deskthority - Suggestions and Changelog

[Muirium]

Implementable forum fixes please. Unless you have your own magic wand to wave, in which case you don't even need our permission. Shake that thing!

The only kind of "requiring" we can do is adding more non-skippable junk to the thread composition form. Freeform tagging requires nagging. At just the guys who really would prefer non-CONUS users to butt out of their thread. That always goes well…

Bear in mind that a lot of the good stuff in the marketplace, like the great finds thread and all manner of ICs, can't be geographically tagged. So we would need a default option. And every single douche who just wants to advertise his stuff and don't give a shit about people's locales and feelings WILL select that default option. Because fuck you. That is their way.

Here's one I would like: posting in the marketplace (or even the whole forum) is off limits until you specify a location in your user profile. We might as well at least get that out of people. Even if they scrawl bullshit in there, we can tell what we need to know about them.

[seebart]

No nagging more authority at deskthority. I believe that's part of your role here Mr.secretary and I have seen you exercise it! Now I understand you can't watch the marketplace like a Scottish wolf, just a little reminder once in a while will do. Repeat offenders = ban from marketplace.

And yes location should be mandatory for use of the marketplace.

[Muirium]

No nagging more authority at deskthority… Repeat offenders = ban from marketplace.

Authoritarianthority!

Nah, that's not my scene at all. You could try suggesting such policies to the club, where we could have a vote on them. But I wouldn't care to enforce such rules, and I'd likely oppose them anyway. I'm lazy and liberal minded!

Nagging is quite a different thing from banning, or indeed getting in touch with posters and harassing them for info so we can passively aggressively tag their threads for them. But all these things do share a common trait: so much bother.

And yes location should be mandatory for use of the marketplace.

If it's technically feasible, I want it indeed. We're technology geeks. We need to make systems, not empty policies.

[seebart]

Lazy and liberal minded, that's how you got the job! Anyway I understand. I have been in other forums where enforcement was daily basis, and it generally emulates bad vibes. The fact that we discuss it is good.

[webwit]

Officially it's the club master's job anyway (002 and team), and me and Muirium take care of the more mundane administration tasks such as hosting, finances and membership admin. Not that we care much about officialities, but there you go.

[Muirium]

002 and his team of Topres?

Practically speaking, the admins (Webwit, 002, me and occasionally I guess 7bit and maybe Mr Interface?) handle these things. Mostly by not doing anything! I occasionally tweak thread titles to make things clearer, and sometimes even move threads around, but I'm serious about the laziness thing. Most of what I do is as a normal DTer, simply asking questions out in public.

[seebart]

Being very honest! Respect.

[002]

You would need to show item location and where they are willing to ship to. As an Aussie I pretty much expect that most keyboard sales are not going to be local, so I'm much more interested in knowing whether someone ships worldwide. Knowing that info without having to open the thread would be preferable but not a requirement -- as long as you could get your answer without having to ask, that would suffice. The question I have is, what would it take to implement something like this? I've thought about the best way to handle such enhancement requests before -- I like to do things consistently. The best way I can think of would be to put all such things to club vote. If more than 50% are in favour, then it officially goes to a backlog where it can be triaged by our large business analyst team and either placed in scope or deferred Thoughts?

[webwit]

Congratulations!

[002]

Thanks!

[seebart]

The best way I can think of would be to put all such things to club vote.

Yes I'm for a club vote on this.

[shreebles]

I'm voting yes on voting.

[Muirium]

Someone care to write a proposition? I don't know exactly what you guys are in favour of. How many lashes for transgressors?

[SL89]

This is the part when someone says 'I volunteer myself as tribute..."

Irregardless, I'd like to help more, maybe instead of changing policies we can continue what Muriuim suggests and go for cultural changes, maybe we can compile a small FAQ for sellers, with instructions to help clarify things for them as well as the potential buyers.

[chzel]

And when they fail to follow the guidelines set in the FAQ, we lash them!
I like!

[Halvar]

FAQs are good because our unwritten policies are not as self-explainatory as some of us think. That said, I fully support moderator laziness/self-effacement like we had it in the past.

[Muirium]

An FAQ will help. Gives us something to link to when telling people they're doing it wrong.

An automated procedure is the dream. I really want user location field enforcement. As in no text in that field in your profile, no ability to post in the marketplace (or even all DT) for you. Can phpbb do that?

[trax]

Small suggestion: make it more clear when a FS sale is closed (many people seem to overlook the crossed-out FS)

[Muirium]

Here's an interesting little glitch I just spotted in the forum spy:

Screen Shot 2015-09-02 at 10.29.17 pm.png (241.32 KiB) Viewed 4345 times

Look at the line for the [WTB] IBM SSK thread. But that wasn't me…

Screen Shot 2015-09-02 at 10.29.33 pm.png (205.91 KiB) Viewed 4345 times

The error shows up the same on different clients. Looks like something host side. Weird the spy and the actual forum are out of sync.

[webwit]

That's funny, that bug has been in the spy for...well since the beginning, and you're the first to report it I think it might be something trivial like a > instead of a >= in the javascript which checks if there are new posts since the last AJAX poll. Am I making any sense?

[Muirium]

First I've noticed it.

Thing is: I pulled out the phone and loaded the Spy just to check it wasn't a browser cache thing. I forced a fresh load on that and saw exactly the same thing as on my Mac. Other posts have shown up in the thread now so I can't test again.

[webwit]

It's not your cache, sometimes it misses a post. I think it's a timing issue.

[Muirium]

Oh right, the Spy is doing the polling, not the browser.

