GWJ bugs, feature requests, and updates

CaptainCrowbar wrote:
Certis wrote:
Bugs
Recent Content icon Stays Red

This spontaneously fixed itself for me after a few weeks. Still have no idea what triggered it to either start or stop.

Same here if that helps. It was an issue for about 5-8 days. That is about as specific as my memory allows.

Certis wrote:

The tricky thing about "better search" is it's kinda vague. GWJ has a unique challenge in that we've got SO MUCH content to search through any search engine we'd host on the server would destroy our performance. Third party services have ongoing costs and also add a layer of complexity and upkeep.

If folks with search issues could drill down a bit on why search sucks for you we can look into this more. I think we could work on making Google custom search a bit more specific (specific forum sections, catch-alls only, etc.) but having our own on-server search engine is kind of a non-starter.

One thing I think would be nice is having a way to narrow search results such as title only, by poster, in forum, in thread, in date range, etc. Basically phpBB's search options.

I would love to be able to search by poster. I've wanted to search for an old post of my own many times.

I would also like an ignore list. I realize that's a sticky wicket because people get quoted and I could miss parts of conversations, but just not showing posts from people in my ignore list would work for me.

Regarding "Recents and Favorites" I think Jeff and I came up with a good middle ground here, building on what Clockwork suggested.

We can make the current favorites section auto-add any post you participate in (or create). That way you can manually remove threads you no longer want to track by un-favoriting them.

For users who just want favorites to be manually cultivated by themselves as usual, they can opt out (or maybe we set it up as opt in) to keep it the way it is in their account settings - just showing things you manually select.

Probably re-label 'Favorites' to 'Following' or something more descriptive. So for those who want it, it will behave like "Recent Activity" with more control, and those who aren't into it that way can leave as is.

Certis wrote:

No he’s not, but every moderator has plenty of plates spinning in their lives. Generally speaking anything I’ve missed during a day I’ll catch the following morning. It’s the first thing I check after making coffee ;)

Lies!

All kidding aside, that's fair. It was just unclear what a reasonable expectation of turn-around on reported spam should be and I've been seeing a ton of those type posts floating around lately. It's probably the fault of all the beer your minions have been focused on imbibing in your absence.

Certis wrote:

Regarding "Recents and Favorites" I think Jeff and I came up with a good middle ground here, building on what Clockwork suggested.

Nice! That all sounds great!

Search by poster would be wonderful, and make Trichyclaus either very happy or very sad. Christmastime forum stalking is wonderful, but less wonderful is combing through 80 page threads only to discover the person you're looking for posted only once to add to a 3-page "pun"ning. Of course, that has also been part of the charm of the whole event.

Certis wrote:

Regarding "Recents and Favorites" I think Jeff and I came up with a good middle ground here, building on what Clockwork suggested.

We can make the current favorites section auto-add any post you participate in (or create). That way you can manually remove threads you no longer want to track by un-favoriting them.

For users who just want favorites to be manually cultivated by themselves as usual, they can opt out (or maybe we set it up as opt in) to keep it the way it is in their account settings - just showing things you manually select.

Probably re-label 'Favorites' to 'Following' or something more descriptive. So for those who want it, it will behave like "Recent Activity" with more control, and those who aren't into it that way can leave as is.

If we opt-in to auto-adding, can followed threads replace "my recent content" at gamerswithjobs.com/[user id]/tracker?

Certis wrote:

For users who just want favorites to be manually cultivated by themselves as usual, they can opt out (or maybe we set it up as opt in) to keep it the way it is in their account settings - just showing things you manually select.

I always strongly vote for opt-in when it comes to new features. It ain't broke for me, but I fully support giving the option for people to opt-in if they want every thread they make a single post in to automatically get added to the favorites/following feed.

tuffalobuffalo wrote:
Certis wrote:

Regarding "Recents and Favorites" I think Jeff and I came up with a good middle ground here, building on what Clockwork suggested.

Nice! That all sounds great!

I'm someone who's requested the forget/remove threads that I've posted to in the past. For me as long as there's a red notification in the upper right indicating recent activity I'll fell compelled to check and clear that up. It's not that big an issue ultimately but on any given day there are half a dozen threads I load just to clear notifications (e.g., the Rocket League thread I posted to years ago to offer keys).

Not sure I have a great solution given the constraints you've mentioned but I'm happy to see you're looking at site improvements in general.

Certis wrote:

For users who just want favorites to be manually cultivated by themselves as usual, they can opt out (or maybe we set it up as opt in) to keep it the way it is in their account settings - just showing things you manually select.

A new opt-in setting would be non-disruptive to existing users, but you have the downside of not exposing the change if people don't know to look for it. To me, not being disruptive seems more important, but that may because I'm not interested in that feature. Those that do want it might have a better idea of whether it should be a default.

