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Hi there. Martyb again with an update of our progress on issues arising from the site update. (The new comment grouping and display code was necessitated by huge server loads as well as long delays on constructing and returning highly-commented articles.)
First off, please accept my sincere thanks to all of you who made the time to comment in the prior stories and/or engaged us on the #dev channel on IRC. Really! Thank you for your passion and willingness to provide steps to reproduce and ideas for overcoming the issues that have been found.
ACs: If you access the site as an Anonymous Coward, be aware that we have NOT forgotten you. We are still trying to ascertain what features work best for the most people and are holding off changing (and rechanging and...) settings until we have a better idea of what to change those settings to be. So, please speak up on anything that you continue to find problematic and help guide us to making a choice that works the best for the most.
Scrolling Within a Comment: From what I saw in the reports from Monday, one of the key issues had to do with the scrolling within comments. We heard you. Oh, did we ever! Scrolling within comments was quickly removed and replaced by setting a limit on how long a comment could be submitted. This was especially problematic on mobiles and tablets.
Display Modes: Another of the often discussed issues had to do with "Display Mode." This can be set in your preferences (for logged-in users) and ad hoc when you load a story.
Display Mode - Defaults: If, prior to the release you had chosen "Flat", then you were transitioned to "Flat" (Doh!) If you had anything else as your selection for "Display Mode", you were transitioned to "Threaded-TOS". That mode was intended, as best as we were able to do using only CSS, to replicate the behavior previously supported by the old "Threaded" mode. You CAN change this. Many have reported that changing "Threaded-TOS" to "Threaded-TNG" and setting a lower value for "Breakthrough" (in this mode, "Threshold" is ignored) seemed to do the trick.
Display Mode - ad hoc setting: For the ad hoc case, just load the story as you normally would. Below the actual story text and before the comments is a set of controls. If you are having issues with the current default of "Threaded-TOS" click on that text and change it to "Threaded-TNG". if you find you have way too many icons to click in order to read comments, choose a smaller value for Breakthrough (-1 displays all; in this mode Threshold value is ignored).
Spoiler: Another popular topic of discussion was the way the new <spoiler> tag was implemented. We've heard you, but have not as yet decided on a course of action on how to update its functionality... Stay tuned!
*NEW* and/or Dimming: A surprising (to me at least) number of folks had issues with how we flagged old/new comments. For logged-in users, again go to the "Comments" tab of your "preferences" page, scroll down a little, and there are checkboxes that you can toggle:
Highlight New Comments [ ] Highlight new comments with *NEW* tag
Dim Read Comments [ ] Dim already read comments
Please give those a try and see if that works for you. Our first implementation of "Dimming" was a bit too strong for most folk's liking - this has been reduced so as to be less jarring. As for the "*NEW*" text, there were several positive comments that on mobile devices especially, one could quickly search for the text and rapidly navigate comments to find out what was new. There was a suggestion that uppercase-only looks like YELLING. Yes, it does. On the other hand, whatever text is selected for display has to be a reasonably unlikely string to appear in the normal course of reading comments. (False positives, anyone?)
There were some suggestions on changing the color of the comment title to flag it as new. This sounds pretty simple, but the devil is in the details. We have some in our community who are color-blind and others who have very limited vision, if any at all. For them, any color changes could be well nigh invisible. But it gets worse. On the "Homepage" tab of the "Preferences" page, there are currently 11 different themes that one can choose as your default. Setting a new comment to have a lighter (or darker) title bar would not work across all of those disparate themes.
Chevrons: And as for those chevrons that control the display of a single comment and of a comment tree, yes we heard you. Work is underway to see if we can replace those images with single/double plus/minus characters.
Penultimately, I would like to add a call-out to Paulej72 who took point yesterday (giving TheMightyBuzzard a well-deserved respite) and worked tirelessly into the night to address the issues that were raised.
Lastly, again many thanks to you, our community, who have guided us through this transition. Your feedback matters. We listen and for those who have been following along, I hope you can see the changes and the progress. We continue to strive to earn your trust and support. Thank you!
Dev Note: Currently there is an issue with Flat mode and viewing single comments such as https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=18223&cid=472653. It just came to our attention and we will be working on it to fix it. This issue will cause you to get a server error. Workarounds are to either switch modes to anything other than Flat or avoid going to single comment views.
