Up/down voting
The thing that irritates me is getting taken to a new page when up/downvoting a post, not just having the vote recorded immediately.
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Friday 23rd March 2012 12:32 GMT Haku
Re: Bug? Log-in tick box not remembering
I get asked for the password all the time on several XP machines running FF, doesn't really bother me as I've set FF to remember that password.
Also it doesn't help that you need to separately login to each sub-site of El Reg, the channel & hardware sites spring to mind.
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Monday 26th March 2012 11:11 GMT TeeCee
Re: Bug? Log-in tick box not remembering
Not being remembered isn't a big deal for me.
Being asked for the password during a session in which I am already logged in is a genuine WTF? moment.
Obvious one here is when trawling back through own posts, hit "next" or "previous" and get prompted to login. That one comes across as particularly daft, as that action and the very page it's on wouldn't be available were I not logged in...?!!? There seems to be no rhyme or reason to this.
Tend to read at work, so that'll be XP / IE8.
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Monday 26th March 2012 11:17 GMT TeeCee
Re: iPad app
s/on to/smoking/
Er, surely a vanilla HTML5 version of the site with the "app" side limited to icon + URL link shortcut, served in the preferred flavour of the various platforms is the way to go here?
1) You only have to do it once for everything.
2) No need to update the "app" every time you want to do something new.
3) Those who have something[1] which you don't ship a shortcut for can just roll their own without losing any functionality.
[1] And with this audience there's probably a good few of those somethings too.
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Friday 23rd March 2012 11:58 GMT Rob Carriere
Threading
If you're considering multi-level threading, one concern is usually that the increasing indentation causes layout problems. One possible solution would be what the programming editor Kate does with its folding bar: Have a this-is-a-response bar run on the left hand side of the posts, like in the old setup, but change the color of the bar as the nesting level increases and decreases. This can easily give you ten or so levels of nesting (i.e. ten colors) without needing more horizontal space than the width of the bar. My experience with this system in Kate is very positive. (Although that's obviously not a forum.)
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Friday 23rd March 2012 12:17 GMT Aaron Em
I suspect that
the comment count on article pages doesn't update in real time because article pages are cached as static copies and regenerated every so often -- guessing, of course, as I'm just a redneck hairball hacker with air-cooled teeth and have no association with the Reg other than being a persistent pain in the comment moderators' collective backside, but that kind of caching is very commonly done with pages that are expensive to generate and which don't change very often.
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Friday 23rd March 2012 12:15 GMT ratfox
Written in Perl? You masochists!
That aside, there is a slight inconsistency between pages "Posts by ratfox" and ""My Posts".
In the first one, each post comes with a link of type "Posted in Blizzard ponders World of Warcraft for iPad", which leads straight to this post in that forum.
In the second one, each post comes with a link of type "In forum Blizzard ponders World of Warcraft for iPad", which only leads to the top of the forum, which is less useful – you have to search for your own post. It is possible to click instead on the permalink Posted Tuesday 20th March 2012 15:37 GMT, and then click again on the link to this post in that forum, but it is a slight annoyance. And it is inconsistent.
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Friday 23rd March 2012 12:21 GMT Aaron Em
Written in Perl? You little dancers!
No accounting for taste, I suppose -- you're probably into Ruby or something. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)
I've noticed the same inconsistency with regard to linking back to the forum from the 'My Posts' page. Doesn't fret me particularly -- if I'm spending time on the Reg at all, I'm skiving, so what's another fifteen seconds or so? -- but it seems a fair enough cop.
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Friday 23rd March 2012 12:32 GMT Dave 126
White text for 'Spoilers'
i.e one must highlight a piece of text in order to read it.
e.g:
"And as every body knows, Luke's father was <span style="color: #fff">the butler. He did it in the library with his lead pipe. </span> "
This was not my idea, a fellow c'tard had posted it in a previous discussion.
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Friday 23rd March 2012 12:33 GMT Lee Dowling
Personally, I have serious concerns.
You're going to reinvent the wheel to produce a modern-day forum with HTML, maybe messaging, etc. It's just seems like the first step on the path to disaster to me. The simplicity of the forums are what save you from the spam - nobody is going to bother to try plain-text links because they won't help the google ranking and can be modded to oblivion quite easily. But now opening up features that others have "just because"? It seems like that's the time that you'll have to reinvent the defences that all forum software have been building themselves for the last ten years, but doing it on your own, via your own code. I don't want yet-another site where I have to be careful what I click if I'm one of the first commenters (and the 100-post limit will be worked around, I'm sure - we'll see lots of "Yeah, me too" posts now, for those fake users that spammers want to hold in reserve for where their current one gets caught spamming).
