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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
(Score: 5, Interesting) by WizardFusion on Wednesday March 01 2017, @04:42PM (10 children)
One comment that someone made quite a while ago, that I agree with, is that we need a different title for logged in (registered) users that want to post anonymously. Something like "Registered User". That way we can differentiate between the unwashed ACs and the registered ACs.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday March 01 2017, @04:48PM (7 children)
I was thinking giving ACs a truncated sha256 hash of the story id and their ip address. That way you can tell which AC is replying to you if you started a conversation with one in a story but the next story they're producing a completely different hash.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Wednesday March 01 2017, @04:58PM
I really like this idea.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Wednesday March 01 2017, @05:12PM
Part of me thinks we might want to do something like 4chan tripcodes if we want to go down this road.
Still always moving
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 01 2017, @05:22PM (1 child)
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/4807 [torproject.org]
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday March 01 2017, @07:47PM
"registered coward 001", with the counter incrementing per user and resetting per story.
Might confuse newbies.
Maybe the hash of the story and the username...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 01 2017, @09:03PM
Instead of the regular story ID, use a per-story nonce/salt that gets deleted/destroyed/overwritten as soon as the story is no longer open for commenting.
Throw browser identification into the hash, helping to avoid collisions and make mapping from hash to IP more difficult.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Wednesday March 01 2017, @09:12PM
That would effectively expose the IP address, as you'd just go through all available addresses (just 32 bits, unless you are on IPv6) and calculate the hash with that (the story ID is no secret, after all).
On the other hand, an IP isn't a very reliable way to identify a poster. On one hand, several people might post from the same IP (e.g. because they are behind a firewall), on the other hand one and the same person may post from different IPs (VPN, TOR).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 01 2017, @11:51PM
Modem reset = new IP addr.
Work, stores, restaurants, library, etc., all = different IP address.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by DECbot on Wednesday March 01 2017, @05:41PM
How about "Registered Coward"?
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 5, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Wednesday March 01 2017, @11:46PM
One comment that someone made quite a while ago, that I agree with, is that we need a different title for logged in (registered) users that want to post anonymously. Something like "Registered User". That way we can differentiate between the unwashed ACs and the registered ACs.
I disagree. I think ACs should be ACs, regardless.
What's the value in separating out registered users posting as AC? If theyt wanted to be known as a registered user, they'd post under their own name, IMHO.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr