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posted by martyb on Wednesday March 01 2017, @03:30PM   Printer-friendly
from the moving-on-up dept.

Martyb here once again with an update on our progress with the site upgrade.

Our development team (paulej72, TheMightyBuzzard, and NCommander) have been hard at it trying to isolate and quash the bugs that have been reported. Having looked at some of the site source code (Perl) I can attest there are places where the comparison of Perl code to line noise is an apt description. Also, some of the code we inherited was written by, um, creative people who did not write the most readable code. Further the code documents what it does, but is just a wee bit short on the why. Translation: we have an amazing dev team here who have slogged many many hours trying to isolate and correct the issues that have arisen. If you've ever been bleary-eyed after a several-day coding sprint, you have an idea of things. I hereby express my personal thanks to the brain-numbing hard work these guys have put in for this site. And now on to where things stand.

We had an issue with getting a single comment to display correctly in "Flat" mode which appears to have been caused by issues with specifying the correct page it appeared in. Also, there was a rewrite of this code so things should be better, but watch out for regressions.

There are known issues with accessing the site via TOR most likely because we added a very restrictive Content Security Policy.

The new comment viewing modes "Threaded-TOS" and "Threaded-TNG" have been tweaked.

There is a strong voice to replicate the old "Threaded" behavior and it appears that may be feasible, now that we better understand how the community used it in the past. No promises, but it is being looked into.

We are close to making some changes for the defaults for Anonymous Cowards (non logged-in users), so if you have a preference, please speak up and make your voice known.

Oh, we have had reports of seemingly random 503 (Site Unavailable) errors. If you should experience one, please reply to this story with a description of what you were doing and a copy/paste of the entire error message. That will greatly help in our identifying, isolating, and hopefully fixing whatever gremlin is in the gears.

We have not forgotten about replacing chevrons with single/double plus/minus, but had some fires to put out that postponed action on these.

I expect I've left out a thing (or three) — please reply with a comment to (gently) remind us if you see a problem persisting, or if you find something new. it is most helpful to provide your user nickname, the date/time (and timezone), steps taken to cause the problem, and (ideally) suggestions on how you expected it to behave. Reports so far have for the most part been amazingly detailed and helpful — thanks!

Penultimately (I like that word!), I must express my sincere appreciation to the community who has been amazingly supportive and helpful in this transition. One benefit of the upgrade is you should see quicker page-load times on highly-commented stories. Our servers are experiencing a much lighter load to serve up those pages, too. Speaking of servers, I noticed that several of you have renewed your subscription to the site which is the primary way we can afford to keeps the lights on. Please accept my sincere and heart-felt thanks! The "Site News" slashbox has been updated to reflect our current situation.

Lastly, I must express my sincere gratitude to the community. I continue to be amazed at the breadth of knowledge that is freely shared here. Nary a day goes by that I don't learn something new. And many days when I am just blown away. Some long-held ideas have been challenged, and in some cases changed, thanks to what I've read here. Thank you!

Dev Note: Deployed a fix tonight for broken comment links that was due to yesterday's deploy. Alos deployed a partial fix for Flat comments and single comments. TMB will be working on getting it fixed up fully but I thought we needed what we had out now. -- paulej72

Continuation of:
Site Update 17_2
Comments Redux
Site Update: The Next Episode

 
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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by number6 on Wednesday March 01 2017, @04:04PM (6 children)

    by number6 (1831) on Wednesday March 01 2017, @04:04PM (#473351) Journal

    Demonstration of a drop-down Spoiler controlled by one input button; mouse-hovering and changing window focus do not have any effect on the spoiler; made with CSS and and does not use any Javascript.

    The label text of the button will change from "SHOW" to "HIDE" every time you press it (along with the spoiler contents showing/hiding).

    The below code has been tested to work on Webkit-engine browsers going back to 2013; it also works on Gecko-engine browsers going back to Firefox v3 (2012); it also works on old Presto-engine Opera v9 from 2008.

