Right, so this is a pretty bare-bones forum installation - it's basically got subforums, threads, posts and private messages, and not much else. There are a few things I've got to change on a command line (the ordering of subforums, for instance), and there's no way to hide subforums from prying eyes (at the moment - I do intend to dig into the source at some point and see how easy it'd be to add some features; better quoting is top of the list).
It looks reasonable on a mobile browser
Avatars come from Gravatar, based on your account email address.
You can @-mention users by name ( @aniki , for instance) to get a handy link to their (currently bare-bones) profile.
Any comments/queries/suggestions are welcome; if anybody can remember the correct descriptions and names for the various subforums I'd appreciate it.
Finally, it's probably worth noting that this is running on a whole bunch of free-tier services, so excessive use will have some impact but I expect that won't actually be a problem for us at all.
I wouldn't worry about the old forum categories, For the last year or so we only ever talked about Videogames, Tabletop games and TV. Lets take this opportunity to set the forums up the way we want it to be now rather than what made sense five or ten years ago.
Right, that should now let you jump to the first unread reply to a thread. I'd need someone else to post for me to test it myself, but hopefully @Ninchilla will let me know.
Edit: The build failed to deploy because of GitHub access to one of the gems I had to patch for this particular fix. Isn't web development fun? It should be working now.
So, I propose that we simplify down to just four forums which match what we mostly talk about:
Videogames
Tabletop games
Film/TV/Music/Books
Everything else (jobs, kids, should I go to the doctor, etc - members only if possible)
These could still have silly mansion names if you like, but I don't think that's essential.
I've added a 'Recent activity' link to the header which will show threads from all subforums ordered by most recent; I might dig some more and get it to more closely replicate the 'all unread' function from before, or I might just call it close enough and move onto the next thing.
Yeah I like it! It’s simple but I’d happily use this full time if we couldn’t get Old Soc back up.
Incidentally, when you post on an iPhone it jumps up the page once you start typing, so you can’t see the text input box. It’s covered by the keyboard.
I'd kind of like a smaller font size. Easy enough to do on a web browser but the text is huge on an iPhone. I appreciate I'm being completely unreasonable asking for cosmetic features though when aniki's done such a good job in standing this up at such short notice.
@"Mr Party Hat" I don't know that that's necessarily a thing that I can do something about - OS-level keyboards popping up is typically out of the realm of website control.
@Garwoofoo How much smaller? Should be an easy thing to change, I'll bundle it with whatever big thing I do next.
(You should have seen the original font this thing shipped with…)
Font size: hard to say really and I don’t think we can easily post screenshots here, though as a broad guide I think the text on the main screen (the flavour text beneath each forum name) is about right, whereas the font size in the threads themselves is too big.
On my Android, I'd say the flavour text is a little small for full-time thread reading. I actually like the current size, but I don't know how the iPhone is rendering it.
EDIT: another minor suggestion: add a separator between the top links (profile / Recent activity / Sign out). They kind of run together a little bit at the moment. Might just be a mobile thing.
EDIT: another minor suggestion: add a separator between the top links (profile / Recent activity / Sign out). They kind of run together a little bit at the moment. Might just be a mobile thing.
This is a mobile view thing, yeah. I'll look into it.
If we’re doing feature requests, the main page doesn’t really indicate clearly when there have been new posts in a forum, can we get the names to bold/unbold in the same way as the individual thread titles in the forums themselves?
Minor QoL: maybe put a link back to the main page/subforum at the bottom of threads, too? Pressing back (on mobile) just reverts to the previous view of the same thread, essentially refreshing the page but re-populating the "add a post" box with what you've just posted.
@wev That's more or less what Ninchilla just asked for; I'm trying to find where exactly I need to add it, but I'm planning to get the forum breadcrumbs to appear just below the "Add a post" bit.
@Garwoofoo Over lunch I've got the font size down (by about 5%) - let me know if that's enough. I've also started to look at some way to indicate which boards have unread threads, but that's quite a complicated bit of SQL wrangling if I want it to be at all performant.
Right, I think that's everything that's been asked for, except underline tags. I want to add a recaptcha for account signups to avoid spambots (the link has been posted on Twitter, it's only a matter of time) but that should be fairly straightforward.
I wasn't entirely happy with the way the 'jump to first unread' was working - it would actually jump to the post before the first one you hadn't read, and if you were coming to a previously-read thread it would always jump to the last post rather than starting from the beginning - so I've changed both of those to work the way I would expect (and the way I originally intended - I'd used a <= instead of <).
Edit: For clarity, now if you click on a thread that has unread posts, you'll jump to the first unread post; if there are no unread posts, you'll be taken to the top of the last page of the thread.
I don't have any particular opposition to renaming the subforums, but none of those names (or the subject matter they cover) are particularly different from what we already have. Change is good, but this feels like change for its own sake. It ain't broke.
Few minor updates over the last day or so, including a proper favicon, links in emails that actually work, the ability to change who's in your private message threads, a markdown cheat sheet link under post entry boxes and a couple of admin-only bits.
Also, your notification preferences will actually save now, instead of failing silently.
(Cheat sheet here)
