deskthority - Suggestions and Changelog

[Muirium]

Sure… if the default is to wrap in spoilers. We're talking about people who don't even bother to look at and fix their post once they've made it. DE FAULT DE FAULT!

[Nuum]

Is there any way to batch upload pictures to a topic, that I can't find?
This would be very useful, as uploading many pictures one after another is very tedious.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

Is there any way to batch upload pictures to a topic, that I can't find?
This would be very useful, as uploading many pictures one after another is very tedious.

That would be really useful. Also, phpBB has a retarded habit of placing and numbering all the images backwards. Adding images to topics is something phpBB overall gets really, really wrong (e.g. the forced name and size below every image, ruining your presentation).

The one thing worse is phpBB tables, which it gets really, really, really, really, really wrong. (Try it — you'll wish you were dead.)

[Muirium]

As long as you can host elsewhere, using [img] tags is the cleanest option. Admittedly, I always host my pictures right here and do the Add Attachment dance every time. Including Daniel's observation about reversed order. I type up descriptions in between uploads, which is just asking for a browser crash and wipeout. Fortunately I've escaped that fiery pit so far…

I'd suggest making the forced name feature more useful by giving us a sizeable multi-line box for describing the image, rather than indicating a quick one liner. The current system is awkward indeed, but something else I dislike is a stream of captionless pictures. The sort of things we post here aren't always self explanatory.

[Madhias]

As long as you can host elsewhere, using [img] tags is the cleanest option. Admittedly, I always host my pictures right here and do the Add Attachment dance every time. Including Daniel's observation about reversed order. I type up descriptions in between uploads, which is just asking for a browser crash and wipeout. Fortunately I've escaped that fiery pit so far…

That's true, it's the simplest option you have when you want to post a lot of pictures at once. You can prepare everything before posting. If you have a webspace somewhere, you can just upload everything and change only the image names. That's how i do it.

I wanted to save some space, and tried last week imgur for the first time, and was very happy, until i saw how they compress the images - it was instantly a no-go for me.

I never tried the DT upload option BTW. It's not easy: is it best to use the forum option? Host for yourself? What's when you're dead and don't pay the bills? All the images gone? What happened to GH for example is a horror scenario for me.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

There's no win on this one. Hosting sites like Photobucket and Imageshack are scummy at best and quite unreliable (though Flickr and Imgur seem less of a mess). There's a photo that Capwn posted to OCN using one such site, and it's completely impossible to guess from the URL whose photo it is, or what the gallery URL is if there is one. The image appears to be on a server that's been decommissioned; all I have is a Google thumbnail of it. I assume the image is now on another server, but I can't determine the new URL from the URL of the remaining images (which are all essentially random), and Capwn has ignored me. (I despise load-balancing by randomised URLs: URLs are sacred and should always be clear about the content, and navigating up the URL (by removing "/"-delimited parts) should always take you to a working page. You should be able to reach the author or gallery of an image by its URL, so that when someone hotlinks it, you can find your way back to where it came from.)

Some people use personal websites, but several of those have died, including Wellington's (no idea what happened to him, either).

Geekhack saw the loss of images posted directly to the forum.

I personally prefer all media to remain together, i.e. so long as people are concerned about keeping the forum and wiki alive and working, the images will come along for the ride. With images hosted elsewhere, if you die, or the hosting company packs it in, the images will be lost.

I only use my personal website when it's important that the image not have a filename below it, though some images on other forums (KBtalKing and GH) are indeed hosted on my own website, as well as forums that don't even permit image uploads.

[Muirium]

Yup.

I upload my stuff to DT because third parties are scummy, DT handles images honestly and doesn't hide my stuff behind thumbnails (so a retina display always displays it optimally), and as this is DT content there's not much upside in retaining it elsewhere if and when DT itself falls down the old memory hole. I have my own personal backups along with all my own photography. But I bet Webwit is better prepared than my crappy backup system. And the DT club is intended to keep the site going as long as any of us are still around.

[webwit]

I've currently this in development:
http://deskthority.net/toptopics.php

If I'm bored at some point I might make it real cool and keep historic reply/view counts. For example, in week view now I can only take new topics started in that week into account, not topics started earlier but which got most replies/views last week. Because there's only one counter for views and replies. So I don't know when it got its views/replies.

[Muirium]

Gold, silver, and bronze go to…

http://deskthority.net/toptopics.php?p=alltime

Well, could it be any other way? DID YOU SHIP THEM YET!

[002]

Sweet
It might also be interesting to rank/sort topics with abnormally unbalanced post:view ratios. Would give an idea of what stuff gets shared heavily outside of the realms of DT? The Lisp keyboard thread comes to mind with a whopping 1:825 ratio!

[webwit]

So I started keeping historic stats of 1 hour granularity. Almost have a day worth of stats now. This already gives interesting results, for example:



It shows the replies/views in the last day with the total replies/views in parentheses .

Go matt3o! That topic gets lots of external hits from people looking into building their own keyboard.

[Muirium]

I like the idea of a silent army of custom builders. Presumably you're keeping stats on where these views are from? I bet a lot of them come from east Asia, where people point to Matteo's threads for their illustrations.