Continuation of:
Site Update 17_2
Comments Redux
(Score: 2) by donkeyhotay on Tuesday February 28 2017, @10:05PM (5 children)
One of the things that I've noticed for me is that there is no css on the initial page load. Everything is just plain text. However, when I click on a particular story, everything seems normal. I usually only hit SN while I'm at work. I know my company has some funny business with https sites, and this might have something to do with it. Still, one would think the problem would be global, not just with the initial page load.
(Score: 1) by The Shire on Tuesday February 28 2017, @10:55PM (4 children)
I totally just reported this same thing two seconds ago :) The main site is https://soylentnews.org [soylentnews.org] so if you hit that it will load correctly. Something broke on the "www" version. Usually for companys the problem is the other way around, they don't account for people who drop the "www" portion.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday March 01 2017, @12:13AM (3 children)
Yeah, I think we may just have www redirect to soylentnews.org soon. Lot easier than teaching rehash to behave itself with multiple hostnames.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by paulej72 on Wednesday March 01 2017, @02:19AM (1 child)
It's the Content Security Policy. It is currently too restrictive and does not allow css and other stuff to load if the site is not soylentnews.org.
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday March 01 2017, @02:25AM
Oh, good. It's doing its job then.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by donkeyhotay on Thursday March 02 2017, @07:33PM
Thanks for pointing that out. I have my own homemade portal and, indeed, the link is pointed to www.soylentnews.org. Thanks for the tip.
(Score: 2, Informative) by The Shire on Tuesday February 28 2017, @10:52PM (1 child)
Just a heads up, while https://soylentnews.org [soylentnews.org] works great, https://www.soylentnews.org [soylentnews.org] does not (appears to be missing a stylesheet?). It's grovy to drop the useless "www" but you might want to put in a redirect from www to the main site to prevent a corrupt page from appearing.
cheers!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 01 2017, @03:27PM
happens here as well... for 3?ish days now. as described by op.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Wednesday March 01 2017, @12:11AM (5 children)
"Select all" has disappeared from messages.pl, and now I have to tick all the checkboxes myself like a chump!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday March 01 2017, @12:15AM (4 children)
That bit is still javascript. Can't change the state of a checkbox via CSS, unfortunately.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday March 01 2017, @02:41PM (2 children)
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday March 01 2017, @04:35PM (1 child)
For the wee little bits we do? Not really.
I have no idea what to tell you, man. It's a "cannot reproduce" for me at this point because it worked fine when I used it this morning. Got details so we can go about trying to reproduce it?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday March 01 2017, @06:21PM
I have no idea what to tell you, man. It's a "cannot reproduce" for me at this point because it worked fine when I used it this morning. Got details so we can go about trying to reproduce it?
Safari, Mac OS X, the button is simply gone. I've just deleted all of my messages one at a time, otherwise I'd look at the generated page.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Wednesday March 01 2017, @04:53PM
I've got Javascript enabled. There's no button where once there was.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Wednesday March 01 2017, @12:39AM (4 children)
The FAQ says
Everyday each eligible moderator is given 5 mod points to play with. Each comment they moderate deducts a point. When they run out of points, they are done moderating until 00:10 UTC when mod points are regenerated.
-- /meta/faq.pl?op=moderation [soylentnews.org]
I've also been seeing messages saying "You get 5 points per day, given out at 00:10 UTC." However, that didn't happen for me a few minutes ago--I got no points. It happened the day before, but not at 00:10. By moderating right at 00:10 I used to be able to get a 500 error page--very cool!
I tried to moderate as "off topic" a comment that was already moderated as "spam" with a score of -1.
/comments.pl?sid=18218&cid=472532&mode=threadtos&page=1&noupdate=1#comment_472532 [soylentnews.org]
What I expected to happen was that the moderation wouldn't change, that I would see an error message, and that I wouldn't lose the point. What actually happened was that the moderation didn't change, I saw no error message, and the footer at the bottom of the story (above the comments) showed I hadn't lost the point. However, after I moderated another comment, I saw that two points had been used up.
I'm not seeing the messages telling me about successful attempts at moderation. They used to appear at the top of the page and would inform me of which comment I'd moderated and what type of moderation it was.
