. But then I will bug you again.

Summary conclusion... it's all too complex for real-user usage, and none of this works on third party embeds.

All of this stuff only really works where the sites own the image upload, conversion, and display of the image.

That isn't the case here... we only have the last bit, and don't have all the pre-requisites available to ensure it works consistently... hell, we don't even know the width and height.

If you produce a proof of concept showing a single URL embed that works consistently on all browsers, and can be guaranteed to be a trusted source for the iframe... I'll use it. But so far, I don't see that.

Yeah the other smaller forums that I have seen that accept this are usually using the javascript that gfycat provides. I wasn't suggesting that you do anything with actual uploaded gifs, just trying to handle the links that are showing up more and more on reddit/twitter/imgur etc. The works on all browsers thing sounds like a hard thing to guarantee. "embeds on most modern browsers with a link for the ones that don't" I think is the best any of us could do.

OK, here is maybe an option:

link provided in a post: http://imgur.com/WOW7pYA

generates:

<video poster="//i.imgur.com/WOW7pYAh.jpg" preload="auto" autoplay="autoplay" muted="muted" loop="loop" webkit-playsinline="" style="max-width: 718px; max-height: 404px;">
                <source src="http://i.imgur.com/WOW7pYA.webm" type="video/webm">
                <source src="http://i.imgur.com/WOW7pYA.mp4" type="video/mp4">
                <img src="http://imgur.com/download/WOW7pYA">
            </video>

It tries the webm and mp4 (which imgur provides), it defaults to a plain gif (which imgur also, grudgingly, provides). I tested in modern chrome, firefox, and tor browsers. I also tested in firefox 1.5 from before their video tag support.

Would something like that work? gyfcat also has a similar url format for the different types.

Oof. you can't just put the image in there embedded like that it can only be a link (if you don't want the browser to download the .gif anyway).

so:

<video poster="//i.imgur.com/WOW7pYAh.jpg" preload="auto" autoplay="autoplay" muted="muted" loop="loop" webkit-playsinline="" style="max-width: 718px; max-height: 404px;">
                <source src="http://i.imgur.com/WOW7pYA.webm" type="video/webm">
                <source src="http://i.imgur.com/WOW7pYA.mp4" type="video/mp4">
                <a href="http://imgur.com/download/WOW7pYA">http://imgur.com/download/WOW7pYA</a>­
          </video>

any possibility for linking an image to a URL to be easier, as this must be laborious/confusing for other forumongers other here too, no?

e.g.

post an image,

then think to add a link, by simply highlighting the image code, then clicking link, resulting in:


(!)

hence have to remember to:

make a link,

link

then replace the 'link' text with an image..

apologies for bringing this up if its a massive faff and code-ache to implement!

Zz

My immediate todo list:

1. Linting
   
   

My feature todo list:

1. Merge items for @hippy
   
2. Move items for Polo forums and others (forum to be moved to should be a search of available forums)
   
3. Sitemaps
   
4. Polls for @Velocio
   
5. Classifieds for @Velocio
   
6. Forums within forums for Rapha, Islington, and most sites
   
7. Merge users
   
   

My refactoring todo list:

1. Create common struct for all types
   
2. Reorganise controllers and structs into micropackages
   
3. Move HTML rendering to Go
   
4. Move internationalisation to Go
   
5. Move localisation to Go
   
6. Do away with Django
   

"Ignored items" is back, Back, BACK!

But clicking on "last" (page) generates a server error...

Describe steps to reproduce please.

I'm guessing, but is it:

1. Ignore someone.
   
2. Find a many page conversation in which they have posted
   
3. Go to last page
   
   

On step 3... does that break on page 1? page 2? all other pages? all pages?

I think I know what you mean, but a bit more detail will help me solve it.

After ignoring something, you are taken to the list of all the items you have ignored: ie https://www.lfgss.com/ignored/

Using "last" from the page number list generates the server error.

I've also found that navigating to the last page but one (in my case, page 435 of 436) generates "Not Found Sorry, we couldn't find that. It might have been deleted."

Page 434 is the last I can view. The last items listed, begin with "Zeus" and it seems unlikely that I have two more pages of "Z": perhaps they contain items which I ignored and were subsequently deleted (spam, banned forumengers etc)?

Both these errors are repeated whether you type the page number in the box, or use direct links (ie when on page 434, clicking on "435" or "last").

And the pages that you are navigating is on the list of ignored items?

You have ignored 436 pages of things?

OK, I see how you're using the ignore system. Essentially you're filtering classifieds so that Wanted adverts and stuff you're not interested in are removed and you only see the stuff you are interested in.

That has led you to have thousands of ignored items, and somewhere in the pagination logic something has gone weird there.

OK... cool.

I'll do the check tonight on exactly what is going on there. I suspect someone has been banned, and they started some conversation you've ignored, and that results in the pagination being out by a couple of items, which breaks the last page.

I'll do the check tonight on exactly what is going on there. I suspect someone has been banned, and they started some conversation you've ignored, and that results in the pagination being out by a couple of items, which breaks the last page.

When I first flagged-up that the ignored list was broken ("Not Found Sorry, we couldn't find that. It might have been deleted."), you thought this might be the cause: ignored items that were then deleted from the forum.

Yes, I'm filtering out anything I'm not concerned with as a) I'm on PAYG internet and b) it keeps my feed clean (I tend to go to "conversations" from the main page, rather than browsing the forum at large).

This isn't a problem from my point of view (I don't use the list for anything), I just highlighted it as a bug.