Hi all, well I'm wading in after being a member here for a few days, so please take this in the positive spirit it's intended. I'm back in the UK after 13 years away and a long time TGP user, so it's good to find somewhere like here with high-quality discussions in the UK (not saying TGP is always high-quality
).
The forum software seems a little flaky, as if someone had had a pretty good go at coding it up but not had time to maintain it. So far, I've struggled to upload photos either via imgur or copy / paste into the WYSIWYG editor, talking of which said editor highlights the whole line not the previous (next) word when I hit ctrl+shift+left (right) arrow, emails aren't working, some links don't work e.g. can't see which posts I got "wisdom" on and generally things aren't in the expected places compared to other forums that I've used (as much as one does in these days of social media).
Edit: and even when posting a new message, I see a parser error to do with JSON.
As I said, the discussions seem great which will keep me coming back, but the UX is frustrating.
I'm opening myself up to flames here but I'm a tech guy and I don't think all the problems are PBKAC; do other people feel this or am I the weird one? Can I help out at all? I don't even know if this is a for-profit enterprise or pure community.
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Comments
It's old, yes. And different - which is, on the whole, a good thing. Most of the "problems" are actually merely differences. For the most part, I like it.
The one thing that really, really needs fixing is the server's failure to send a referer with an image request. This is a major issue as it makes it impossible to host images for display on TFB is a safe and sensible way. You have to host them such that they are available to all and sundry.
The issue here is that the day that some random Internet tool hot-links one of your pictures in a high-traffic site, your entire hosting account gets shut down for over-use, and you lose access not only to your site(s) but also your email. Disaster! And all because the Fretboard server isn't observing one of the basic conventions. It should be a tick-this-box fix but there doesn't seem to be any desire to do it.
Further, it also prevents you linking to images on normal, properly configured websites (which routinely check the referer before serving an image) which in turn requires the waste and tedium of uploading a second copy of the image just for The Fretboard.
* Note for pedants: "referer" is correct in this context. The original RFC misspelled "referrer" in 1996 and we have been stuck with it ever since.
OK, in order...
- Direct image uploads are restricted to subscribers only, because hosting costs money and I ain't rich enough to pay for all the images to be uploaded here forever. There are, however, free alternatives and instructions here.
- Ctrl+shift+left/right - works for me on all my browsers. What browser/OS are you using?
- Things in different places...yeah, can't avoid that
- Emails: you must've had at least one email from the site to verify your email? Have you got your notification preferences set to send you emails? I'd at least see something in the logs for that (even if it failed to send), but I can't find your address anywhere in there.
- Not seeing which posts you've had reactions on...that's a deliberate design decision. There were many discussions with the community, and the conclusion was that while the reactions are useful, giving people the ability to monitor their reactions closely is a gamification step too far - there was a lot of trouble with this in the old days (with members manipulating posts to game the system, and otherwise using it in a manner contrary to the spirit of both the intent and the site), so if you're hoping for this to appear...I'm afraid you're a victim of the history of the community itself.
- Parser error: it's a bug I've been trying to sort for a while, to do with the search functionality, but to no avail...priorities, unfortunately.
@topdog91 One thing you will not find on this forum is unsightly, obese White American men, boasting about guns.
So, accept it is how it is. It's highly unlikely to change. Some things are just how they are !
Offset "(Emp) - a little heavy on the hyperbole."
with a horrible PHP site to look after and then I promptly buggered off and left him to administer it which given how much traffic this site deals with is a significant achievement.
The base code this site is built with can only be described as having some "interesting" design choices which make it quite hard to fix things and unless the site starts pulling enough revenue to make it viable to hire a full time dev to rewrite it then that's probably how it will be for a while.
Discourse was an option, particularly since it's written in my native language (Ruby), but back then the hosting requirements for it were obscene. Unfortunately, as things are now, it's impossible for us to move to Discourse because the import/conversion crashes at every stage - our data is just too big for it to handle (I've tried many times, I've even tried to fix it for them, and that's just another rabbit hole with spikes at the bottom).
Yeah, it's a shame it wasn't mature enough at the time.
I use Elektronauts quite a lot and I think Discourse is a really lovely bit of forum software. Kudos to Jeff Atwood.
Okay, well if you ever want to in the future, I'm happy to talk about some of this stuff offline and see if I can help in some way. I (naively) feel that if we don't do anything, we might grind to a halt under technical debt. Good luck to all of us.
https://edmorgan.info
This is the only "social" type sight I use. Mainly because it's the only one I can use!
But it'd be interesting to have a tech-aware new-pair-of-eyes perspective on it.
As Nick noted above, the Vanilla platform *is* flaky, but it was the best option at the time and we're effectively stuck as long as the forum remains free to use.
Photo uploading can be done - although it's easier from some hosts and via different devices/OSes than others - but the subscription option is by far the easiest. There's a "how to" link in my sig, although the hosts (OSes and browsers) do frequently change the way that they work, and I don't re-test the guidelines every month (ie some may not work - shout if you find any that don't).
Emails do work (as long as not blocked by your mailserver?) although you have to work through the config options to trigger the emails that you want.
On laptop/desktop devices you can see who as fretted you, just hover your mouse over the number at the bottom of your post.
I think that covers your previous specifics, but I'd be interested in other observations (that said, it's not *my* dev priorities list!), and we're certainly all open to a discussion around how to make the UI/UX better.