GWJ bugs, feature requests, and updates

Gumbie wrote:

doogiemac

Just a question for my own curiosity. Do animated .gif pictures posted in topics have any negative impacts on the database as a whole?

No, they don't. We don't allow direct image uploads into the site anyways (unless you're authoring a front-page article), so all we really store is the markup that references the external image.

Well, any comment has an impact, in the sense that entries have to get made in various tracking structures, and it grows the overall database a bit. But an image comment will usually cost a little less than a normal one, because the link data will typically be shorter than our normal verbosity.

In other words, I could have posted links to three or four GIFs in the same text space that I'm using here.... they'd be dancing and singing in your browser, and would look much more impressive than these boring words, but the actual impact on GWJ would be just a tiny bit smaller.

I think what Gumbie's after here is a semi-technical reason for banning animated GIFs for being dumb and making pages take forever to load. I support his efforts and will endorse whatever technical voodoo doogiemac needs to mutter in order to make it happen.

Sadly, the only real ways to ban animated images or other giant images would be to ban all images, or to grab the images and store them on the GWJ server. (Which would [em]add[/em] considerable strain to the system, not remove it.)

There's just no technical reason to do that. Any justification would have to be social.

I guess you could implement a preference to never load full images to give people the choice, then replace the images with a button to load whatever image is in a page if somebody has set that setting on.

Might be nice for mobile as a side effect. Right now, using the mobile site, if somebody posts a screenshot in a thread I'm following, I generally just quit going into the thread from my phone until the page rolls because it forces the text to such a small size.

Most (desktop) browsers will have options to block images in some form.

Scratched wrote:

Most (desktop) browsers will have options to block images in some form.

Of course. But maybe you don't want to block images on world news sites or gadget blogs, but you don't want to show images on a particular forum.

I'm sure there's a solution, even if it means using custom user CSS for a site or a greasemonkey script, a browser addon, or a filtering proxy.

Scratched wrote:

I'm sure there's a solution, even if it means using custom user CSS for a site or a greasemonkey script, a browser addon, or a filtering proxy.

I'm sure it can be done by some, but that's pretty deep-end-of-the pool.

I'm not saying it's a high priority, but I can understand a use case for something. More of a "nice to have" if you have the time type of feature.

I'm noticing some slow load times today...

ClockworkHouse wrote:

I think what Gumbie's after here is a semi-technical reason for banning animated GIFs for being dumb and making pages take forever to load. I support his efforts and will endorse whatever technical voodoo doogiemac needs to mutter in order to make it happen.

I would love that. I hate it when people post the same dumb gifs over and over because they're too lazy to type out a line or 2.

Mr GT Chris wrote:
ClockworkHouse wrote:

I think what Gumbie's after here is a semi-technical reason for banning animated GIFs for being dumb and making pages take forever to load. I support his efforts and will endorse whatever technical voodoo doogiemac needs to mutter in order to make it happen.

I would love that. I hate it when people post the same dumb gifs over and over because they're too lazy to type out a line or 2.

IMAGE(http://media.comicvine.com/uploads/7/72249/2291482-not_sure_if_serious.jpg)

Thanks for making my point :p.

I've always thought the GWJ crowd was good at keeping the use of images to appropriate places... the picture and video threads are swarming with them, but most of the ones posted elsewhere tend to actually be important to the thread in question.

F'r instance, the Mass Effect 3 Spoiler Thread had lots of video and images, but they were germane, often conveying a lot of info in a small space.

Lol, didn't mean to start a big debate. I just honestly had a technical question about if the animation cycles of the .gif affected the database performance.

Are you seeing performance problems particularly on pages that use animated gifs?

Scratched wrote:

Are you seeing performance problems particularly on pages that use animated gifs?

Nope.

Hypatian wrote:

Sadly, the only real ways to ban animated images or other giant images would be to ban all images, or to grab the images and store them on the GWJ server. (Which would [em]add[/em] considerable strain to the system, not remove it.)

Banning animated gifs is pretty easy: ban all gifs. It's 2012 and the only reason people use gifs these days is to have an animated image.

Doogie, there's some kind of bug where I don't have moderator privileges.

Quintin_Stone wrote:
Hypatian wrote:

Sadly, the only real ways to ban animated images or other giant images would be to ban all images, or to grab the images and store them on the GWJ server. (Which would [em]add[/em] considerable strain to the system, not remove it.)

Banning animated gifs is pretty easy: ban all gifs. It's 2012 and the only reason people use gifs these days is to have an animated image. :D

APNG is the new hotness.
IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/s1Giu.png)

Huh. Doesn't animate in Chrome, but does in Firefox.

APNG isn't yet supported by WebKit browsers (Safari, Chrome) or by Internet Explorer. As soon as Safari (or rather, mobile Safari) supports them, I'm sure you'll see more of them.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

Doogie, there's some kind of bug where I don't have moderator privileges. ;)

Checked a fix into Github.

Scratched wrote:

APNG is the new hotness.
IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/s1Giu.png)

I'll be happy to have it gain more traction. Problem with GIFs has always been the dithering.

Bonus_Eruptus wrote:
Quintin_Stone wrote:

Doogie, there's some kind of bug where I don't have moderator privileges. ;)

Checked a fix into Github.

Sweeeeet.

I've noticed that if I select some text, click link and then cancel out of it without providing a link, it will look like the text is no longer selected. I wondered if this was the case, so I tried hitting the bold button and it provided the bold tag for the text that was selected but not visually shown to be selected. I guess it has to do with if you ever redirect focus away from the text box, the selection doesn't show up, but remains. Is this a browser based thing, or something that can be 'fixed' on the site?

I haven't tried this elsewhere, and the only time it's really an issue is when I click link and don't already have the link in my clipboard, so I have to cancel the link dialog. I never feel like I know the text is still selected.

EDIT: From the time I hit post to when the page loaded showing it as posted, it took about 3 minutes. Maybe more, maybe less. I stopped looking after 1 1/2 min.

Suggestion: Is it possible to do a drop down instead of the bread crumb trail or forum link in the bar at the top of the forum to pick other forums on the site? Right now, the majority of the time if I'm not using my favorite topics, I click back up to the forum level then pick a subforum. That's an extra click, and I assume extra load on the server. Just being able to go straight to another sub forum would be nice.

I'm thinking maybe a third option. Bar, bread crumb, drop down.

Also having it at the bottom of the page to avoid the user having to scroll all the way up to the top of a thread would be much appreciated.

Wait, you haven't memorized the different forum id's yet?

trueheart78 wrote:

Wait, you haven't memorized the different forum id's yet?

Every time you post a suggestion to simplify things here, people propose obtuse, deep in the weeds solutions