Me, I prefer to manage it myself, but it's not usually a good idea to design stuff so that I'll like it. Opting out wouldn't be hard, although unfavoriting a bunch of threads would kind of suck. It probably wouldn't be a major hassle, though, as I'd probably notice the behavior change within a day or so.

edit: an "Unfavorite All" button might be a good idea if you go for an opt-out approach. Removing everything and then re-adding what I care about would be easy.

I feel like the best balance would be opt-out with no retroactive additions or subtractions from a user's favorites list. A banner announcement similar to the new private messages notification could alert users that the feature has been added, giving everyone a chance to set things up how they want going forward without having to alter what habits or setup they have in place.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

I feel like the best balance would be opt-out with no retroactive additions or subtractions from a user's favorites list.

I would agree with this ONLY if an annoucement is made to let us know when this "new thing with opt-out" occurs, so that those of us that don't want this new thing to be the default can "nip it in the bud" as the saying goes. Meaning, I want a heads-up to opt-out of a feature that automatically follows/favorites any thread I post a single comment to before that feed starts getting filled with threads in which I only had a passing/one-off interest in.

In other words, for those of us that are happy with the way things are in this specific aspect of the forums, minimize the work that needs to be done for us to keep things as they are.

The main reason I've never ONLY looked at my favorites feed is that I would never see new, potentially interesting threads that are created. That said, I can respect others who only want to see new comments in those threads for which they've already favorited/followed.

I think opt-in makes the most sense and we'll send a PM blast once all the features and updates are made so everyone is in the loop and can make their own call.

I think the programmer always knows best, and the changes should be rammed down the users' throats.

After all, we're here at their sufferance, and we'd do well to remember that.

Request for consideration: "Infinite scroll" for thread lists instead of pagination. Note I'm talking just about the top-level listings (e.g. the contents of the "Games" and "Everything Else" forums), not the contents of an individual thread (e.g. "Post a GIF"). It's occasionally kind of annoying to be going back and forth between pages only to miss a particular thread because it got pushed from one page to the next due to activity on an earlier page. Maybe this is too niche of a problem, but as someone who literally never uses the Favorites or Recent Activity listings, and instead looks only at the forums themselves to see what's active, this gets me.

Infinite scroll is an abomination before nature and should be cleansed with fire.

Not sure if Google custom search can accommodate, but a "search in this thread" option would be very nice, particularly for some of the extremely long-running threads.

I kind of like not having a good search option. Keeps people from easily dredging up the past.

I would like to see YouTube videos fit the page on mobile someday, however.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

I would like to see YouTube videos fit the page on mobile someday, however.

I'll second this too!

Stevintendo wrote:
Chairman_Mao wrote:

I would like to see YouTube videos fit the page on mobile someday, however.

I'll second this too! :)

Ooh... me too. Especially since they've now moved the 'Watch Later' icon to the right side.

Improve discoverability of new content (the previous discussion of favorites and recent might do the job)
Improve search. (I might be able to help with that I deploy search solutions in my day job)

Wasn't it discussed at some point that the search function can only see the first three pages of a thread?

One more the 'enhancement' list that I've asked for a couple of times over the years - add the forum navigation breadcrumbs to the bottom of the page on front page comments like they are on the other forum threads. It is a little annoying to have to scroll back to the top after reading a front page thread to get back to the main section.

Dunno if this has been requested before, but can we get Discord added to the list of Service Identities for our profiles?

It can be hard to know if some of our community members are still active or with us and it is nice to check in with people now and then. Right now there is no good way to tell if someone has been around recently unless you happen to see them post in a thread. Two requests to fix that:

Enhancement request: Show a user's last posted date in their profile

Enhancement request: In a user's profile the 'Recent Activity' page should show their actual recent activity, and the links should go to their posts in that thread. Right now it seems to show threads with recent activity that the user posted in, but they could have posted in it years ago and never visited since.

Not sure what changed, but I'm getting website e-mails now to my outlook.com account, so yay!!

So small thing but the code tag is adding a ton of whitespace to everything.

Example:

for (int i = 0; i < x; i++){
DoStuff();
}

That should just be three lines tall but it appears to be adding a lot of additional whitespace between each line.

Rykin wrote:

So small thing but the code tag is adding a ton of whitespace to everything.

Example:

for (int i = 0; i < x; i++){
DoStuff();
}

That should just be three lines tall but it appears to be adding a lot of additional whitespace between each line.

Curiously, that isn't the case if you use the BBCode code tag ([]) instead of the HTML one (<>) to wit:

for (int i = 0; i < x; i++){ DoStuff(); }