The 17S 4 Discussion Thread

[Argent he/him]

The brightness issue is very much resolved, I think. I would still prefer a dark theme eventually, but this makes everything so much more bearable until then.

[Straw he/him]

No friends or reputation tabs in profile.

[Nyali she/her]

Oh, wow, the mobile site is awesome! I'm really happy about it. I wonder if I can access it from my PC and just use that from now on...

[Mestiv he/him]

10 minutes ago, Nyali said:

Oh, wow, the mobile site is awesome! I'm really happy about it. I wonder if I can access it from my PC and just use that from now on...

It is the same site, no matter if on PC or on mobile. Just resize your browser window and make it really narrow, like a smartphone screen and you'll end up with "mobile version"

[Straw he/him]

Could we get a option to follow someone without getting a notification whenever they post?

[Nyali she/her]

Just now, Straw said:

Could we get a option to follow someone without getting a notification whenever they post?

It already exists - check the Notification Settings. They were reset somewhat after the change.

[Straw he/him]

Thanks!

[Nyali she/her]

1 hour ago, Mestiv said:

It is the same site, no matter if on PC or on mobile. Just resize your browser window and make it really narrow, like a smartphone screen and you'll end up with "mobile version"

Wow, so, this is really cool! Between this, the recent color tweaks (small as they were, I think they're great and they added enough contrast for me to not get headaches anymore, especially since I now use an even smaller window for this site), and the recent changes to the icons, the issues I was having with using the new site are pretty much gone. Thanks!

I turned off the adblocker filters since the header and background don't appear on mobile anyway, and here's what the site looks like if I shrink the window horizontally a bit (again, image shrunk to 75% of real size):

If I shrink it a little more, it changes a little more, I guess for ease of use on phones with small screens (image shrunk to 75% of real size):

I'm not sure which version I like better when on the PC.

The only feature I seem to lose so far from doing this is the easy text coloring, but I often did that by hand anyway, and I think I'm going to start using a more complex coloring format in SE games anyway (the one I posted in the general rules thread for SE), so it's practically not a loss at all.

I think it would be nice to have an option in the settings for "always display mobile version" (and I guess the other options for that setting could/would be "always display full version" and "automatic" (the way it currently works), with "automatic" being the default), but might just be me. This is certainly usable as is.

 

One random thing I've noticed - ctrl-a doesn't work anymore on this site. When I write up a post and decide I'd rather not post it, I'm used to hitting "ctrl-a, del" to get rid of it. Now, not only does that not work for some reason, the new autosaving is so nice that the post doesn't seem to go away until I go in and manually backspace the whole thing xD The old autosave required you to click a button to load it (I think? I didn't use it much) and I think it required the "full" editor. This is much better, unless you decide you don't want to post it after all  I guess "ctrl-end, shift-pageup, shift-pageup, shift-pageup, del" serves the same purpose. Oddly, ctrl-end and shift-ctrl-end work right, but ctrl-home and shift-ctrl-home don't. Putting the cursor at the first character of the post and hitting "shift-ctrl-end, del" should work, but if the post starts with a quote, you can't seem to put the cursor before the quote, so that leaves some of the quote box behind.

 

Oh, and I love the way attachments work on the new site! It's so nice!

[Eki]

16 hours ago, Mistrunner said:

ighlight text from a person's post and there's a button that pops u

wOOW AMAzing

15 hours ago, Mailliw73 said:

This isn't a thing on mobile, is it?

It works for me, but can be a bit wonky sometimes. You might have to mark some text a few times before the pop-up shows, and then you can choose the actual text you want.

I couldn't get the italics button to work on mobile though, I had to use bbcode.

[Nyali she/her]

It works for me, but can be a bit wonky sometimes. You might have to mark some text a few times before the pop-up shows, and then you can choose the actual text you want.

If you're on a PC, but viewing the Mobile version of the site, it works perfectly.

Didn't this feature exist before though, except without the pop-up so you had to click the quote button at the bottom of the post after highlighting the text? I can't remember if it was the old 17s forum or another forum I used to regularly visit where it worked like that. The popup is super nice though!

Oh, it looks like clicking on "Quote" at the bottom (not in the popup) with the text highlighted doesn't work the same way... If it did, the feature would be easier to use on Mobile, where popups are often wonky (not just here - I often have issues with "mouse"-related highlights on mobile devices and have to attempt to trigger them multiple times before they work).

[Chaos he/him]

11 hours ago, Kythis said:

Question: Would it be terribly difficult to implement "themes"? (for lack of a better term). By that, I mean changing the 'fore'ground colors.

For example: See how the background of this post you're reading is white, and all throughout any thread is white? Could we have an option to say, turn it 'fore'ground color black and have text in a different color (white or green or something else light), a handful of different predetermined color-schemes, sometime in the future? I know other websites have them but I don't know if they're a pain to implement or not.