I always suspect my browser as the Spy is a slippery bugger for a computer that's just waking from sleep, which I do a lot. Let alone a tablet or phone. A full reload is my first instinct when things look stale. But an error is unusual, to say the least.

[webwit]

The bug can actually be at one or both ends.

[Halvar]

I quickly looked over the JS in spy.js and I think it must be on the server side. The client just nudges the server (telling it when it was last updated), gets back a list of objects that represent new posts since that point, and creates a new row at the top for every new post where it just formats nicely whatever is in the object from the server. No opportunity for post mixups on that side.

Maybe the other error in the spy ajax updates, the one that everyone knows, can be fixed while at it: when there's a new post in a thread that is already in the spy, the older one should be deleted from the spy after the new one has been inserted. The JS doesn't do that (or it doesn't work).

[webwit]

Server-side just does a database query based on the what was new since the last server-side time stamp.

I think I found the bug, the solution is on my todo-list. If there's a poll at 00:00:00.5 and there's a new post at 00:00:00.3 and 00:00:00.7, it misses the second post, even in the next poll, because the time stamp in the database and the spy are in whole seconds only.

[Muirium]

With the regular annoyance destroying success of a mandatory location field now implemented, I'd like to suggest another routine frustration fix:

Can we change the behaviour of the quote bubble button? People so often use it GH style to repeat a load of stuff that's immediately above their post, and so often they're just adding a single line at the bottom anyway. (I'll find some egregious examples of this in practice, if required. It's an eyesore.) Could we add some smarts to automatically avoid this behaviour? It's ugly and pisses me off especially when it cascades!

The ideal thing would be to parse the submitted reply for how much new stuff there is, and nuke the quote block if it's dominant *and* immediately above the new post. The behaviour I'm talking about is always exactly the same format: people leave the entire quote intact, and add a line or two of their own at the bottom. If we can spot that, and nuke the quote, ideal! If the quote has been edited, then leave the whole post be. But I admit, this requires heuristics, which is trouble.

The next best thing would be to remove the quote bubble button from the last post in every thread! (Leaving it intact for all other posts.) New posts are automatically responding to the post above them, style wise, anyway. For those of us who really want to dissect a post, piece by piece, we can write something quick and then edit our (now last) post to include the (now enabled) quotes desired.

Another good fix would be to collapse immediately quoted images by default. Auto wrapping spoiler tags around them would be neat.

There are multiple ways to address this annoyance. Interested in pursuing one with me?

[SL89]

With the regular annoyance destroying success of a mandatory location field now implemented, I'd like to suggest another routine frustration fix:

Can we change the behaviour of the quote bubble button? People so often use it GH style to repeat a load of stuff that's immediately above their post, and so often they're just adding a single line at the bottom anyway. (I'll find some egregious examples of this in practice, if required. It's an eyesore.) Could we add some smarts to automatically avoid this behaviour? It's ugly and pisses me off especially when it cascades!

The ideal thing would be to parse the submitted reply for how much new stuff there is, and nuke the quote block if it's dominant *and* immediately above the new post. The behaviour I'm talking about is always exactly the same format: people leave the entire quote intact, and add a line or two of their own at the bottom. If we can spot that, and nuke the quote, ideal! If the quote has been edited, then leave the whole post be. But I admit, this requires heuristics, which is trouble.

The next best thing would be to remove the quote bubble button from the last post in every thread! (Leaving it intact for all other posts.) New posts are automatically responding to the post above them, style wise, anyway. For those of us who really want to dissect a post, piece by piece, we can write something quick and then edit our (now last) post to include the (now enabled) quotes desired.

Another good fix would be to collapse immediately quoted images by default. Auto wrapping spoiler tags around them would be neat.

There are multiple ways to address this annoyance. Interested in pursuing one with me?

You mean like this?

[Muirium]

With the regular annoyance destroying success of a mandatory location field now implemented, I'd like to suggest another routine frustration fix:

Can we change the behaviour of the quote bubble button? People so often use it GH style to repeat a load of stuff that's immediately above their post, and so often they're just adding a single line at the bottom anyway. (I'll find some egregious examples of this in practice, if required. It's an eyesore.) Could we add some smarts to automatically avoid this behaviour? It's ugly and pisses me off especially when it cascades!

The ideal thing would be to parse the submitted reply for how much new stuff there is, and nuke the quote block if it's dominant *and* immediately above the new post. The behaviour I'm talking about is always exactly the same format: people leave the entire quote intact, and add a line or two of their own at the bottom. If we can spot that, and nuke the quote, ideal! If the quote has been edited, then leave the whole post be. But I admit, this requires heuristics, which is trouble.

The next best thing would be to remove the quote bubble button from the last post in every thread! (Leaving it intact for all other posts.) New posts are automatically responding to the post above them, style wise, anyway. For those of us who really want to dissect a post, piece by piece, we can write something quick and then edit our (now last) post to include the (now enabled) quotes desired.

Another good fix would be to collapse immediately quoted images by default. Auto wrapping spoiler tags around them would be neat.

There are multiple ways to address this annoyance. Interested in pursuing one with me?

You mean like this?

Exactly like that. But even better when there are pics. Like this:

This would be perfect. Throw that Row 2 Legend2 to Row 1 as a page up

But there is already Row 1 page up in base set?[//quote]

Oh yeah...I need some sleep haha

[SL89]

I agree it's totally annoying, but I think your solution is a bit complex.

On GH and other forums (like XDA iirc) you can only have a certain amount of quotes within quotes. The easiest way to deal with this would be to limit the amount of quotes within quotes to about 2 or 3 at max. (Some forums go from 5 to 10) I'm not sure we even have a limit tbh.