SoylentNews

Here is look at the upcoming changes in August update for Slashcode. We anticipate that this will be deploy within the next week or so, as we are finalizing updates to the subscripion plugin.

• Complete Unicode support for all but 4 byte Unicode.
• 4 byte Unicode support as html entities
• Upgrade subscripion module.
• New themes, CSS fixes, and styling of blockquotes.
• Removal of Jouranl themes as incompatible with new theme engine.
• New Zoo icons, new topic icons, and updated logos.
• Removal of most of the annoying comment and submission filters (needed to support Unicode).
• Fix broken web messages.

The majority of the work done in the past two months has been on Unicode support. The Mighty Buzzard was the point man on this endeavor, and almost single handedly bent slash to his will. The amount of code changes need to make this work was large. All of the slash Perl modules needed to be touched to add utf8 support. Our memcache processor had to be upgraded so that it would not mangle utf8. Form inputs had to be sanitized as Perl sometimes can't determine that what it reads in is a utf8 string without being told so specifically.

During our testing of utf8 we discovered many processes in slash that were deliberately breaking utf8. These all had to be tracked down and squashed. Our MySQL database in not set to handle 4 byte Unicode and would take a major change to make it comparable, so we are using html entities to handle these characters as needed. We also determined that the filter on submissions and comments were not coded with utf8 in mind. As many of these would be impossible to make utf8 friendly, we removed them. This will make most of you very happy as you will see very few filter errors from now on.

We are currently doing some ongoing testing on utf8 to make sure it works properly. Many thanks to Bytram who is heading up the QA on this. We are hoping that when we release this we do not break anything permanently.

Late in July we were given a mandate to get subscriptions working. As NCommander was taking a much needed vacation the bulk of the work fell on me. NCommander had indicated the changes we wanted to make would be relatively easy. The old slash subscription code was designed to give users that subscribe ad free pages as well as early access to stories. The majority of our community did not want subscribers to have early access to post, because it was thought that some users would abuse this functionality. Also since we do not have ads, we wanted to change the subscription length from number of pages to number of days. These two changes should have been easy to do.

The problem was that the slash subscription module was missing functionality like many of the systems that we have fixed. The PayPal payment system was missing the back end payment processing code, so although a user could pay for a subscription there was nothing to tie the completed transaction back to the website to give the user their subscription. Being PayPal this code was not straight forward to implement, and as of this writing we only have the real-time component working. The back end processor, which would catch payments that complete but fail to reach our systems due issues on redirect, is being hammered out right now by The Mighty Buzzard. It is its own little web engine in Perl that listens for PayPal transactions, verifies, then processes them.

Other subscriber bonuses were also added to the code. One of the biggest is that subscribers will not be throttled by slash's formkeys. They will no longer get the "Slow down cowboy" messages. Another bonus was already in the code and just needed to be turned on. This bonus allows the user to see their entire comment history on their info page. This was a Easter egg to me as I was unaware that it was available until I read the code. The final community requested feature was the ability to turn off the subscriber indication. This was a * that was beside a user name next to a comment. It is now a star and goes well with our new Zoo icons (see below). But the indicator status was stored with the comment at the time it was made. I had to rewrite the code so that the check would happen at display time and it would check the author of the comment to see if they are a subscriber and they do not have the hide_subscription status checked.

As work was being done on the swag store with a bunch of versions of the SoylentNews logo, we noticed that the main site logo on the Wiki was a nicer version than the one on the main site. We used the newly obtained logo source files to update all of the site logos with cleaner ones based on the Wiki logo. This also lead us to pump out two quick site themes. Bada55 and Black IcIcle are based on the two colors used in the logo on each #bada55, and #1c1c1c.

We also had some new topic icons made by user rand. We used some of our original icons, some of rand's, and some that I made, to get our new set of topic icons that are all transparent png files so they will work on the dark themes. This made our Zoo icons (Friend and Foe) look bad, so a quick trip to the internet, to find a free set of similies that would look good at 15px x 15px, fixed that issue.

So as The Mighty Buzzard would say, thank The Mighty Buzzard it you like the changes and blame paulej72 it you hate them :).

I just set the minimum story count to 15 on the main page. This will give you 5 more stories showing when the day changes. As we are currently posting around 15 stories a day, the new setting will show about a days worth of stories at any one time. The default of 30 max stories has not changed so you will see all of the stories posted in a day on the home page (as we have not posted that many in a day).

I do have code in place to have the max stories preference setting to work again (testing on dev), but it was originally disable due to cache misses. I need to investigate if the code is able to handle arbitrary max stories for each user, without degrading server performance. I had an idea to have the preference a drop down of preselected max numbers so that cache hits would be better as more users would have the same values.

If you have a suggestion please let me know.

Here is a preview of upcoming changes to SoylentNews that are scheduled to go live on 6-1.

• New user selectable themes, including a Night Mode. Themes are now CSS based and use no images for effects.
• New collapsible comment with the Improved Threaded mode. (Will be set as default for all users that have Threaded or Nested set. You can change it back if you dislike it.)
• New message display that shows all messages in reverse chronological order as a full message (now without the email footer). Also set the Daily Newsletter to be off for new users.
• Removed a bunch of unneeded code that will make page loading faster.
• Static pages (FAQ and About) are now dynamic and show the proper user menu and theme.
• RSS now encoded properly.
• Preferences update to make pages work together better. (Most of the work was on the admin side so most of you will never see the bulk of the changes.) Also fixed a issue with the Homepage Prefs where the reset to default would not set everything to the defaults.
• Updates to the Submissions system. The pages look better and now you past submissions are organized better.
• Login system updated to allow passwords with unlimited lengths and user names of upto 35 characters.
• Slashboxes fixed so that they show properly when you change your Homepage settings.
• Pollbooth updates to make pages look better.
• Fixed issue with long words and page elements overflowing their parent divs by adding word-wrap: break-word; to the css.
• And a bunch of smaller fixes that you will be sure to notice.

While not everything has been fixed we are making progress. If you want to check the changes out now go to http://dev.soylentnews.org. If you signed up on SN before 4-1 your account is already on dev and you can log in if you care to.