BIKEPGH MESSAGE BOARD ARCHIVE

Thanks for starting this thread. I agree completely about #1, and #2 to a lesser extent. The rest of the stuff doesn't bug me as much, although I'd still like to see the layout and colors tweaked a bit. Erok/Nathan/etc - are there any plans afoot to address any of these issues? Especially the new posts thing - is that something the board supports and it just isn't enabled, or was that functionality removed? I understand it requires saving extra per-user state on the server, but pretty much every message board I have ever used has that feature - even going back to 'rn' in the good old days of usenet.

Ah, my #8 (or maybe #2b) would be to change the display on the thread list from "thread starter" back to "last poster".

I think search works pretty well. It's not just matching on keywords so far as I can tell.

So, there's a bunch of stuff that Nathan's working on. He's also recruited a board user to help with some coding. I don't know all the technical details, but from what i understand, we had to update to the newer forum because of the update in wordpress. with that said, i'll try to answer some questions. things take time, and there are several things that we're working on, so please be patient. I also have very little control over things outside of basic settings and recommending things for nathan to work on 1) Hitting a thread takes you to the last entry. - This should be changing to hitting a thread and take you to the first entry soon. Also, i'm going to be playing with the number of posts before it changes to a page. my thoughts are that they should be increase to reduce the number of pages. Note that this is hopefully a temporary fix as we work on clicking on a thread taking you to the last one read. 2) Signalling new posts by subtle changes in color and luminance doesn’t work. - Agreed. This, in my opinion is a low priority, but it's on the list of things to do. 3) The cheat sheet on html markup is a vast improvement over the past but it’s cryptic for non-initiates. Why not a link to a Help or a How To Edit? Noted. First time I've heard this comment 3a) Can we please reduce the font size for quotes? I just don’t get it. Use just color maybe. Noted 4) Not really sure what you mean. my biggest complaint with the search is that if the thing you're looking for happens to be in the title of the thread, it gets a listing for every post in that thread 5) Noted 6) I've extended the edit time to 10 minutes 7) PM's are being worked on 8) (or maybe #2b) would be to change the display on the thread list from “thread starter” back to “last poster”. Agreed and we're looking into it In my opinion, the biggest problem is the whole not going to the last read post thing.

Can we improve the way search results are returned? On the old board, when you did a search, it returned the first 51 hits. Most of these were unique threads; not always, but predictable. And while there was one broken piece -- I think the first five entries would fail, but the other 46 were good -- it did a pretty good job of helping me locate a past thread. I have not yet figured out how to get past the large amount of redundant hits, especially on recent threads, to get back to something I know we talked about six months to a couple of years ago. Edit: Search on "warmology". What comes up are several hits on that one thread, and one cross-reference to it by me a year later. What I would like to see is one reference to a thread by that name, and one reference to each cross-reference to that thread. Edit #2: Thank you for upping the edit time to 10 minutes.

10 minutes! Stingy stingy! :) Why not 30? Have you guys considered "real" forum software? There are paid and free solutions (free having usual caveats for being free), but most of them have Wordpress connectors. bbpress is probably the worst I've come across in terms of usability and being programmed properly (the same could be said of Wordpress, really). I deploy SimpleMachines on all my forums, but I haven't evaluated the market space for well over 2 years now.

As to changing the message boards entirely, people hate change. I would imagine there would be a whole bunch of other issues if the message boards themselves were changed. I think that if Nathan can find a way to bring up the last unread message in a thread and tie it to the account, not the computer, most people will be satisfied. I've noticed some of the other issues like margins etc have already gone away.

Remember when? http://web.archive.org/web/20121122074429/http://bike-pgh.org/bbpress/topic/hopping-the-gap-tactics

10 minutes! Stingy stingy! haha. Serious question: please explain to me why one would need to edit something past 10 minutes... It's never occurred to me that i'd want to change something i've said past a few minutes, and it's mostly to change an error, typo, or thinking of a clearer way to say the same thing. it also makes sure you think it out before you post. i kinda don't like the idea of changing your post after it's had a chance to get a bunch of replies.

with that said, i can edit any post from any one forever

@erok sometimes on Tag-o-Rama I'll post from my phone at or near the tag then discover that I've made some error or typo and go back to correct it when I get to some place warmer. So 10 minutes might be cutting it too close. But it doesn't actually bother me that much now that I know how to use the (still too tiny, BTW) image button. Move of the editing problems were from not typing the image url quite right.

thanks. that seems like a legit reason. i don't use the tagorama thread. Is the editing feature mostly something that mobile users care about?

I've often edited a post from my desktop 10 or 20 minutes after the fact, especially when I've screwed up a URL or something that is not immediately, obviously wrong.

i feel that most forums i've used don't even give the option to edit

Get a whole new board with better functionality. The one time you have to re-register your account is less annoying than having a board with crappy functionality (going to the last post EVERY SINGLE TIME). The search function sucks and most new people ask the same questions that have been answered before anyway. I know that isn't going to happen..