    <HTML>
    <HEAD>
    </HEAD>
    <BODY>

    <STYLE>
    label {
        position: relative;
        top: 0;
        left: 0;
        padding: 2px;
    }
    input#show, input#hide {
        display:none;
    }
    span#content {
        display: block;
        -webkit-transition: opacity 0.5s ease-out;
        transition: opacity 0.5s ease-out;
        opacity: 0;
        height: 0;
        font-size: 0;
        overflow: hidden;
        padding: 5px 1px 5px 1px;
    }
    input#show:checked ~ .show:before {
        content: "";
    }
    input#show:checked ~ .hide:before {
        content: "HIDE";
        font-weight: bold;
        color: #FFF;
        background: #555;
        padding: 0.1em 0.5em;
        text-align:center;
        border-radius: .3em;
    }
    input#hide:checked ~ .hide:before {
        content: "";
    }
    input#hide:checked ~ .show:before {
        content: "SHOW";
        font-weight: bold;
        color: #FFF;
        margin-left: -4px;
        background: #555;
        padding: 0.1em 0.5em;
        text-align:center;
        border-radius: .3em;
    }
    input#show:checked ~ span#content {
        opacity: 1;
        font-size: 100%;
        height: auto;
    }
    input#hide:checked ~ span#content {
        display: block;
        -webkit-transition: opacity 0.5s ease-out;
        transition: opacity 0.5s ease-out;
        opacity: 0;
        height: 0;
        font-size: 0;
        overflow: hidden;
    }
    </STYLE>

    <B>*Spoiler*</B>
    <INPUT type="radio" id="show" name="group">
    <INPUT type="radio" id="hide" name="group" checked>
    <LABEL for="hide" class="hide"></LABEL>
    <LABEL for="show" class="show"></LABEL>
    <SPAN id="content">This text is displayed because you clicked the SHOW button.<BR>
    This text will remain visible until you click the HIDE button;<BR></SPAN>

    </BODY>
    </HTML>

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +3  
       Interesting=1, Informative=2, Total=3
    Extra 'Informative' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   5  
  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday March 01 2017, @04:40PM (1 child)

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Wednesday March 01 2017, @04:40PM (#473370) Homepage Journal

    Noted and we may very well steal it. We haven't had time to talk about spoilers since roll-out cause you guys keep finding bugs for us to fix.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 01 2017, @11:58PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 01 2017, @11:58PM (#473624)

      That css button code seems cool, but badly fails http://validator.w3.org [w3.org] , and so do most websites (SN included).

      What's the general feeling / consensus re: w3.org code standards?

      And why doesn't anyone seem to care?

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 01 2017, @04:41PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 01 2017, @04:41PM (#473374)

    Many thanks for this. If you don't mind, I'm going to "borrow" some of that CSS as a solution for a current problem of mine. JS-Free show/hide.... Me likes.

  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 01 2017, @05:01PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 01 2017, @05:01PM (#473390)

    How does this behave when there is more than one spolier on the page? I thought element IDs had to be unique on the page. Maybe it just works - I haven't tested it - but the (lack of) strict correctness just feels wrong, and may cause other issues down the line. What does the general case look like with lots of spoilers? For extra fun and bonus points, can this work when nested? =D

    Still though, I find it amazing what you can do with CSS3 these days, I've not done proper web development type stuff in years.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by rigrig on Wednesday March 01 2017, @09:48PM

      by rigrig (5129) Subscriber Badge <soylentnews@tubul.net> on Wednesday March 01 2017, @09:48PM (#473549) Homepage
      You don't need IDs to make something like this work (or radio buttons for that matter, using a checkbox simplifies things a bit).
      (Unlike GP, this has only been tested in my browser, so for anything serious you want to either use that or properly test this)

      <html>
          <head>
              <style>
                  .spoiler-toggle { display: none; }
                  .spoiler-teaser  { display: block; }
                  .spoiler-content { display: none;  }
                  .spoiler-toggle:checked ~ .spoiler-teaser  { display: none;  }
                  .spoiler-toggle:checked ~ .spoiler-content { display: block; }
              </style>
          </head>
          <body>
              <label class="spoiler">
                  (always visible:) Warning, spoiler ahead:
                   <input type="checkbox" class="spoiler-toggle">
                  <div class="spoiler-teaser">You don't want to know this! (will be hidden on click)</div>
                  <div class="spoiler-content">Spoiler content (will be shown on click)</div>
                  (click anywhere in the label to toggle)
              </label>
          </body>
      </html>
      --
      No one remembers the singer.
  • (Score: 3, Informative) by number6 on Wednesday March 01 2017, @10:24PM

    by number6 (1831) on Wednesday March 01 2017, @10:24PM (#473574) Journal

    This code is an improvement of the code in my first post. You can ignore my first post and use this instead.
    This code allows you to have one or more spoilers on the same page; each spoiler will work independently of the other.
    The demo below contains two spoilers; you can easily add a third (or more) by using the code-block of "2nd Spoiler" as the template.
    Read the comments at end of file:

