Forum Upgrade

[nerdsforprez]

Reading through things and trying to answer my own question, but where are we on the updates?  I can respond to conversations, and on a newly posted on I can view youtube videos, but I am still cannot see photos.  Is this normal? Lastly, not that it is a big deal or anything, I have lost a few "posts" to my overall post number.  I am not sure how this could have occurred, anyone else had this problem?

Edited September 23, 2016 by nerdsforprez

[Hinckley]

5 hours ago, LXF said:

 SORRY and I hope this is a temporary layout and design. 

 

Thank you for apologizing. Hopefully, you will learn to identify that before you do it in the future. Owning up to what you did is admirable. A lot of people would've just ignored it. Sincerely, thank you.

As for the layout and design, I will always be trying to learn and improve, yes.

As for the single click is a paragraph break, sorry. For now, it will stay that way until I can think of a work around. If we turn it off, it merges posts without paragraph breaks, smashing everything together and starts replies directly after quotes and I can't stand for that. I really can't. My head will explode. I understand how frustrating that can be. I am also used to using cmd+Enter but I know it can be frustrating to get used to something new. I'll ask our Tech expert if there is any way we can get around the board software on that one.

No problem getting the darker color on the post border. I'm working on some of the other "easier" ones but the new software has triple the amount of .css files and everything is in a new place. And there's this stupid new editor interface I'm trying to override. Chasing it all around with Firebug and real life keeps getting in the way.

Thanks all for the constructive feedback. We're working as hard as we can.

We've had a small number of accounts that needed to be manually approved on the new board software. I think I was able to find them all but if you are not able to login but can read this as a guest go to our Facebook page and contact me there with your display name and I'll fix that for you quickly.

23 minutes ago, nerdsforprez said:

Reading through things and trying to answer my own question, but where are we on the updates?  I can respond to conversations, and on a newly posted on I can view youtube videos, but I am still cannot see photos.  Is this normal? Lastly, not that it is a big deal or anything, I have lost a few "posts" to my overall post number.  I am not sure how this could have occurred, anyone else had this problem?

Days.

[nerdsforprez]

 

And..... this reply did not work.  I have tried several times.  Lets try this....

 

 

Okay..... I think this is better.  What I wanted to say was "days" doesn't help me.   Sorry for my ignorance, but do you mean "days" from a solution? 

Edited September 24, 2016 by nerdsforprez

[dr_spock]

44 minutes ago, nerdsforprez said:

Reading through things and trying to answer my own question, but where are we on the updates?  I can respond to conversations, and on a newly posted on I can view youtube videos, but I am still cannot see photos.  Is this normal? Lastly, not that it is a big deal or anything, I have lost a few "posts" to my overall post number.  I am not sure how this could have occurred, anyone else had this problem?

You probably have some posts in the Community forum or some threads moved there.  A side effect of the upgrade is posts in the Community forum before the stop counting are now also not counted in your total posts count.  My count dropped by over 1000.

The pictures will come back after the scripts grind their way through every single posts and update them.  If you have some posts with photos that you want fixed right away, you can click on "edit" by the "+" and then click on the EDIT button when in the editor (The button probably should say "SAVE").  On resaving, the forum software will regenerate those pictures links.

 

11 hours ago, Kai NRG said:

Funny how some people's tags are all in a line and others aren't...

Cool, automatic hypenation too.

[Darkdragon]

24 minutes ago, dr_spock said:

the EDIT button when in the editor (The button probably should say "SAVE")

Sometimes it does say "Save" 

[AFOLguy1970]

1 hour ago, nerdsforprez said:

Reading through things and trying to answer my own question, but where are we on the updates?  I can respond to conversations, and on a newly posted on I can view youtube videos, but I am still cannot see photos.  Is this normal? Lastly, not that it is a big deal or anything, I have lost a few "posts" to my overall post number.  I am not sure how this could have occurred, anyone else had this problem?

I also lost some posts, kind of makes me wonder if anyone got "demoted" to a lower rank as a result of it.  

[dr_spock]

11 minutes ago, Darkdragon said:

Sometimes it does say "Save" 

Interesting.  The button says "SAVE" when I tried to edit my reply above.  When I edited my post in Pirates to get my pictures to display, I have to click on the "Edit Topic" button to save and exit.

 

[Darkdragon]

Yeah, it's really strange. I haven't figured out the pattern on when it says Save and when it said Edit Topic. While doing some work in BF&C, it was seemingly random. :shrug:

[Robert8]

7 hours ago, LXF said:

Found an error :

There's no more friends box, now oly followers. 