(I did look through options beforehand to see if they already existed so if I didn't find them, call me dumb and point me to where I should properly look.)

 

8 hours ago, Master_Moridin said:

Oh hey, thread about the update I didn't notice.  I had sent a tweet about this topic, but might as well go ahead and post here for extra chance of being noticed.

Is there any sort of dark theme option I can set for the site?  I have a specific eye condition and the site being a good 90% white now is making it really hard to even type this.

I'm going to talk about themes in just a moment. But first, I would like to ask you some questions, Moridin. Was the old site too much? The old site used white quite liberally in its main area too. Also, is Facebook or Gmail too bright? They also use white very liberally.

I have identified some reasons why people might feel the new site is brighter. I don't really think so, because really the "content" area is exactly the same color as it always was, but here are my theories. First, that the site has a variable width so proportionally there is more white. But that would have been the same as the old site if I had it be more of a variable width as well. The width might matter depending on your monitor width because you may or may not see the purple background to the sides which cools things down immensely. Second theory is that the green in the logo cooled things down in the old site. We changed it to yellow to fit the color scheme which could increase brightness.

As for themes themselves, and a dark theme, we'd have to create the theme ourselves. It is not on our immediate agenda to create a dark theme. New theming is nontrivial to do. If you change one thing, that affects other things. Changing the white to a dark color is a radical change that would require total rework to everything else. The theming is what took this version of 17S a long time to make. So when I read, "why can't we have a dark theme" I read, "Remember all the work you did? Do it again and totally differently this time." So... try and keep that in perspective. It is not trivial. Though it is easier to theme on IPS4 it is not trivial by any means. We are all fairly particular and perfectionists on site design. Sometimes we need to pad things by a pixel, or something, and we agonize over it a long time. 

Also additional skins add more overhead to software updates and such.

9 hours ago, The Young Bard said:

Now, if I were truly sadistic, this would be the point where I mention that you'd said that awards might make a return under the new update...

That's solidly soon(tm). Obviously I have focused on making this update actually work, and once tweaking is done I can do other projects.

7 hours ago, Mestiv said:

I'd also like to mention that the site is still missing HTTPS/SSL secure connections 

EDIT: Oh, a it would be nice to have facebook application correctly configured to allow us to login through facebook. Currently facebook states that the application is still in developement and only test users and administrators can use it.

Soon(tm) on HTTPS, same as Awards. I'll see how logging in through Facebook works. It really didn't work great on the old site.

5 hours ago, Straw said:

No friends or reputation tabs in profile.

Friends don't exist anymore. ...Okay that sounded really dark out of context.

3 hours ago, Nyali said:

Wow, so, this is really cool! Between this, the recent color tweaks (small as they were, I think they're great and they added enough contrast for me to not get headaches anymore, especially since I now use an even smaller window for this site), and the recent changes to the icons, the issues I was having with using the new site are pretty much gone. Thanks!

I turned off the adblocker filters since the header and background don't appear on mobile anyway, and here's what the site looks like if I shrink the window horizontally a bit (again, image shrunk to 75% of real size):
 

If I shrink it a little more, it changes a little more, I guess for ease of use on phones with small screens (image shrunk to 75% of real size):

I'm not sure which version I like better when on the PC.

The only feature I seem to lose so far from doing this is the easy text coloring, but I often did that by hand anyway, and I think I'm going to start using a more complex coloring format in SE games anyway (the one I posted in the general rules thread for SE), so it's practically not a loss at all.

I think it would be nice to have an option in the settings for "always display mobile version" (and I guess the other options for that setting could/would be "always display full version" and "automatic" (the way it currently works), with "automatic" being the default), but might just be me. This is certainly usable as is.

 

One random thing I've noticed - ctrl-a doesn't work anymore on this site. When I write up a post and decide I'd rather not post it, I'm used to hitting "ctrl-a, del" to get rid of it. Now, not only does that not work for some reason, the new autosaving is so nice that the post doesn't seem to go away until I go in and manually backspace the whole thing xD The old autosave required you to click a button to load it (I think? I didn't use it much) and I think it required the "full" editor. This is much better, unless you decide you don't want to post it after all  I guess "ctrl-end, shift-pageup, shift-pageup, shift-pageup, del" serves the same purpose. Oddly, ctrl-end and shift-ctrl-end work right, but ctrl-home and shift-ctrl-home don't. Putting the cursor at the first character of the post and hitting "shift-ctrl-end, del" should work, but if the post starts with a quote, you can't seem to put the cursor before the quote, so that leaves some of the quote box behind.

 

Oh, and I love the way attachments work on the new site! It's so nice!

