GWJ bugs, feature requests, and updates

Malor wrote:

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

About a year or so ago, the Quarter To Three forums switched to Discourse (which I think is free, but if support is needed that costs money) which has infinite scroll. People were very skeptical and protested, but they decided to give it a try. Practically everyone was won over.

It is so much nicer for a variety of reasons. Looking for a past post doesn't mean guessing what page the post was on. It remembers your place in the thread from when you last visited. One click to jump to the bottom. Scrolling displays the date of the post the scroll tracker is currently positioned at.

I have no idea if the current forum software here supports infinite scrolling - but if it does I think the admins should at least check it out. I agree that on a website like Steam infinite scrolling is annoying. But, forums do have an end, so the scrolling really isn't infinite - but it is easy to browse forward and backwards.

Tyops wrote:
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.

I was literally coming into this thread to suggest something along these lines. That red icon keeps calling me! I'd love to be able to 'forget' threads in the recent activity tab, but the plan Certis mentions above could accomplish the same thing. Thanks for the improvement!

Oh. I used the reference link at the bottom and saw the HTML one first.

The site seems to be having substantial problems, for the last couple days. It went blank for at least an hour yesterday (whole site "up", but responding with absolutely nothing to http or https requests). It did it again for a few minutes about an hour ago, and just a few minutes ago, Cloudflare was complaining that the source GWJ site was down.

I have no idea what's going on, but something might be amiss.

edit: fixed a typo.

Seeing the same thing here in the UK.

Yeah, Jeff and I were discussing this morning. Looking into it!

LeapingGnome wrote:

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.

I have had the same wishes as the first part, but your second part goes too far into "tracking people down" territory for my liking. I agree that when you want to suggest an appropriate tag for someone, for example, you go to their "recent activity" tab and it's useless because it's a bunch of popular threads they last posted in three years ago. At the same time, I think it's good that you'd have to go to lengths to "follow someone around" on the forums.

I think at least though, a "last active on X month if the year" would be helpful.

There was a mention on the podcast of adding emoji support on phones so could we maybe get an emoji input tool for the desktop version?

I did a search but didn't find anything recent about this: was topic-as-RSS-feed cut out of the site completely? I realized how much I would prefer to have my RSS reader window open, and be able to see updates from Reddit, YouTube, etc - all in one place.

It would be great just having the basic functionality to subscribe to certain topics and export an OPML file of them. Even better than that would be a unique-per-user OPML subscription URL, which my reader app could follow and dynamically import my list - even when I add/remove favorites. Since this site isn't ad-supported, there really isn't a reason to require people do their forum reading here, is there?

Thanks!

I don't recall if it ever came up before, but would it be possible to allow embedding Twitter posts on the site?

I like both of these ideas.

PaladinTom wrote:

I don't recall if it ever came up before, but would it be possible to allow embedding Twitter posts on the site?

You already can, it just doesn't work very well.

garion333 wrote:
PaladinTom wrote:

I don't recall if it ever came up before, but would it be possible to allow embedding Twitter posts on the site?

You already can, it just doesn't work very well.

How? Is there a workaround to make it better?

You have to do this from a browser, I believe, but on Twitter click the down arrow on the top right of a tweet, choose Embed Tweet. They provide you with code you can copy/paste:

Even if the tweet has a picture in it, it won't display properly when you embed it here, but you will get the text.

Weird, I tried that earlier and got a captcha. Thought I broke something so I stopped.

Thanks!

Nope, that's by design.

Serengeti wrote:

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

Can anyone with Hotmail or Outlook.com confirm emails from GWJ are showing up?

I just tested it, and I'm able to receive emails from the site on my Outlook.com account that couldn't receive emails before.

Great! We’re close to rolling out a bunch of stuff soon. Will update once we have that nailed down.

Feature request: hide a thread so you never see it. You could view a list of hidden threads in your profile to unhide them if you want in the future.

We deployed a suite of updates. Here's a quick summary:

New features

  • The GWJCC podcast feed at https://www.gamerswithjobs.com/podca... now redirects to https://gwjcc.libsyn.com/rss. This change allows Shawn and the crew a lot more flexibility in managing the podcast, and also allows the feed to go back much further in time. The redirect shouldn't break your subscription, but it may result in some duplicate items listed in your podcast app.
  • Added a "Pronouns" field to user profiles. If filled in, this field is shown on user profile pages.
  • Spoiler tags are now customizable, e.g. [spoiler="End-game spoilers"]spoilery stuff[/spoiler]
  • MP4 and GIFV files can now be included in posts using the [video] tag. The implementation does its best to render the right resource, but GIFV resources can be weird. If you run into any issues with it, let us know!
  • Laid foundation for supporting more gaming service identities. The actual services, e.g. GOG, Origin, Epic, etc. will be added soon. Adding new services means we'll have a long list of potential service icons. So, this change also limits the number of services rendered in forum post footers to the first seven in the list on a profile, while user profile pages will still show the full list of services added.

Bug fixes and other updates

  • Long single words in thread titles should no longer break display of the page.
  • Fixed various issues with "new" activity markers including "new" text in the forum listing, the new state of the recent content and favorites icons, and "new" links going to the wrong page on posts. I think I nailed all the issues here, but there may still be some I didn't catch. Let us know if you continue to see issues with navigating unread content.
  • Marking all read on favorites should no longer result in an error.
  • Fixed an issue that was preventing users from saving their profiles in certain cases.
  • User profile PSN links now go to the correct URL.
  • Updated Drupal core and a slew of modules we depend on.

Coming soon

  • Emoji support! This is almost done, but we need to limit the use of emojis in a bunch of places to prevent inevitable abuse of... certain... emojis. You know which ones.
  • Further search improvements. Today's update should address some outstanding issues with Google Search, so I'd like to see how search settles out over the next week or so before making a big investment in new capabilities.
  • Misc. UX improvements for users (e.g. better breadcrumbs) and admins.

Examples of new / updated tags:

[spoiler="End-game spoilers"] spoilery stuff [video]https://i.imgur.com/xvTiUIl.gifv[/video] [/spoiler]
Spoiler: End-game spoilers

spoilery stuff

Awesome update! Huzzah for videos!

Yay! This is great. Looking forward to spamming PSN friend requests.

We going to get a video tag button?

Long single words in thread titles should no longer break display of the page.

Huzzah!

Thanks for all the hard work

doogiemac wrote:

[*] Added a "Pronouns" field to user profiles. If filled in, this field is shown on user profile pages.
]

Wooo the only suggestion of mine that will ever see the light of day! (Also the only one that doesn't involve declaring me God-Emperor of the site, so probably fair)

I've noticed the Favorites and Recent Activity icons at the top of the page aren't accurately reflecting the unread state of that content. But, the "new" link on threads does seem to be continuing to work properly. Anyone running into issues with the "new" links in thread listings? I want to make sure it's not just a "works on my machine" anecdote and that I actually fixed that problem for most cases

Well, my Favorites star is not lit up, but there was an unread post in my first entry, so it wasn't working for me when I first read this message. (the next day).

Thanks, btw, for the video fix! That's the one I really really wanted.