Forum Upgrade Today, June 15th! PLEASE READ!

[phaeron]

2 hours ago, Albert said:

I really don't understand all the complaints about the desktop theme of the forum, it's not that significantly different from the old forum.  The 3 pixel blue borders are a bit overdone and I will tone that down, and I'll tighten up the skin a bit to make it slightly denser where I can.

This probably depends a lot on the OS, browser, and screen resolution. I noticed that you seem to be using a Mac with a Retina display, which will render differently than a PC. The skin also looks spaced out to me, although not that much when you actually compare side by side:

 

 

This is a scaled-down image of the new and old forums, taken from Firefox running on Windows 10 on a 2560x1440 display at 100% global scale. The new forum is in private mode to hide the signatures, while the old forum is taken from the Wayback Machine. The font size for the old skin is 14px, while for the new skin it is 1.6rem, which comes out to 14.5667px according to the Inspector. Line spacing is set to 1.6x which magnifies this point size difference a bit. The boxing around each post and the quote bar is also a major contributor to the spacing. Thus, the post view isn't that much more spaced than before, but it could be adjusted to be a bit more compact.

 

The forum post list actually seems slightly more compact in the current new skin. However, once the browser is narrowed, the responsive design logic switches to a different format that is very spaced out similarly to what people were seeing on mobile, and perhaps a source of some the complaints:

 

 

The threshold for this seems to be relative to font size, so people who are using a higher display scaling factor or are zoomed in the browser to make text bigger will hit this at larger window sizes.

 

Having run an Invision forum before -- on an even more ancient version -- I have an idea of the huge amount of work that went into this upgrade and appreciate it. IMO the current skin is generally not that bad spacing-wise, but I would also appreciate minor CSS tweaks to tighten this up a little closer to the old forum.

 

[Albert]

Thanks for the comparison.  I did look back and forth between the old forum skin and the new one while it was being developed to try and keep they layout reasonably close.  It is interesting about the threshold for the skin switching to tablet mode.  I haven't experienced this myself, but I tend to use fairly wide windows.  Looks like the tablet and the mobile views can definitely use some work as far as vertical whitespace.

 

 ..Al

[_The Doctor__]

On 6/16/2019 at 3:29 AM, Albert said:

I believe they removed friends.  Now you can "follow" people instead, which allows you to get notifications when people you follow post (which is something I've wanted for a while).

 

 ..Al

Both have a purpose, friends was a great thing if used by persons who would grant or deny friend status and this could help limit a things from becoming an issue in some circumstances. Used in combination with ignore was pretty useful. The Follow makes sense for clubs topics and blogs, but not so much on  or for a person, the implementation in that context is part of what turns some people off about social media sites.

[ggn]

On 6/16/2019 at 3:36 PM, Albert said:

You're now the third or fourth person to ask about this, and I'm not sure why Invision removed the ability to hide the sidebar.  I'm gong to look today to see if anyone's created a third-party plugin that adds this functionality back.

 

 ..Al

 

Hi Al,

 

Great stuff with the forum update - I've done that in the past (with other forum software) and it's no picnic!

 

I'm also interested in that hide sidebar functionality so I looked around for a bit and found https://invisioncommunity.com/files/file/8525-toggle-showhide-sidebar-widgets/. I don't know what version of the forum software AA is running but hopefully perhaps this helps.

 

 

[roadrunner]

No option to delete a comment on someone's status update?

[matthew180]

3 hours ago, Albert said:

You'll need to use your display name (InsaneMultitasker) instead of a login name if that was different on the old forum.  The login name has been eliminated in lieu of just having a single login/display name. 

 

 ..Al

I always considered this a big security risk and never understood why A.A. followed that practice.  By using a person's login/account name as the publicly visible display name, I automatically know 50% of everyone's login credentials.  An account's unique identity and login should always be kept private to the account holder and the server admin.

[+Random Terrain]

9 hours ago, CPUWIZ said:

 

No, a lot of us turn 50, this year.  We are still churning out code and get used to change.

 

I'm older than 50 and still can't code, unless you count BASIC, but I only do that by copying and pasting. This forum upgrade isn't as jarring as one or two times in the past where it seemed like Invision was trying to make the forum software harder to use. "What? They can do that with one click? Unacceptable! Change that to 3 to 5 clicks by the end of the month!"

[matthew180]

I can already tell the new editor is going to cause some hair pulling and crying.  I consider A.A. a technical forum and I do a lot of posts that involve code examples, formatted diagrams, and such.  The previous editor introduced some quirks that made it harder to do these kinds of posts, but at least we could fall-back to the text version to fix things.  Yes, the "code block" is there (although it still does not have an assembly language highlighting option), but I've been trying all night to get it to do some basic things that were at least possible in the previous editor (the editor from around 2014 was the best, IMO).  Doing these kinds of things now seem very difficult or maybe not possible:

 

1. Wrap long code-examples in a spoiler block so they are collapsed by default, to make the text part of the post easier to read.  I have tried to make this work a few times tonight and I cannot manage to get it working.  And when I tried to put a code-block into a spoiler, the code-block *went away*...  I'm glad it was only a test; an editor should *never* lose your text.  Also, it is difficult enough to get people to wrap their 400-line programs in the old spoiler and code tags, but having to fight with the placement and nesting in this editor is going to make it much more challenging.

 

2. Quote multiple people (or just one person) and "slice up" their quote into multiple pieces, so a reply can address each point in a multi-part question or previous reply.  In the old editor this was tedious (using the text mode to duplicate the quote tags), but at least it could be done.

 

3. Making the post box bigger to start with.  Yes it auto expands, but why not just have it be the maximum height of my browser window to begin with (that's why I paid a lot of money for my giant-ass monitor)?  This seems like an artificial limitation based on someone's bad idea of what "good modern UX design" is supposed to be.  White (or dark depending on the theme) space is good, and personally I like a lot of blank space to write a post (it helps me think).  At least the previous editor let me make the editor window as big as I could inside the browser.

 

The preview does not seem to be accurate either, from the initial testing I was doing.

 

Maybe I'm in the minority of the typical demographic of user on A.A.?  Media (images, movies, hearts, likes, etc.), font sizes and colors, etc. are secondary to the text content, IMO.  Of course images can certainly be useful, and videos too from time to time too, but I would trade that for a editor that makes writing good replies easier.  Actually, I have never seen a good editor in any forum that makes writing a technical or multi-part reply easier.  And that should be the primary focus of an editor, again IMO.

 

 

[Flojomojo]

Can anyone help me find a “mark board as read” button in the mobile view? 

 

Its got got to be there, but it’s not obvious to me. 

[Flojomojo]

5 hours ago, matthew180 said:

I always considered this a big security risk and never understood why A.A. followed that practice.  By using a person's login/account name as the publicly visible display name, I automatically know 50% of everyone's login credentials.  An account's unique identity and login should always be kept private to the account holder and the server admin.

There’s an option for 2FA now, problem solved? I enabled it on my account. 

 

Besides, support is simpler when a member only has one potential login username. I know I’ve seen at least one person wondering how to get in with this new change. 

[Jinks]

I clicked on 7800 on rarity search guide and it has all the info about the 2600..

Very strange. 

 

Edited June 18, 2019 by Jinks

[Andromeda Stardust]

On 6/16/2019 at 9:58 AM, Albert said:

 

Looks awesome. I am using it right now! ??

[Tidus79001]

My eyes Are loving this new dark mode theme option (it's really helping with the eye strain).  Attachments prior to the forum upgrade are going to come available again later this week?  Found some demo ROM's this past weekend after the upgrade but no download links.  Thanks for all the hard work on this valuable retro gaming website (it is one of my favorite and most frequently visited websites).

 

[PlaysWithWolves]

This is an underrated post.  It allowed me to put "My Content" (custom stream) back to where it previously was (upper-right) and act the way I want it to (e.g. click opens to first unread post) : 

 

14 hours ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

Make your custom stream the default stream.

 

 

[Mr SQL]

On ‎6‎/‎15‎/‎2019 at 11:37 AM, Albert said:

If you see something that's obviously broken, please report it to me directly, post about it in this thread

Hi Al, there's a new BASIC game for the CoCo written by the Sock Master (an awesome programmer from bitd) that looks pretty cool; it's based on Man goes Down for the Atari, a fantastic game with original concept written by another awesome programmer.

 

I like ports that are different, and I wanted to compare them but now I can no longer find the Machine Language CoCo port of Man goes Down by Linville because the search dialog is no longer local; it searches all of AtariAge which is more like using Google and not a sub board  search - before it would search just the sub board.

 

There's probably a dialog setting buried somewhere that is on longer on by default; might be an Easter egg hunt to turn it back on. 

