New Software is Here!


  • ♿ (Parody)

    AS you can probably tell by now, the site has been split into the Main Site and the Forums.

    The Main Site is all custom code, written by yours truly. It's notably less featured, but it should be able to take the increased load that the site is receiving. Plus, the URLs all look very nice =-)

    The Forums is Community Server, but a much less customized version of it. In fact, I've only changed a bit of the UI pages and none of the "Core" code. This means less bugs and easier upgrades.

    I'm sure there will be errors and bugs in the Main Site, so please just let me know them and I'll get them looked at.

    thanks



  • I've been getting all the new articles posted in my email, and now I'm wondering if I can do that in the new version at all?


  • ♿ (Parody)

    Will get this in very soon -- FeedBurner (who hosts the RSS feed) provides an email subscription that works just as well (if not better).



  • Is there way to see when there are new comments posted on any of the main articles, like there is for the forum threads?



  • Now that you mention it, I don't really see why I'm not using the RSS-feed in the first place :P


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @iwpg said:

    Is there way to see when there are new comments posted on any of the main articles, like there is for the forum threads?

    Not yet, but it's a high-priority to-do: the thought is that it will simply display the most recent 50 comments.



  • I like this new forum software, it's quicker than the last. I do like the fact that on the front page, the articles are now truncated, which increases the speed of load time and also consumes less bandwidth.



  • @Alex Papadimoulis said:

    @iwpg said:

    Is there way to see when there are new comments posted on any of the main articles, like there is for the forum threads?

    Not yet, but it's a high-priority to-do: the thought is that it will simply display the most recent 50 comments.

    I'm not sure if 50 would be enough - between a new regular article and a new CodeSOD there could easily be more than that in a couple of hours, plus people usually keep commenting on older articles for a while.  But I'm glad to hear you're working on something.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    My bad -- I meant, 50 Articles, sorted by Last Comment Date -- kinda like how you could do it in the forums.



  • @Alex Papadimoulis said:

    My bad -- I meant, 50 Articles, sorted by Last Comment Date -- kinda like how you could do it in the forums.

    Yeah, that sounds great, thanks.  Would it keep track of read/unread for each thread for the current logged in user?  I could live without that, but it would be nice. 


  • ♿ (Parody)

    That is an expensive feature, and one of the reasons the server (a pretty hefty duel xeon w/4GB RAM) was getting bogged down almost daily. I'll try to think up a way to do it "cheaply".



  • @iwpg said:

    @Alex Papadimoulis said:

    My bad -- I meant, 50 Articles, sorted by Last Comment Date -- kinda like how you could do it in the forums.

    Yeah, that sounds great, thanks.  Would it keep track of read/unread for each thread for the current logged in user?  I could live without that, but it would be nice. 

    this should be already maintained by the RSS feed reader (well mine does). 



  • Just curious, will there be some sort of archive for previous front page postings? I often like reading back among posts of even a year back



  • @brendan said:

    this should be already maintained by the RSS feed reader (well mine does). 

    I meant keeping track of unread comments - not tracking each comment individually, but a per-user per-thread flag saying "new comments since the last time you read", the same as the forum does already.  Sorry if I was unclear.  But as I said, I can live without it.

    Actually, I wonder if a separate feed containing all the comments would work?  Another site I use does that and it works well, but it's not nearly as high-volume as this one.



  • One thing I've noticed: threads used to be ordered by start date, at least in TheDailyWTF and Sidebar WTF forums. Now it's by date of last reply. While that's the norm for forums, I think the old way worked better in the Sidebar WTF, since it was always trivial for me to see what if any new stories there were. Plus the propensity for somewhat off-topic discussion means that just because a topic has lots of replies, doesn't necessarily mean it's a good story in the first place.

     



  • Great. Loads WAY faster than the old site, at least here.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @DigitalXeron said:

    Just curious, will there be some sort of archive for previous front page postings? I often like reading back among posts of even a year back

    http://TheDailyWTf.com/Articles/ --> that should give an archive by month.

    One thing I've noticed: threads used to be ordered by start date, at least in TheDailyWTF and Sidebar WTF forums. Now it's by date of last reply.

    That was one of the many hacks I made to Community Server. Not sure why they never included it in their base release, but I think that CS3.0 might have it. I do plan on doing more with the Side Bar, but not sure just what yet -- I'm thinking of using the Rating and promoting threads to the front page.



  • I have a site question that has been buggin me since i first started viewing this site... When i load any page, specifically a comments page, i can't use page up or page down to scroll the page (or my mouse wheel) until i click off of the center of the page, to the right hand side (where the sidebar wtfs sit, except it's blank space most of the time)... do you get what i mean? I can't scroll unless i click OFF the section where all the text and pretty blue/grey bars and boxes are. This has occured on windows xp x64 with ie6 32/64, and now with ie7 32/64.

    And no, i won't use firefox, because the only one that functions properly on my machine is deer park alpha, and that still refuses to load flash.

    anyhow i sorta am digging the new layout... can we have edit capability at some point? thanks!

    edit: scroll wheels work, pgup pgdn do not... weird.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    It has something to do with "overflow" I think in CSS. The comments are set to overflow in CSS, so that if one comment is too wide, it will show scroll bars and won't ruin the whole page's layout. This makes each comment it's own container. I guess if you click on side of the page it will set the focus to the page container, as opposed to the comment container, and the scrolling will work.

    No idea how to fix this. Now that comments are BBCode, maybe stretching will not be a problem and I can pull off the overflow thing.



  • Much faster than the old software. The reply box on the main site loads in about 5 seconds while on the forums takes it takes 35 to 40 seconds to load. Page loads in general are also much quicker.



  • search is borked. Fix it.

    edit: please. 



  • Is it just me, or is "Remember me next time" not working again?  (Fx 2.0.0.1 on Win XP if anyone cares).

    Other than having to sign in every time, overall, the experience is improved.

    Edit:  Testing editing and bbcode.  This should be in [b]bold[/b], [i]italics[/i] and [u]underlined[/u]. 



  • (Loving the quick reply, by the way.) The font is way too small on the forums. I have to crank it up every time I want to read a thread. Also, shouldn't "display full article text" be a link on each article instead of a checkbox that applies to everything on the front page? It would make much more sense to just have a list of summaries and then click on "Read full article" which takes you to that article's dedicated page.



  • An additional, minor WTF that's bugged me pretty much as long as I've been reading the site, but has always been lost in the general WTF-ness of CS ... Now, let's see if I can explain this:

    On the main forum page, forums with unread posts are displayed in a darker blue than forums where all posts have been read.  My experience is that even when I've read every thread in a forum, it still shows as having unread threads/posts until you go down to "More Options" and "Mark all Read" ...

    Now that I think about it, this may be the same thing that iwpg was mentioning, and that Alex said was too expensive.

    Anyway, all whines aside, I'm liking the new setup. 

    Thanks again for the great site and forum, Alex.



  • @Sgt. Zim said:

    On the main forum page, forums with unread posts are displayed in a darker blue than forums where all posts have been read.  My experience is that even when I've read every thread in a forum, it still shows as having unread threads/posts until you go down to "More Options" and "Mark all Read" ...

    Now that I think about it, this may be the same thing that iwpg was mentioning, and that Alex said was too expensive.

    Nah, I was asking about keeping track of the read-state for the front page articles, the same as it does for forum threads.  But yeah, what you mention has been happening for a while.  It's a little annoying, but tolerable, so I never bothered to complain.



  • Hi,

     The RSS feed doesn't seem to have changed since the new software. Is that deliberate?


     


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