Needs more hyperactive squirrel…

[mr_a500]

Wow, 161,090 views for the Round 5 thread. I wonder if you'd get more hits if you include the word "SEX" in the title.

"GB SEX SEXY ROUND 6 SEX NUDITY KEYCAP SALE (porn)"

(they'll probably mistake what "GB" stands for too)

[webwit]

According to our piwik stats, that topic got its visits today from:
http://www.reddit.com/r/DIY/comments/2i ... for_a_few/
and
http://imgur.com/a/LTWew

[Muirium]

Two sites I can't quite understand! Someone seems to have set up the Internet backwards…

[Madhias]

As expected Cindy's warehouse sales threads are on the top now (sorted by replies)! I do like the Top Topics page, i'll add it to my daily routine beside the DT spy and general world news.

[webwit]

I updated the top list to the new version based on historic data (I'll make a switch to show the prior view, new topics in the selected period only, later). Only got just over a day of historic stats now, day view and all time view are accurate, week view will be accurate in 6 days, month view in 29 days and year view in 364 days ( ). These last views currently discriminate favorably to new topics started in the selected period, as the reply and view count in the period are known. For topics started earlier there is no historic data yet, so we need to catch up slowly.

[Muirium]

Something very useful indeed for presenting simple tabulated stuff would be a fixed width font option that is distinct from a

Code: Select all

 block. Code blocks are presented in a scrolling subview (I am not a web developer…) which makes sense for something potentially enormous, but is crap when showing things like stock lists or feature comparisons. We already have (rarely used) text colour options in the post editor. Something like that for the font itself would be great.

Just two options of course. (Normal and Fixed Width.) This isn't bloody Tumbr…

[Madhias]

On the front page the pictures and videos overview is new? Now it shows the first image posted in a thread from this category and not images hosted by DT?

[webwit]

New since 2011

[webwit]

Something very useful indeed for presenting simple tabulated stuff would be a fixed width font option that is distinct from a

Code: Select all

 block. Code blocks are presented in a scrolling subview (I am not a web developer…) which makes sense for something potentially enormous, but is crap when showing things like stock lists or feature comparisons. We already have (rarely used) text colour options in the post editor. Something like that for the font itself would be great.

Just two options of course. (Normal and Fixed Width.) This isn't bloody Tumbr…[/monospace][/quote]

There's a hidden [ monospace ] tag I once made for this purpose. Didn't add it as a button in the editor so far because of lack of horizontal space.

[Madhias]

New since 2011

I must have been blind or never looked at it. Today i woke up and it looks different than it was a day before.

[Muirium]

There's a hidden [ monospace ] tag I once made for this purpose. Didn't add it as a button in the editor so far because of lack of horizontal space.

Nice!
That's almost what I was looking
for, Webwit.

But! Multiple space characters are trimmed,

For example. << Missing lots of spaces in between.

And tab
seems to be ignored
as well so I'm stumped
how to align text horizontally
across lines.

Ack!

I should have really typed that on my beamspring, for authentic sound…

[matt3o]

I should post more kb building tutorial it seems

[webwit]

Nice! 
That's almost what I was looking
for, Webwit.

But! Multiple space characters are trimmed,

For        example. << Missing lots of spaces in between.

And	tab
seems to be	ignored
as well	so I'm stumped
how to align	text horizontally
across 		lines.

Ack!

Try [ fixed ].

[JBert]

Hmmm, now you made me curious.
   Ok.
    ^ This does point at the k, right?

Only the spaces for the first line get lost, but that's easy to work around by actually putting a line of text before your spaced text.

Good to know this exists, but where to document it? Tooltip or help box somewhere?

[webwit]

[ fixed ]<spaces>line1
<spaces>line2[ /fixed ] gives:

line1
    line2

Darn. I guess it trims the white space of what's between the tags somewhere deep in phpBB.

[ fixed ]Foobar:
<spaces>line1
<spaces>line2[ /fixed ] gives:

Foobar:
    line1
    line2

Workaround.

[Muirium]

It'll do. Thanks.

I'm having a lot of trouble with the site's "change font size" setting. It's not sticking between page loads. Any new thread I visit, it's back down to the default tiny size (that's way too wee for me, I like the medium and large sizes, depending on time of day and how worked my eyes feel). The setting is a simple number stored in a cookie, which is accepted by my browsers, yet most of them are ignoring it on every refresh. This is on several browsers each on old Macs, new Macs and my ancient iPad. Any idea what's up?

Likely not related, but maybe: I noticed that IMAP access to info @ deskthority.net requires a trusted secure certificate override on OS X. The authority Deskthority's cert is signed by is not trusted and must be explicitly granted. Anything similar, security wise, behind the apparently ignored cookie? I doubt it! But I'm not technical enough to be able to rule out a common cause.

[scottc]

It looks like Deskthority is avoiding the SSL mafia by using a self-signed certificate. That's actually good, I can use HTTPS now!

Edit: uh, maybe not yet! https://deskthority.net/

[JBert]

I noticed before that HTTPS doesn't work. Maybe it still redirects to the old hosting provider?