I had quite some people in the friends box, so that's something important on social level

I think there won't be friends anymore. Only followers

 

[Flipz]

3 hours ago, Calabar said:

Hi all!
At first, thanks for the hard work necessary to update this forum. It seems that it brought a lot of changes.

Among other things, there is one I miss: the manual editor. It is very important for me to see all the tags in edit mode and not the formatted text.
Besides I'd like to see the problem with word wrap in manual editor solved (text don't go new line when it reaches the right side of the text area), as it was never solved in the previous version of the board.

After a brief first look at the new board, other things I'd like to see fixed are: the double new line clicking on enter key (not for me, I've not problems to use CTRL+Enter, the risk is to reduce the readability of the posts due to an excessive spacing), a better separation between pinned posts and standard post (and maybe a third level of pinned posts, it would be helpful to differentiate permanent pinned posts from temporary pinned posts) and a better placed "quote" button (very invasive in the present position), a better separation for the signature (and maybe a global "collapse" key easily accessible).

Ah, another thing: increase the number of supported BBCode tags for each post: in the LDD Official Sets topic I was almost depleting the available space for the index.

Yeah, I find myself missing the manual editor as well.  While I haven't had any problems with the new rich-text editor so far, based on my experience with the rich-text editors we've had in the past I just don't trust it not to mess up long, complex formatting.  (The prime offender for this is Heroica, for me, but I'm sure there's plenty of other places on the forum where precise control is needed.)

I agree with your other suggestions as well--at the risk of sounding like a broken record, these are all changes that would be significantly helpful for Heroica, since at the moment we're kind of still in disarray.

2 minutes ago, Robert8 said:

I think there won't be friends anymore. Only followers

 

*ominous villain lightning*

 

[fordtruckin]

Getting used to the site. I had some mild withdrawal while it was down as well. Thanks to everyone working on the site!

[Hinckley]

3 hours ago, dr_spock said:

Cool, automatic hypenation too.

That will be turned off as soon as I find the setting. Death to hyphenation!

[Rick]

On the BBcode issue:

Unfortunately, BBcode is no longer fully supported by the new board software. If you want to read Invision's (the board software vendor) reasons for dropping BBcode support, I suggest you read through this thread on their boards (pages 3 and 4 have some statements from Invision representatives on the issue). In summary: you can still enter simple BBcode, but posts will no longer be saved as BBcode, i.e., you won't be able to edit BBcode. This is a massive drawback for those that used to format indices, etc. in BBcode and the staff, obviously, are not happy with this change either. Unfortunately, there is no way around it as we had to upgrade because the old board software was no longer supported by Invision. Support for copying/pasting from (rich) text editors like Word, etc. should be a lot better though, so perhaps that offers a solution for some of the problems.

[Flipz]

23 minutes ago, Rick said:

On the BBcode issue:

Unfortunately, BBcode is no longer fully supported by the new board software. If you want to read Invision's (the board software vendor) reasons for dropping BBcode support, I suggest you read through this thread on their boards (pages 3 and 4 have some statements from Invision representatives on the issue). In summary: you can still enter simple BBcode, but posts will no longer be saved as BBcode, i.e., you won't be able to edit BBcode. This is a massive drawback for those that used to format indices, etc. in BBcode and the staff, obviously, are not happy with this change either. Unfortunately, there is no way around it as we had to upgrade because the old board software was no longer supported by Invision. Support for copying/pasting from (rich) text editors like Word, etc. should be a lot better though, so perhaps that offers a solution for some of the problems.

So what exactly DOES the site use to implement its formatting now?  HTML?  Even if that's the case, a plaintext solution would be very much appreciated.

 

[Rick]

19 minutes ago, Flipz said:

So what exactly DOES the site use to implement its formatting now?  HTML?  Even if that's the case, a plaintext solution would be very much appreciated.

 

It's stored as HTML, yes. If you read the statements from Invision that I linked too, they're not thinking in the direction of users being able to edit source code at all, so don't expect any developments in that direction.  

[Flipz]

1 minute ago, Rick said:

It's stored as HTML, yes. If you read the statements from Invision that I linked too, they're not thinking in the direction of users being able to edit source code at all, so don't expect any developments in that direction.  

That's...really unfortunate.  In my experience with the RTE--both the one we had before the last major upgrade, and the one before this update--they have a tendency to add TONS of junk code to text, clogging up the editor and causing it to reach the character limit FAR earlier than it should.  It's especially noticeable in situations like Heroica, where we rely heavily on being able to use formatting to keep things clean and easy-to-read.  As an example of the junk code the old editor would add...