 

[Albert]

51 minutes ago, Tidus79001 said:

My eyes Are loving this new dark mode theme option (it's really helping with the eye strain).  Attachments prior to the forum upgrade are going to come available again later this week?  Found some demo ROM's this past weekend after the upgrade but no download links.  Thanks for all the hard work on this valuable retro gaming website (it is one of my favorite and most frequently visited websites).

All missing post content (images, attachments, quote boxes, etc.) will return as post content is rebuilt.  Not sure how long exactly this is going to take.  I filed a support ticket with Invision last night to ask them to investigate speeding this up, as it's taking longer than it should.  But it will all be back once the process is complete.  I know it's annoying right now, and trust me, it's probably more annoying for me than anyone else!

 

 ..Al

[Albert]

I figured out how to clean up the "All Activity" stream to remove all the superfluous crap.  It's much better now..

 

 

 ..Al

[Albert]

1 hour ago, Jinks said:

I clicked on 7800 on rarity search guide and it has all the info about the 2600..

Very strange.

As part of this process of moving the site to a new server, I had to completely rewrite all the code for the main site hosting the games database.  There are definitely going to be some issues there as I didn't completely finish this work.  I wasn't aware of this issue, though, so thanks for pointing it out.  I'll fix this today since it's a pretty obvious bug.  I still have many static pages to move over from the old site to the new one, which I'll get done once I am caught up with store orders again.

 

Thank you again for spotting this and bringing it to my attention.

 

 ..Al

[Albert]

32 minutes ago, Mr SQL said:

I like ports that are different, and I wanted to compare them but now I can no longer find the Machine Language CoCo port of Man goes Down by Linville because the search dialog is no longer local; it searches all of AtariAge which is more like using Google and not a sub board  search - before it would search just the sub board.

 

There's probably a dialog setting buried somewhere that is on longer on by default; might be an Easter egg hunt to turn it back on.

Just click on the search field and you'll get a popup that lets you localize the search:

 

 

I don't believe there is a setting that turns this on by default.  I actually prefer this new behavior, as I usually want to search the entire forum, and the exception is wanting to search the current thread or forum I'm engaged with.

 

 ..Al

[Jinks]

4 minutes ago, Albert said:

As part of this process of moving the site to a new server, I had to completely rewrite all the code for the main site hosting the games database.  There are definitely going to be some issues there as I didn't completely finish this work.  I wasn't aware of this issue, though, so thanks for pointing it out.  I'll fix this today since it's a pretty obvious bug.  I still have many static pages to move over from the old site to the new one, which I'll get done once I am caught up with store orders again.

 

Thank you for pointing this out .

 

 ..Al

Thanks for making a great website! 

 

[Ikrananka]

Does the forum software allow for Two Factor Authentication via email?  I'm one of those who refuse to embrace smartphones and don't have one.  At the moment it seems that TFA is only available if you have a smartphone and install the Google Authenticator app.

[Albert]

11 minutes ago, Ikrananka said:

Does the forum software allow for Two Factor Authentication via email?  I'm one of those who refuse to embrace smartphones and don't have one.  At the moment it seems that TFA is only available if you have a smartphone and install the Google Authenticator app.

No, unfortunately, there are only three different methods available for Two Factor Authentication, and email is not among them. 

 

The Authy service looks somewhat expensive (it's 9 cents per SMS/push notification), so I'm not inclined to enable that one.  Although that woudln't help you in this case.  I could enable the Security Questions method, though. Looks like I'd have to come up with the questions, though, and I'm not really a big fan of pre-determined, somewhat generic security questions.

 

 ..Al

[Ikrananka]

9 minutes ago, Albert said:

No, unfortunately, there are only three different methods available for Two Factor Authentication, and email is not among them. 

I could enable the Security Questions method, though. Looks like I'd have to come up with the questions, though, and I'm not really a big fan of pre-determined, somewhat generic security questions.

 

I like the security questions option, but certainly not expecting you to come up with a whole load of predefined security questions.  If the user could define their own security questions like I've seen on some systems then that would be ideal.

[Flojomojo]

"Knowledge based authentication" (security questions like, "what city is your mother from?") aren't so great unless there's a way to set your own questions. 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge-based_authentication

 

I think I'll add my Google account to this ... as if I need an ironclad security vise on my forum posts. ????

[Ikrananka]

5 minutes ago, Flojomojo said:

I think I'll add my Google account to this ... as if I need an ironclad security vise on my forum posts. ????

 

I do agree with you.  I was just curious if an easy to use and convenient TFA was available then I might have used it just because it was easy.