Forum Update

[Immortan D]

I have several issues with the update while using my Samsung 4k smart TV to access the forum, issues that were not there before the update:

1. No full screen editor available for replies after the update. Sometimes the quick reply editor fails to load properly and the full screen editor was a valid alternative.
2. No "code" editor available after the update. Was a lot easier to fix formatting issues using the text editor under certain circumstances.
3. In forum view, the right sidebar sometimes causes horizontal scrolling, but not always. It's a random issue.

Of course you don't have to fix any of this! I don't think many members are using their TVs for this purpose anyways.

[BrandonD]

Is there a way to not receive an email every time a post is replied to , or do I have to uncheck the box every time I reply to a thread? 

Go to your Notification Settings from your user drop down (top right), uncheck the box "Automatically follow content I reply to" and save. Alternatively, you can leave it checked and tweak the settings below that so that you only get it in your notification list and not an email. 

[Jim DaddyO]

I seem to have to log in manually a lot now too.  Seems it does not remember who I am.  

[TerryMcK]

The Insert other media>Insert image from URL bug appears to be fixed now

[thewoodwhisperer]

I can certainly remove the gallery strip. I only put that there to make the forum "feel" more like the old one. But I agree, the overall height of the strip is way too much. If folks don't care too much about the gallery strip, I can either remove it or push it to the sidebar.

As for mobile being unusable, my experience is anything but. Page loads are as fast as I would expect and reading/posting works just fine. I'm using an iPhone on AT&T LTE. I wonder if there's something else at play here causing the issues. Any other forum members having major slow downs on mobile?

FYI, gallery strip moved to the bottom of the front page. Maybe I should just get rid of it all together. Would probably speed up the page load a bit but I want to hear what people think about its presence in general.

[Immortan D]

No space between the tag "Location" and the actual location:

 

[Brendon_t]

In order to not make this a whine fest,

Marc, we appreciate the work your doing with the forum to make it better. We all know that the forum is not a money maker and is just barely self sufficient so the time your putting in is pretty much volunteer hours so thank you.

with that said.

 

Is anyone else having the issue of when you go to quote something, it doesn't give you a text box?

[Woodenskye]

I had the same problem as you Brendon.

[Vyrolan]

Well I have been using this for a couple days now and I have decided the mobile version is basically unusable.  Too many page refreshes to perform simple tasks.   I don't want to sound like a jerk, but that is my honest feedback and Marc, maybe something you can pass along to the vendor.  It is ok with wifi, but on a wireless data connection it is just too slow.   the old version did not have that problem. 

I can certainly remove the gallery strip. I only put that there to make the forum "feel" more like the old one. But I agree, the overall height of the strip is way too much. If folks don't care too much about the gallery strip, I can either remove it or push it to the sidebar.

As for mobile being unusable, my experience is anything but. Page loads are as fast as I would expect and reading/posting works just fine. I'm using an iPhone on AT&T LTE. I wonder if there's something else at play here causing the issues. Any other forum members having major slow downs on mobile?

FYI, gallery strip moved to the bottom of the front page. Maybe I should just get rid of it all together. Would probably speed up the page load a bit but I want to hear what people think about its presence in general.

Oh my...thank you for moving the gallery...   I always click the title at the top to go back to the homepage on mobile...and having that bulky gallery load at the top was very annoying...a whole screen of scrolling just to actually start to see categories.

I also still don't like mobile but am getting slightly more used to it...everything is just so much more scrolling and clicking.   It's the stupid little things that define the difference between "downsized for mobile" and "optimized for mobile".     The old mobile site just showed the title of the categories...I could probably see everything from General Woodworking down to Turner's Corner on one screen on my phone.   Now since it's just the full site downsized you also see the descriptions and so I can see half as much (only see down as far as The Shop now).   So scroll scroll scroll...   Same thing viewing a thread...the header with the member's name/picture is bigger and more padded than before...more scrolling on phone screen.   Also before you had to click the post to get the edit/quote/etc buttons to appear...which saved space...but now they show all the time and take up space...more scrolling.  I can barely see 2 short posts (by short, I mean 20-30 words so like 2-3 lines on mobile) on one screen.  I do like being able to do "Like" on mobile now though.

I can totally understand it from the dev's perspective...and it is nice having full functionality on mobile, but the old version was actually just nicely optimized for mobile.   I never understood why anyone would even want to try to use tapatalk or anything before when the mobile web version was so good.

 

(For the record, I have an iPhone 5...so it's not a phablet-sized screen, but it's not exactly some tiny little thing either.)

[bgreenb]

 

My biggest beef with the filtering.  If I want to see updates to posts I participated in, I have to hit the little star and wait for the page to reload.  Then I have to set each filter.  Sometimes it hangs up so I hit the star again and see "you must wait X seconds before starting a new search"  Wireless connectivity is poor in general in my area (Chicago suburbs), I think we must have a lot of congestion and little bandwidth.  Vyrolan lives near me so maybe we have the same problem. 

 

 

 

Yup I'm having this issue too...

Edit:  I actually can't even get it to display just stuff I'm following.  I check off "just items I follow" and hit the star again and it just loads every thread again.  Unless somehow I'm following every thread on the site.

Edited August 5, 2015 by bgreenb

[thewoodwhisperer]

Well the software is new, so there will be updates and bug fixes as time goes on. Hopefully they'll be responsive to feature-requests as well.

I'm not siding with software developers who make arbitrary changes here but I can give you a little perspective on why changes like this happen. These days, modern websites are built to be responsive, meaning that no matter what screen/device you view it on, the content displays in a readable fashion. The way this was handled during the early days of mobile was to create an entire theme/skin separate from the main site. Essentially, it's like maintaining two sites: one intended for mobile and one intended for desktop. Because  they were using a totally separate theme, they could set up a unique set of rules that apply to the mobile theme only.

Since then, responsive design became a thing and now we have a single website theme that simply morphs and changes into whatever the device or screen size dictates. It's pretty cool technology and it does make things easier for website owners like myself. And in theory, it's supposed to provide a better experience for the user and should look good on just about any device. But the reality is that it's a give and take. You often have situations where you make a positive change to improve the desktop view but it turns out that it impacts the mobile view in a negative way and vice versa.

Like any of this stuff, it will get better with time as new tricks are discovered and employed. But there will be bumps in the road along the way.

 

FYI - To try to improve mobile viewing, I got rid of the room descriptions. They are pretty self-explanatory so deleting them saves space. Even looks better on the desktop view as well. Not a major improvement but it should bring the room list up a little higher for you guys.

And thanks Brendon. I don't take any of this personally. Hopefully people understand that I didn't design the software and there's only so much I can do. But that said, I like reading these lists of issues because there just might be something i can do. Even little annoyances are important for me to know about if there's a chance I can resolve the issue. So keep it coming.

 

Edited August 5, 2015 by thewoodwhisperer

[Vyrolan]

FWIW, you could like on mobile before.  It was not obvious but there was a little check box next to the post.  Clicking it created a "like".

Well damn...  As an aside, this is one of the downsides of space-saving mobile layouts.

 

Vyrolan lives near me so maybe we have the same problem.

There are huge dead zones when I'm on the Metra trains.   I'm on Verizon, and one thing that actually helps is to turn off the LTE on my phone...let it fall back to 3G...  The 3G network is much less populated so it can actually be faster despite being slower technology.

 

But not being in technology, I never understood why software companies need to overhaul things that worked just fine.

Yea like I said before I can totally understand from the developer's perspective...it's much easier to build (and more importantly maintain) a single interface for all devices and all screen sizes instead of trying to maintain a desktop site versus a tablet site versus a smartphone site versus a crappy phone site.   It definitely has a lot of advantages to the user as well because functionality is always the same and intuitive when switching between devices...there's no little "can't do this or that on mobile" problems filling up their bug reports.    I just think the downside is that overall those designs are still optimized for desktop computers...and then the concern is "does it work" and is it "good enough" on mobile.   In the previous era of mobile-specific designs, the question was always "what's best for mobile".  It's not really any different from any other kind of quality/speed tradeoff.

FYI - To try to improve mobile viewing, I got rid of the room descriptions. They are pretty self-explanatory so deleting them saves space. Even looks better on the desktop view as well. Not a major improvement but it should bring the room list up a little higher for you guys.

Many thanks...definitely helps on mobile IMHO.

[Beechwood Chip]

When does the announcement go away?  I've read it, I clicked on it, I marked site as read, but I'm still seeing the announcement.