And that's one of the posts with relatively simple formatting; it gets far more complicated with higher-level characters who have more items and more effects, facing more enemies with more complicated special abilities.

Meanwhile, for the people who chose to struggle with the RTE anyway, they'd often have complications getting the editor to format things the way they actually wanted them formatted, and in several cases the editor would cut off their post halfway with a jumble of html in the middle.  Now, I don't mind having to use HTML for formatting (though, admittedly, I am less familiar with it than I am with BBCode), but having to deal with a finicky RTE that won't let me convert it to plaintext even to troubleshoot it?  That's a serious problem.  I don't know what's going through Invision's heads, but the results are seriously counterproductive.

[makoy]

Indeed if I use the basic BBcodes which I am doing now, it shows correctly.... However, more test is needed as to what "basic support" means. You can see below what I have done. The actual code I used below is written in the code block (without syntax highlighting)

For those who do not like double spacing, you can use SHIFT+ENTER to create a single line break which should be equivalent to <BR> HTML code. I think the parser interprets single enter keystroke as a new paragraph entirely that's why it creates double spacing which is a common behaviour in document processor like MS Word.

bold
italics
underline
strikethrough
color
URL

1. test
2. ordered with numbers
3. list
   

1. test
2. ordered with letters
3. list
   

• test
• unordered list
• or bulleted list
  

This is a quotable quotes

 

[b] bold [/b]
[i] italics [/i]
[u] underline [/u]
[s]strikethrough[/s]
[color=red]color[/color]
[url=http://www.eurobricks.com/]URL[/url]
[url=http://www.eurobricks.com/][img=http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/uploads/profile/photo-thumb-5261.jpg][/url]
[list=1]
[*]test
[*]ordered with numbers
[*]list
[/list]
[list=a]
[*]test
[*]ordered with letters
[*]list
[/list]
[list]
[*]test
[*]unordered list
[*]or bulleted list
[/list]
[quote="Mr. Quotes"]This is a quotable quotes[/quote]

 

[LEGODalekbuster523]

The forum upgrade is terrible. It looks so ugly now compared to other forums on the internet.

[Rick]

1 hour ago, Flipz said:

That's...really unfortunate.  In my experience with the RTE--both the one we had before the last major upgrade, and the one before this update--they have a tendency to add TONS of junk code to text, clogging up the editor and causing it to reach the character limit FAR earlier than it should.  It's especially noticeable in situations like Heroica, where we rely heavily on being able to use formatting to keep things clean and easy-to-read.

I agree with you, but you've read Invision's stance on the issue... We'll all have to find a way to deal with it for indices, etc. Good thing about the new editor is that you won't actually see the junk code it creates.    I suppose at some point it could cause issues when you keep editing bloated code over and over again though. Normally you'd then dig through the BBcode to find the source of the problem. Thinking towards solutions, it'd probably make sense to either keep an offline version of your stats and edit them with an editor that supports BBcode or a simple plain text editor (e.g., Notepad on Windows) and paste the full result of your edits in a post instead of trying to edit the post itself. Alternatively, use an offline RTE, like a word processing program, to keep track of your stats and paste that in a post. Or... who knows, the new editor might not be so bad and WYSIWYG editing might not be so bad after all. I guess we'll find out through using the new board software.

40 minutes ago, makoy said:

For those who do not like double spacing, you can use SHIFT+ENTER to create a single line break which should be equivalent to <BR> HTML code. I think the parser interprets single enter keystroke as a new paragraph entirely that's why it creates double spacing which is a common behaviour in document processor like MS Word.

This takes some getting used to but is actually desirable behaviour in my opinion. It makes it easy to create "true" paragraphs, instead of having to hit enter twice and still allows you to have a simple line break within a paragraphs using shift-enter. As Hinckley explained earlier, the behaviour of the return key is configurable but makes quotes and merged posts hard to read, so it's very likely we'll keep the behaviour of the return key this way.

[Sven J]

On 22.9.2016 at 8:53 PM, Hinckley said:

On 22.9.2016 at 8:31 PM, Tenderlok said:

One thing that I noticed after the update: I cannot see the members' signatures until I have signed in. Is that intentional?

 

No...um... ...unless you like it!

Good answer...   But, to be honest: No, I don't like it...

Two more issues:

When I edit an older post and save it without further changes, the images reappear, as described above. But emoticons in the text still aren't displayed. Do I have to fix it manually, or will the automatic script do this?

And some (but, strangely, not all) pictures now have a thin gray frame around them, which does not look very good when the photos were taken against a neutral white background.

Edited September 24, 2016 by Tenderlok

[makoy]

So we can do nested quoting as well? (Are all the people quoted around here also notified?)