    <HTML>
    <HEAD>
    </HEAD>
    <BODY>

    <!-- ================================================================= -->
    <!-- 1st Spoiler "show" - code starts below here -->

    <STYLE>
    label {
        position: absolute;
        top:0;
        left:0;
        margin: 0.7em 0 0 10em;
    }
    input#show, input#hide {
        display:none;
    }
    span#content {
        display: block;
        -webkit-transition: opacity 0.5s ease-out;
        transition: opacity 0.5s ease-out;
        opacity: 0;
        height: 0;
        font-size: 0;
        overflow: hidden;
        padding: 0.4em 0.2em;
    }
    input#show:checked ~ .show:before {
        content: "";
    }
    input#show:checked ~ .hide:before {
        content: "HIDE";
        font-weight: bold;
        color: #FFF;
        background: #555;
        padding: 0.1em 0.5em;
        text-align:center;
        border-radius: 0.3em;
    }
    input#hide:checked ~ .hide:before {
        content: "";
    }
    input#hide:checked ~ .show:before {
        content: "SHOW";
        font-weight: bold;
        color: #FFF;
        background: #555;
        padding: 0.1em 0.5em;
        text-align:center;
        border-radius: 0.3em;
    }
    input#show:checked ~ span#content {
        opacity: 1;
        font-size: 100%;
        height: auto;
    }
    input#hide:checked ~ span#content {
        display: block;
        -webkit-transition: opacity 0.5s ease-out;
        transition: opacity 0.5s ease-out;
        opacity: 0;
        height: 0;
        font-size: 0;
        overflow: hidden;
    }
    div#show-title {
        margin: 0.3em 0 0 0.1em;
        font-weight: bold;
    }
    </STYLE>

    <DIV id="show-title" class="show-title">*1st Spoiler*</DIV>
    <INPUT type="radio" id="show" name="group">
    <INPUT type="radio" id="hide" name="group" checked>
    <LABEL for="hide" class="hide"></label>
    <LABEL for="show" class="show"></label>
    <SPAN id="content">==== content of 1st Spoiler is showing ====</SPAN>

     
    <!-- ================================================================= -->
    <!-- 2nd Spoiler "show1" - code starts below here -->

    <STYLE>
    #show1 {
        position: relative;
        top: 0;
        left: 0;
        margin: -1.2em 0 0 9.3em;
    }
    #content1 {
        display: block;
        -webkit-transition: opacity 0.5s ease-out;
        transition: opacity 0.5s ease-out;
        opacity: 0;
        height: 0;
        font-size: 0;
        overflow: hidden;
        padding: 0.4em 0.2em;
    }
    #show1:before {
        content: "SHOW";
        font-weight: bold;
        color: #FFF;
        background: #555;
        padding: 0.1em 0.5em;
        text-align:center;
        border-radius: 0.3em;
    }
    #show1:active.show1:before {
        content: "HIDE";
        font-weight: bold;
        color: #FFF;
        background: #555;
        padding: 0.1em 0.5em;
        text-align:center;
        border-radius: 0.3em;
    }
    #show1:active ~ span#content1 {
        opacity: 1;
        font-size: 100%;
        height: auto;
    }
    div#show1-title {
        margin: 1.5em 0 0 0.1em;
        font-weight: bold;
    }
    </STYLE>

    <DIV id="show1-title" class="show1-title">*2nd Spoiler*</DIV>
    <DIV id="show1" class="show1"></DIV>
    <SPAN id="content1">==== content of 2nd Spoiler is showing ====</SPAN>

     
    <! --
           * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
           * To add more spoilers:
           * repeat the code block for 2nd Spoiler ("show1"), changing th ID and CLASS
           * names - i.e. Change all occurences of "show1" to "show2"; and "hide1"
           * to "hide2"; and "content1" to "content2". Also change the margin numbers.
           * Repeat for further spoilers, incrementing names by 1
           * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
    -->

    </BODY>
    </HTML>