 

[nginear]

Using Mac OS X 10.10.5 and Chrome, clicking a link in a post is taking me back to top of the original post.

I'm having a similar issue, only that it takes me back to the top of the page I am on.  Windows 7 Professional and Firefox here.

[thewoodwhisperer]

When does the announcement go away?  I've read it, I clicked on it, I marked site as read, but I'm still seeing the announcement.

 

When I say it goes away!!! They allow me to set expiration times for the announcement but unfortunately it's static. I would love it if it went away after the first display. I'll only keep it up for a day or two.

I'm having a similar issue, only that it takes me back to the top of the page I am on.  Windows 7 Professional and Firefox here.

I believe this to be an issue only with older posts.  The links are there but the hyperlink is busted so it defaults to the page link. The original poster or a mod can go in and copy/paste the link into place to fix it.

[nginear]

Marc said "I believe this to be an issue only with older posts.  The links are there but the hyperlink is busted so it defaults to the page link. The original poster or a mod can go in and copy/paste the link into place to fix it."

Even when I click on your "The Wood Whisperer Guild" link in your signature line of your response to me, it takes me to the top of this page.  I make no claim as to understanding how all of this internet voodoo stuff works, so I believe you that the links are there.  I'll just give it some time and maybe it will all get sorted out.

Thanks for the response.

Edited August 5, 2015 by nginear
trying to fix the quote.

[Tpt life]

Agreed, Marc your signature is broken. 

[Immortan D]

I believe this to be an issue only with older posts.  The links are there but the hyperlink is busted so it defaults to the page link. The original poster or a mod can go in and copy/paste the link into place to fix it.

Editing a post does not fix the issue. I tried that in http://www.woodtalkonline.com/topic/19272-rockwell-jawhorse/ , with the link in the first post, and it's still pointing to the forum page instead of to Amazon.

Apparently external links are disabled somehow.

[Coop]

Brendon, Marc called you "a little annoyance"

[Tpt life]

Just doinking around, same pasted link works one out of three times. 

[thewoodwhisperer]

Agreed, Marc your signature is broken. 

Should be fixed now. Can you verify? This is the same issue as links in old posts. The link was written prior to the upgrade.

Editing a post does not fix the issue. I tried that in http://www.woodtalkonline.com/topic/19272-rockwell-jawhorse/ , with the link in the first post, and it's still pointing to the forum page instead of to Amazon.

Apparently external links are disabled somehow.

Check that post again. I fixed the link myself and it's working properly for me. Not sure how/why your edit didn't fix it though. Did you just use the Link icon in the menu bar when doing the editing or did you just copy/paste the raw link back into the writeup?

 

I talked with the forum folks, and this is apparently an issue that occurred during the rebuild of the database. So in a day or two they will re-run the import and it should fix the broken link issue. There's no way we'd be able to fix the entire database with manual edits.

Edited August 5, 2015 by thewoodwhisperer

[Eric.]

Guild link works for me.

[Tpt life]

Signature fixed!

[Immortan D]

Should be fixed now. Can you verify? This is the same issue as links in old posts. The link was written prior to the upgrade.

Check that post again. I fixed the link myself and it's working properly for me. Not sure how/why your edit didn't fix it though. Did you just use the Link icon in the menu bar when doing the editing or did you just copy/paste the raw link back into the writeup?

 

I talked with the forum folks, and this is apparently an issue that occurred during the rebuild of the database. So in a day or two they will re-run the import and it should fix the broken link issue. There's no way we'd be able to fix the entire database with manual edits.

I didn't actually replace the link. Just edited the post, then submitted it again.

The posts are not stored in HTML format in the DB, but using VB codes. But there is probably a cache, in HTML format, which is corrupted. I assumed that just making a small change in the post would rebuild the cache.

In Vbulletin there is a command to rebuild the cache for the entire forum. That command usually fixes problems like this after an update and is invoked via the admin control panel. Perhaps you could check if a command like that is available to you?

BTW thanks for removing the right sidebar from the forum view.

Edited August 6, 2015 by Daniel.

[thewoodwhisperer]

There used to be numerous rebuild functions on the back-end but those appear to be gone. So we'll be doing a re-import of the affected posts this week. Hopefully it will fix them all at once.