5 minutes ago, Tenderlok said:

On 9/23/2016 at 2:53 AM, Hinckley said:

On 9/23/2016 at 2:31 AM, Tenderlok said:

One thing that I noticed after the update: I cannot see the members' signatures until I have signed in. Is that intentional?

 

No...um... ...unless you like it!

Good answer...   But, to be honest: No, I don't like it...

 

[Calabar]

2 hours ago, Rick said:

On the BBcode issue:
Unfortunately, BBcode is no longer fully supported by the new board software.

That's unfortunate. No, it is a tragedy.
The code created by the rich editor is full of junk code. It is a problem in standard posts, but it is absolutely inadequate for complex posts such as the indexes, that need to be extremely clean.
 

1 hour ago, Flipz said:

In my experience with the RTE--both the one we had before the last major upgrade, and the one before this update--they have a tendency to add TONS of junk code to text, clogging up the editor and causing it to reach the character limit FAR earlier than it should. 

Exactly.

I add that I've tons of saved txt files containing BBCoded text that I continuously update in order to have a local backup of critical contents.  I need to obtain BBCoded text from the posts in order to do that.
Besides I've a lot of tools (including the index manager) that works using bbcode. Come back to manual indexing is not an option, indexes are too huge for this.

[Calabar]

39 minutes ago, Rick said:

This takes some getting used to but is actually desirable behaviour in my opinion. It makes it easy to create "true" paragraphs, instead of having to hit enter twice and still allows you to have a simple line break within a paragraphs using shift-enter. As Hinckley explained earlier, the behaviour of the return key is configurable but makes quotes and merged posts hard to read, so it's very likely we'll keep the behaviour of the return key this way.

My opinion is that the feature is not desirable at all. The result would be very long posts (the great part of users will use the default "enter" and will not be worried to use the SHIFT+ENTER chance), that reduce the readability of the topic (too much scrolling).

About the space behind the quote, I suppose that it is possible to add a bottom margin to the element, and that will solves the issue.
Similar approach for the topic merge, you simply need to add a line break (or more) to include among posts when they are merged (or an "HR" element with proper margins, that is my preference, but maybe not ever adequate).
 

[Flipz]

44 minutes ago, Calabar said:

That's unfortunate. No, it is a tragedy.
The code created by the rich editor is full of junk code. It is a problem in standard posts, but it is absolutely inadequate for complex posts such as the indexes, that need to be extremely clean.
 

Exactly.

I add that I've tons of saved txt files containing BBCoded text that I continuously update in order to have a local backup of critical contents.  I need to obtain BBCoded text from the posts in order to do that.
Besides I've a lot of tools (including the index manager) that works using bbcode. Come back to manual indexing is not an option, indexes are too huge for this.

This is another good point--I used to keep backups of my Heroica stats and compose battle posts in Notepad++.  I don't use a rich-text word processor (if I absolutely need rich-text for something I can always use Google Docs and then print to either paper or PDF), so now without a plaintext mode I'm going to have to completely change how I back up and compose my posts.

I get why the average internet user prefers WYSIWYG.  Truth be told, I used to prefer it too.  But losing that degree of precise low-level control is a major setback, and if I may vent for a moment about tech in general, it's both frustrating and worrying that many systems ranging from Wikia to forum software to Windows itself seem to be trying to hamper the power users who need that low-level control to create the things we do.  By all means, tech industry, keep on improving interfaces and making new high-level tools so that the less tech-oriented can easily accomplish simple tasks.  But don't take away the power users' options to actually get things done in the process.

EDIT: Just to be clear!  I by no means blame the staff here, in just the past 24 hours you've all done a TON of great things to improve the site usability.  I'm just frustrated at all the options that have been taken away by elements beyond your control, and a bit overwhelmed at how much prep work on my projects has been rendered null and void in the process.  You folks are awesome, and I really do thank you for all the time and energy you've invested and are continuing to invest in the upgrade.

Edited September 24, 2016 by Flipz

[Mister_Bruce]

Hi there, this is the first "Reply" that I've managed.

The "Reply to this topic" button is missing for me from many (all?) of the threads in the Eurobricks Community --> Community area. I can start new topics, but can't reply to any established topics. As per my comments on Facebook, this is the same for me across three different devices so it must surely be a user setting. Previously I had access. Please could this be investigated.

Cheers,

Bruce

 

PS: And another thing that is strange - it's recording that this is only my 2nd post. I've posted more than that. Maybe there is something wonky about my account and that is why I can no longer "Reply" to certain topics.

Edited September 24, 2016 by Mister_Bruce