deskthority - Suggestions and Changelog

[bhtooefr]

Well, and then you get HTML pixels (which are supposed to be 1/96 physical inch) versus physical pixels.

(Nothing actually follows the W3C standard here, and instead derives the inch from physical pixels, although sometimes more than 96 on high density displays.)

[Muirium]

Yup. Everything's a mess, as usual. *Except* for all the nice tack sharp high resolution photos posted on DT, which are superb when browsed — in place — by a retina display! Disabling that, by replacing them with fuzzy placeholders, would be about as dumb as ditching colour. That's not the way we're headed. No need to go backwards, when by lucky accident, we're already ahead!

[7bit]

The pictures are scaled to 724 width if JavaScript is on and if not they are clipped at 724 pixels.

If it works like in the wiki, after upload, the necessary sizes of those pictures will be generated for once. These need not necessarily be low quality (also known as shitty phone pictures or potato pictures).


Also: It would be good practice to scale down those images that are larger than the actual resolution of camera/lens.

[Muirium]

Let's just call it 7bit mode. When logged in as 7bit, DT scales all images to 100k or smaller! And the site squeezes to fit inside your EGA resolution CRT.

[7bit]

You do not understand!


The DT website scales images down to 724 pixels by telling the browser (via JS) to do so, or via HTML to show only 724 pixels!

This is a fact and nothing else.


All I would like to have is to let the server scale them down to 724 so JS is not required here and not only is loading images faster, it solves the problem with people who don't know how to scale their shitty images properly!


OT: If I would ever rewrite the story of Don Quijote, I will let him fight against JS and Flash!

[Muirium]

Really? They seem to look better than that when I zoom in on my retina Mac and iPad. (Like any normal human, I never go to the image's own page. The previews are the pictures.) Perhaps JavaScript is smart enough to know the difference between my pixels and yours!

[webwit]

Only a couple of thousand more paying members and we can hire our own web developer, after which all these issues will be fixed.

[Muirium]

As soon as we hire one, I want him fired!

[bhtooefr]

It's scaling down to 724 px, which is the HTML unit called the "pixel", and which isn't necessarily 1 physical pixel.

On a Retina Mac, 724 px is rendered by the browser as 1448 physical pixels. So, when a 2048x1536 image, let's say, is scaled by the JavaScript down to 724 px, it's rendered as 1448x1086 on a Retina Mac, and 724x543 on a "normal" system.

[Halvar]

Just so I understand this: 7bit's monitor is not wide enough to show the full width of the page header but wide enough to show the 724 pixels wide images in the posting column? How is that even possible?

[Muirium]

By the mystic powers of being a pain in the ass…


@Bhtooefr: Thanks for the clarification. I was pretty sure I was looking at >724 pixel images all this time!

[Daniel Beardsmore]

Yup. Everything's a mess, as usual. *Except* for all the nice tack sharp high resolution photos posted on DT, which are superb when browsed — in place — by a retina display! Disabling that, by replacing them with fuzzy placeholders, would be about as dumb as ditching colour. That's not the way we're headed. No need to go backwards, when by lucky accident, we're already ahead!

Firstly, plenty of the images are larger than the 1448 pixel width of double DPI — that's only 1.5 MP at 4:3!

Secondly, double the DPI means four times the bandwidth for the same load time, four times the network traffic, and four times the processing power required for the same image decompression speed. It also means four times the RAM requirement.

Currently, it's an overstretch, and photos in forums is one place where high DPI is largely irrelevant. I'd rather open the full image than squint at tiny pixels, and generally it's not the detail level that's the issue, but the lighting. If I was a high DPI user I might be tempted to study where the bottlenecks are — even on my Core i7 CPU on high-speed cable there's a lot of lag, and I don't know that DT's own traffic capacity is adequate, or the links between the UK and Germany.

The real issue is that phpBB is too stupid to store image sizes, so you can't scroll the page until every image is loaded, as it jumps about as images come in and you lose your place repeatedly. If the images had sizes set in the HTML, it would be far less annoying as you'd at least be able to read the words on the page in the meantime. This was a solved problem from the beginning and I have no idea how anyone can get this wrong.

[Halvar]

All I would like to have is to let the server scale them down to 724 so JS is not required here and not only is loading images faster, it solves the problem with people who don't know how to scale their shitty images properly.

I agree with this, this would also help mobile users. I just don't know who should take the time to program this. For folks with retina displays and fast connections, the current solution could probably be left in with the option to be reactivated in user options.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

Actually, there is one gotcha — people who host huge images off-site — should phpBB be expected to save its own scaled-down images? One thing that would do is ensure they're preserved forever instead of left the the mercy of $idioticImageHostingCoOfTheMonth, albeit not at their original size.

[Halvar]

That would be great of course, but will inevitably lead to expensive legal problems ...

[webwit]

There are some different aspects to this:

1. "Responsive" image resolution - it would be optimal if the image resolution is different for broadband, mobile, retina and non-retina displays. We can offer different resolutions, but the method by which this is done is more time-consuming and troublesome, as there is no real, ideal standard last time I checked. There is no <img src-mobile="a.jpg" src-broadband="b.jpg">. There are many methods and frameworks for this though, some css-based, some javascript based, some <img> based, some <div> based etc. all with pros and cons. Maybe some of you know what's currently hot.