You know... in retrospect I probably should have just told you you could do that, since you didn't have max size browser windows. (I was tired, what can I say.) 

Unfortunately it is extremely nontrivial to activate the mobile site "always" as you suggest. It is created using clever CSS that responds to the window size.

[Nyali she/her]

5 minutes ago, Chaos said:

You know... in retrospect I probably should have just told you you could do that, since you didn't have max size browser windows. (I was tired, what can I say.) 

Sorry for being overcritical of the changes. I was just trying to figure out if I could resolve the issues I was having that were making it hard for me to use the site, and it seems there was a totally workable solution, it just wasn't obvious to me at first. Now that's resolved, I actually really like the new site, especially when I'm on my phone. Thank you so much for putting all the time and effort you did into upgrading this site!

5 minutes ago, Chaos said:

Unfortunately it is extremely nontrivial to activate the mobile site "always" as you suggest. It is created using clever CSS that responds to the window size.

Ah, okay, that makes sense. Thanks for letting me know!

[Ecthelion III he/him]

Here is something completely strange and random and irrelevant I found out.

You know how when your mouse is hovering above a post, the Report Post button is black, but if your mouse is not hovering above a post, the Report Post button is light grey? Well, if your mouse is hovering above a post and the Report Post button is black, but you press the middle mouse button (if you have a 3-button mouse), it will turn light grey until you move your mouse, and then it will turn black again.

Thank you for allowing me to waste your time.

[Delightful]

Announcements (unread?) at the top of the page is cool and very noticeable. 

[Dunkum he/him]

On 6/14/2016 at 4:07 PM, Chaos said:

I've removed it for you.

Ah, I see. (Note: I literally never navigate things using that, so it is a bit alien.) Try this: http://www.17thshard.com/forum/discover/content-started/?&stream_ownership=postedin 

Basically with Activity Streams you can set what things you want displayed, and so I just changed the Ownership tab to "I posted in". Does that do it? The Activity streams seem to load very slowly for me... so I dunno, but I think that should do it?

I can confirm that that activity stream thing works for me in terms of replicating the old My Content link after modifying one or two of the settings.  You can also set it as your default activity stream so it replaces the unread content button next to the search bar on the homepage (but not, it appears, all the other pages)

[Master_Moridin he/him]

7 hours ago, Chaos said:

I'm going to talk about themes in just a moment. But first, I would like to ask you some questions, Moridin. Was the old site too much? The old site used white quite liberally in its main area too. Also, is Facebook or Gmail too bright? They also use white very liberally.

I don't use Facebook and someone created a Stylish theme for Gmail that I use that makes it super dark.

I had problems with the old site, but it wasn't quite as bad as the new is.  I think it might be the monitor size thing you mention, cause the purple sides are barely the width of my little finger on my monitor, or it might be that there's just more white than before.

[Wychmire he/him]

I'm new so I don't see a difference. The reason I'm posting is 'cause I wondered if anyone had screen shots of the previous versions.

[WayneSpren he/him]

This is what it used to look like.

[Asperity he/him]

Yeah if themes are as much of a pain to create as this was then don't worry about it. I was merely curious, and was mostly referring to 'stock'/very simple themes but I still understand if they're aggravating to create.

Don't get me wrong; I like this one, at least the overall background. The decision of Shadesmar and an illustration of it was nice.

Edited June 16, 2016 by Chaos
Removing space; you don't need extra lines!

[Argent he/him]

Interestingly, the Load more activity button at the bottom of the Unread Content page works fine until you run out of content. Once I have all the unread posts displayed, I can still press the Load button once - but instead of loading more content (of which there is none), it just goes away and is replaced by a message that there is no more content to show.

This is probably not something we can fix locally, but is a bug with the software suite instead.

[Argel he/him]

Different topic: is there a reason that, when filled out, a user's Website is not converted to a hyperlink for users viewing said profile? I can copy and paste, but it just seems odd not to turn it into a hyperlink.

[DrakeMarshall he/him]

Just logged on and I am loving the new look.

[Delightful]

Someone else mentioned earlier they couldn't Ctr+A, on mobile I couldn't 'select all' to delete a double quote, I had to delete every individual letter and then fight to delete the quote box. 

[Rubix he/him]

Hey guys, I've moved all discussion of the reputation system to a new thread, over here. Please keep all discussion of the reputation system in that thread, and discussion of the changes to the site in here.

[Oversleep]

I had trouble with deleting the quote box (I was on PC).

Also, I have to look for a way to edit all those notifications cause I don't really need to see that somebody has up/downvoted me or replied to a thread I posted into... Also, I have to turn off the sound. Also, I have to stop using 'also' all the time.

Edited June 16, 2016 by Oversleep