(Score: 2) by paulej72 on Wednesday March 01 2017, @02:28AM
The moderation success messages were removed as we now return you to the comment you just modded. I can't remember what we did for error messages. I'll need to look that up.
We will try to see if your modding of a -1 was a bug. The correct outcome should have been no mod with no point spent, but as many things as we changed over the years, there easily could be an bug.
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday March 01 2017, @02:32AM (2 children)
Yup, that had to go to redirect you back to the comment you just moderated. We argued it over and decided not having to scroll or open a new tab was worth way more than messages that hardly anyone actually read.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday March 01 2017, @02:33AM
Damn, ninja'd by da boss.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by paulej72 on Wednesday March 01 2017, @12:02PM
I think I figured out a CSS way to post the messages as window with high z-index that would float above the page. Simple click would dismiss. This would take some work, but if I can make it happen, it would be great for many error messages.
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 5, Interesting) by engblom on Wednesday March 01 2017, @05:50AM
The way news on the main page overlap with "Yesterday's News" is the most annoying feature of Soylentnews. Because of this, I most of the time skip reading older news because I do not want to read twice through the headings.
I would have wanted this far more than any of the improvements we have seen during the years.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Wednesday March 01 2017, @07:08AM (1 child)
I tried to view a comment I'd made; it's the first one in this topic.
/article.pl?sid=17/02/28/2320249 [soylentnews.org]
The link from the comment ID number goes to this page, which normally would display the sotry, with the comment below it, and below the comment a table showing the moderation, and finally below that, others' comments made in reply. Instead, none of that appears, just the boiler-plate that goes on every page.
/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=18240&commentsort=&mode=&threshold=&highlightthresh=&page=1&cid=473207#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
http://www.webcitation.org/6odGnISAr [webcitation.org]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday March 01 2017, @01:12PM
&mode= is likely the problem there. On the to-fix list it goes.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday March 01 2017, @10:34AM (10 children)
Bug report time. When I submitted this comment [soylentnews.org] I was taken to a white background page titled "200 OK" with the following:
Around the same time, everything aside from the #article/#articles and #commentform disappeared. So all side menus and nav elements disappeared. Something similar happens on the home page. This has happened to me several times in the past week or so, including before the update went live I think. It is temporary.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday March 01 2017, @10:36AM
Nav elements disappeared again before I wrote the bug report comment and then I got the 200 OK page, so these two issues are definitely linked.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday March 01 2017, @10:37AM
URL of the blank page is https://soylentnews.org/meta/comments.pl#post_comment [soylentnews.org] or https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl#post_comment [soylentnews.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday March 01 2017, @10:40AM
When you are viewing article.pl during this issue, everything goes flat. There is no indentation for nested comments.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by paulej72 on Wednesday March 01 2017, @12:08PM (6 children)
What story were you in and what comment were you replying to. The link to the comment you gave is giving me a blank screen. I am not sure why it is giving me that, but I think I have an idea.
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday March 01 2017, @01:06PM (5 children)
Hitting the Parent button on your comment caused a new error for me:
But I can't replicate the bug, because when I went back to this article, clicked page 2, and clicked your comment ID, I got a blank page here [soylentnews.org].
As for the bugs I mentioned, it was on this article and the Gamers Get Good [soylentnews.org] one. I don't think it was specific to any article.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday March 01 2017, @01:07PM (2 children)
And another thing, when you reply to a comment on page 2, you are returned to page 1. Not sure if that is the intended behavior.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday March 01 2017, @01:08PM (1 child)
But it didn't happen just now, so I guess I couldn't replicate that one either...
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by paulej72 on Wednesday March 01 2017, @03:28PM
Yesterday's update fixed this issue, but probably caused the other issue.
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 2) by paulej72 on Wednesday March 01 2017, @03:27PM (1 child)
I see the issue, the urls are getting buggered. Not sure why though. I'll investigate to night. It probably has to do with the fixes I deployed yesterday.
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 2) by paulej72 on Wednesday March 01 2017, @03:37PM
Found the bug. It will be fixed tonight.
Team Leader for SN Development
(Score: 2) by number6 on Wednesday March 01 2017, @02:30PM
Demonstration of a drop-down Spoiler controlled by one input button; mouse-hovering and viewport focus states do not have any effect; made with pure CSS and and does not use 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.
Copy this to your desktop and run it in your browser for an instant demo: