17 replies to this topic

[Alex Libman]

OK, I am seriously pissed off right now. I've just spent about 3 hours writing a very detailed reply, and then some piece of JavaScript bullshit with this forum caused me to lose everything I typed!!! What's worse, the fucked-up pointy-clicky textarea box designed for retarded two-year-olds is incompatible with browser-based recovery mechanisms like CommentSave or Lazarus. That was the last straw!

The interface of this forum is the worst of any forum I've ever used. Elementary essential features (ex. unread replies) are missing, and there's a flood of useless features that do a lot of harm and virtually no good. You need a 1600 pixel monitor to fit all of that sidebar crap without being able to sufficiently zoom in! At least I was able to use AdBlock to get rid of the annoying spamy animation, but it's still too horrible. Usenet was so much more usable - 30 years ago!

And this forum is also particularly inconvenient to scrape. I can no longer permit myself to use a forum where countless days of my hard work are at risk of being libricided on a whim! Once I tried writing a script that archived all threads on which I've posted, but gave up after an hour. The RSS features are insufficient, and thread URL's unpredictable. To properly archive this forum you'd literally have to crawl through the whole thing, while filtering out a great deal of patterns that display the same thing! No wonder my posts here take days to appear on Google, instead of minutes like on all decent forums!

[rwac]

Well, Lazarus seems to work fine for me, have you tried cleaning out the cache and cookies?

Unread replies to your posts can be seen in the Notifications dropdown at the top right (to the left of your username).

You could use "follow this topic" to be alerted to replies.

How could the RSS streams be made more useful?

[Marios Kyriazis]

If you have to type a long comment, why don't you type it in Word and then paste/copy it onto the comments box...

[brokenportal]

That's great feedback and I hope you don't leave. The site is still going through construction. You'll encounter a lot of frustrating things during the process, and then when its done it will be better than ever. If you know of any other engineers around that we can talk to about bringing on board then let us know.

I always type longer responses into word first no matter where I am.

[niner]

Alex raises some good points about unfriendliness toward small screen users and the annoying spammy animation. AdBlock Plus is highly useful in that regard but users shouldn't have to do that. We shouldn't have to resort to typing responses into Word. That just shouldn't be the state of forum software in 2011. I have to say, I've never lost a post due to instability, although I'm having some pretty bad performance problems of late, which apparently others aren't seeing(?) As for the rest of it, LongeCity can't afford (or chooses not to pay) professional programmers, rather relying on the donated labor of a few, who could use some help (hint hint... You're a programmer, aren't you Alex?)

[The Immortalist]

As for the rest of it, LongeCity can't afford (or chooses not to pay) professional programmers.

They should if users are having problems with the site.

[hivemind]

vBulletin rules. Check out my forum (if you understand finnish )

http://www.bluezone.fi

[niner]

vBulletin rules. Check out my forum (if you understand finnish )

Great forum, Trip. One of the avatars was particularly good:


Sorry to be OT, but I couldn't resist this.

[hivemind]

Yes, that is Mr. Mahariski. He is no longer on the forum.

[Ben]

What about the old style of the forum? The previous version of IP Board? There was nothing wrong with that and it worked quickly.

Have to make sure that change isn't for its sake alone but that there is a clearly defined benefit to it.

[rwac]

This latest version seems to be much faster, can't complain on that account.

[1kgcoffee]

It's working fine for me.

[hivemind]

But why IP Board? vBulletin is much better.

[niner]

But why IP Board? vBulletin is much better.

In what ways is it better?

[hivemind]

But why IP Board? vBulletin is much better.

In what ways is it better?

Hmm... I thought this IP Board was only a hosted service, but that seems not to be the case.

I have little experience of IP Board and a massive amount of vBulletin so I really can't say.

[hivemind]

LOL, I switched to IP.Board. :D

The main difference is that vBulletin is open source and IP.Board is not.

[chrono]

Just wanted to add that the board now has an auto-save feature (appears just below the lower-left of the text box). If text has been previously saved on a particular page, View Auto Saved Content will appear there.

Personally, I still use the Lazarus plugin, which I can confirm has always worked with this board. Not sure why alex was having trouble with that, since if properly configured (i.e. default), it should save a copy of any text typed in the web browser. Perhaps the context-menu "recover form" function doesn't always work once you've exited a particular reply box, but Lazarus saves a list of all text entered which is viewable independently of the current web page (right-click icon, Search Lazarus).

I can no longer permit myself to use a forum where countless days of my hard work are at risk of being libricided on a whim!

You've mentioned this fear before. Has any content been deleted in the board's history? Why are you convinced your content is somehow on the brink of wanton deletion? And how are we different in this regard from literally every other board on the internet? We even use a paid backup server!

As for the web scraping issue, you'd have to be more specific, I think. The URLs are both human-readable and static, and are derived from the thread name, so I don't see how they could be more predictable. If you can tell us how to make it more easily scrapable we could try to work it in at some point, but TBH it's probably not useful to many people. Searching for your content and copying links with something like SnapLinks might be a workaround, except the find content feature has some limitations in terms of timeframe, unfortunately.

Edited by chrono, 04 November 2011 - 05:44 PM.

[manic_racetam]

Just wanted to add that the board now has an auto-save feature (appears just below the lower-left of the text box). If text has been previously saved on a particular page, View Auto Saved Content will appear there.

Thank goodness for this feature. I was about to poop my pants in disappointment when my computer crashed but this worked like a charm.