2. We already use a rescaler, phpThumb, for the topic thumbnails. But it would need work, for it does some things not right yet. It does not do width and height storage (not a problem for the topic thumbnails which have fixed dimensions), but that can be fixed. Instead of <img src="http://example.com/foo.jpg"> we'd have to patch phpBB to output <img src="/phpThumb.php?url=http://example.com/foo.jpg&maxwidth=724" width="724" height="386"> (simplified example for readability). PhpThumb uses the url as a filename where it stores an image, which sometimes breaks things and wasn't a good idea. It has some bugs in importing/handling images, most of which I fixed but there are some more. It currently only saves to jpg, it should save to the original format (png, gif, jpg). Maybe someone knows a better solution as it seems abandon-ware. The problems are fixable though, but it requires time and effort. It should save to a hash of the url, and include dimensions in the filename, to prevent database lookups for those. For example http://example.com/foo.jpg becomes eFx9wz63gxmBet4pYd_724x386.jpg. Although that would require a filename matching routine. Maybe save them in a quick cache, whatever. In other words, it requires more thought and design.

3. Legal. If someone inserts [ img ] http://example.com/foo.jpg [/img] in a post and deletes the image later or doesn't own it in the first place, should we continue to show it. We should also think about how to handle image changes.

In general it would be quite some work, while we're into keyboards. Maybe we should just switch forum software. This branch of phpBB is a dead end, they started over in an incompatible 3.1 (our branch is 3.0).

[Muirium]

Ah, that's what nagbox is about in the admin console.

[webwit]

Small change: Timezone settings changed to city based settings. For example, it used to be "+1 hours" for me, now it's "Europe/Amsterdam". The purpose of this is automatic DST settings. It may have set the wrong city for you (for example it used Europe/Berlin for me, which doesn't really matter), it just picked a city in the same time zone for existing users

[bhtooefr]

Interestingly, it pushed me into America/Chicago, when that's actually not my time zone. (And I didn't notice the zone being wrong before...)

[Muirium]

Europe/London for me. Which is fine, until those buggers move to CST like they've been threatening to for years. Winter daylight is shorter up here, and moving us further ahead of the sun again spells a lot of extra morning dark, how wonderfully depressing… unless we get our own timezone for UTC.

I like that OS X includes timezones for Edinburgh and Cardiff. That's real long term thinking! Those poor bastards in Wales.

[kbdfr]

Clicking the "Spy" buttons returns an error message:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function automatic_dst_cache() in /home/dtnet/public_html/includes/cache.php on line 74

(Firefox, Windows 7)

[Muirium]

Odd. Works fine here.

[webwit]

Refresh?

[kbdfr]

Refresh?

Did that, and don't know why, but well, now it's OK.

I'm glad at least you guys understand how this whole stuff works

[Muirium]

Webwit updated the way the forum deals with timezones. DST_CACHE pretty much explains itself: Daylight Savings* Time is the updated timezone logic, and cache means your browser was mixing new with old. Refresh!


*Yes, savings. Suck it DST fans! Stupid bloody meddlers the lot of you.

[mr_a500]

I made a few changes. If things look weird, refresh the page.

I've changed some things in the header and footer. If you can't find stuff or think it's all wrong, complain here so I can neatly ignore it all in one place. FAQ and The team have been moved to the footer (when you click on "deskthority" there). Also new in the footer are About deskthority, Contact and Privacy policy. The top right of the header now consists of things which change depending on whether you're a guest or logged in, while the bottom left always stays the same.

I don't like it. I preferred the old way - only boxes at the top when I'm not logged in, more boxes at the bottom when logged in. I'm sure I can get used to the new layout, but I just liked it better before.

[7bit]

I just hit "Top topics" instead of "new messages" ...

[Daniel Beardsmore]

It's rare to get something right from the beginning, and balancing the need to improve against the inconvenience of change is hard. It's more annoying when you can't fault something or get used to it. I'm a spatial person, and yet I can never find where I left any icons on the Windows 8 start screen. For some reason, the spatiality doesn't stick with me like it would normally. I can't objectively fault what Microsoft did, either, since my reasoning says that it should work well.

The iPhone UI, though — it seems to have remained largely the same, since Apple did such a good job from the start. Contrast the BlackBerry where RIM keep reshuffling the UI and can't seem to find anything that makes sense or is able to be left alone. The captionless icons were a hoot.

Personally I'd have Members on the bottom row, on the rationale of top row = me, bottom row = forum. Members is a forum concept, and is nothing to do with me.

I don't fight new UI too hard. I still have the menu bar in Firefox so that I can run my bookmarks along the menu bar as I've always done, since I can't have a dedicated bookmarks toolbar any more. I kept the title bar, too, for the page title.

[SL89]

webwit - it happened across machines and browsers, i found it to be rooted in some style tweaks i had, all looks good now

[webwit]

I'm in your styles, ruining your tweaks.