It just seems like an invite to a hacking / overloading the site when something goes wrong with that code - no matter how well you think you wrote it, or how much you tested it before. I'd have preferred things to just stay as they were with BUGFIXES, like the "not logged in" issue (where hardware.theregister.co.uk doesn't think I have a cookie but www.theregister.co.uk does but other sub-sites don't, etc. and I spend my life chasing logins and cookie timeout to post), like it being far too tricky to get to the list of your posts, or to see a post in context (play "guess which un-descriptive link to the article does the job and how many sub-levels you'll have to go through to get there), or even just simple stuff like actually using some decent, modern HTML to make the vote buttons work in-place.
Am I the only on who's now going to hold their breath before entering the comments section for at least the new few weeks to see when the spam (even just "helpful" spam to reader's own blog articles or whatever) starts? I give it a few weeks until the first kind of Javascript injection trick or whatever makes it through the filters (or even just bait-and-switch - make the link point to an article you want until it passes moderation, then change to something spammy).
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Friday 23rd March 2012 12:40 GMT Dave 126
My idea
was to have three columns:
[ Relevant to topic, honest question, good joke ] - [Relevance not yet established, groan-making joke, interesting aside] - [ Troll, irrelevant, spam, abuse ]
The commentard would choose which column to put their comment in. A comment may be voted to the right. There would be no penalty for a bit of trolling in the troll column, since it wouldn't be upsetting the more serious column.
However, I would consider this system to be (if I were a pointy haired boss) to be 'blue sky'.
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Friday 23rd March 2012 13:16 GMT BristolBachelor
Not on roadmap
"•Log-in via third parties - e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Disqus, Linked-in"
And keep it that way too, thanks Drew.
I've already left a few other sites because of their insistance that I sell my entire personal life to be able to post, plus their article comments are now full of stupid comments by people who have no idea at all about the subject they are posting about (normally physics / space tech). I'd be a shame to have to stop reading El Reg.
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Friday 23rd March 2012 14:39 GMT gribbler
The one thing that I really dislike about the forums
When I upvote a post (which I don't bother to do very often) I get the message:
Upvote post
We’re glad you liked this post!
Your vote will be recorded in a few moments.
It's the middle sentence that bothers me. As a long-term register reader, I refuse to believe for a second that any of the staff give a monkeys one way or another whether I like some commentards witty remarks. It's got that sheen of false politeness that just makes me squirm and an overly enthusiastic exclamation mark at the end... makes me shudder. Surely more accurate copy would be:
Upvote post
Now you feel like you've contributed, bravo.
Your vote will be recorded in a few moments.
... or something equally cynical?
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Monday 26th March 2012 11:26 GMT TeeCee
Re: The one thing that I really dislike about the forums
On the subject of up/downvotes, how about a "retract" function? Maybe implemented as a "same commentard, up + down =0" thing?
It's way to damned easy to hit one while aiming for something else around here (I think that one of Drew's above just gained a spurious "down", courtesy of my feeble attempt to hit the "reply" button).
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Friday 23rd March 2012 17:01 GMT dssf
Dealing with abusers
"Why HTML and not BBCode?
HTML is the open standard of the web. Deal with it, bitches."
LOL! I love that.
My gripe is there appears to be no way to deal with malicious, drive-by, emotionally-loaded down-voters. It is annoying to be down-voted on one's personal experience story by someone who is in no position to verify or invalidate one's story account.
-- Heavy users of the down-thumb should be shown on a dashboard.
-- Down-thumbing should require justification, to ensure it's not a "gang" of like-minded people ganging up on someone with an unpopular opinion
-- A heavily down-thumbed opinion or comment should be given a "rescue" chance by an automated highlighting of the account to solicit counter-balancing. Once it descends into rancor, the virulent of the comments and authors could or should be highlighted, then locked or locked out for a few days with a count-down timer on the locked-out person and the thread.
-- Abusers of the down-thumb should have their abusive history shown on their profile panel so that when people visit a profile they see not only the usual list of comments, but the person's behavior toward other users.
I've made similar suggestions to at least one other forum, but was resoundingly ganged up on and not even the site admins expressed disapproval of the ganging up.
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Friday 23rd March 2012 21:58 GMT Anonymous Coward
How do you know your post amount anyway ?
When I click on someone else's profile I get to see how much responses he wrote. But if you look at your own "My posts" page you get to see how much you've been up & down voted. I have no idea how much comments I wrote, more than 10 that's for sure :-)
Oh the irony.. One of my firsts posts (quite a few years back) was to complain about the new layout and stating that I probably wouldn't involve myself with all this :-)
Anyway, it would be nice if we were to know - up front - if we could actually perform certain tasks.
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