Serious question: please explain to me why one would need to edit something past 10 minutes… ... i kinda don’t like the idea of changing your post after it’s had a chance to get a bunch of replies.

Shit happens. Typos, details forgotten, etc. People who change their posts in attempt to change after it's been replied to shall be publicly humiliated. Also, if quoting wasn't so difficult in bbpress (I think I'm like one of five people who use the blockquote), it would be used more often and you would be able to see if people did change their post. :P

I need to change my posts a lot. Most of it is typos. My typing is speCiaL. Once I changed a post about half an hour later to tone it down a bit, but it wasn't something that made anyhow who replied look foolish. I think that kind of thing would be caught and as Rice Rockt (who often diagres with me) is correct a appropriate about the public humiliatioin. If this board started having the flame wars that some many forums have, that might change. OTOH, a good proportion of the foolish, insulting or just plain st00pid posts are either made by me or directed at me, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

As to searching, one workaround (with the previous as well as the current incarnation) is to use the Google operator site:bike-pgh.org and then my terms. For instance, to find the drainage grates thread, I would type in "site:bike-pgh.org stuinmccandless longitudinal" and it takes me to the exact one I was thinking of. Aside from that, I agree with lots of what is said above, and I want to reiterate what many of us have also said before, a big THANK YOU to Nathan for his pro bono work on this, despite our griping.

Also, are we re-directing half the links from bike-pgh.org to bikepgh.org now? I'm not sure which was the first, but I've been using bike-pgh just fine...now I have a mix of both and have to login twice... Roll your mouse over some of the links when accessing from bike-pgh, you'll see what I'm talking about.

@ieverhart a big THANK YOU to Nathan for his pro bono work on this, despite our griping. +1

Yes, ++

a BIG one for me is that my read history is tied to a cookie on the machine now instead of to my account. i use between 3 and 5 devices to go online on any given day, depending on what clients i'm doing work for and where i am and having to try to keep track of what i looked at when is super annoying. while my usage case might seem to be an outlier, how many people use their work pc, home pc, phone and tablet to look at the internet on any given day? also, pretty much every forum i have ever posted in, going back at least a decade, has allowed edits. they just note that the post was edited with a timestamp.

Whoa! The PMs just came back!

In reply to Erok's comment: 4) The affordance of the Search function is not obvious, and the invisible input field is too narrow; text flows into the search button. A tasteful border might be enough. Oh, and search still sucks: the Here's the Search: Where am I supposed to type in? I take a guess: Ah, got it! But why wasn't the brown rectangle there to begin with? How am I supposed to know where to type? And, of course, the field is way too small for me to see what I typed. Affordance means that you should be able to tell how to use something just by looking at it.

The other forums I post on let you edit a post for up to 24 hours (on one) and indefinitely (on another). Not that I think it should be pushed that far, but I think an hour was good.

I guess this is an acknowledgement of my own limitations, but I'm usually not done with a post until after I post it, look at it, realize I've made mistakes, and fix it. My posts generally aren't "done" until the third edit. Soviet-era editing, done to conceal a poster's own silliness or to falsify a subsequent post, is just scurrilous and should be handled with snark and shame. I don't think we've seen a lot of that here. I'd like to have the hour, to let me improve my posts when my 10-watt a-hah bulb comes on and I realize, I should have added a link etc. ----- I'd also be really interested (truly) in seeing a comparison of pre-change and post-change Board traffic. I've really reduced my participation because of what is (to me) a degradation of the interface.

ok, i've thought about this a bit. my only reservations were a hypothetical situation from a hypothetical user. actual users clearly want this functionality. 60 minutes it is.

Ah, got it! But why wasn’t the brown rectangle there to begin with? How am I supposed to know where to type? And, of course, the field is way too small for me to see what I typed.Affordance means that you should be able to tell how to use something just by looking at it. ya. agreed the field is small. just didn't think it was all that difficult

On the search: part of the problem is that it's natural to click on the magnifier icon (to activate the search function? I thought), but if you do you end up searching for "Search...". Maybe the script can check for that and in response highlight the search field (minus the 'Search...' of course). One quick suggestion while we wait for the tracking cookie / whatever issue to be resolved. For each topic provide two links: Start and Latest; and go to the corresponding end of the topic. Put the buttons under the Topic title; besides, gotta do something with all that empty pixel space...

For each topic provide two links: Start and Latest; and go to the corresponding end of the topic. Put the buttons under the Topic title; besides, gotta do something with all that empty pixel space. Instead of changing the layout, you could make clicking on the thread title go to the first post, and clicking on the "time since last update" go to the last post. (This would make it similar to the old board.) Then when you get the board remembering last posts again, change clicking on the thread title so it goes to the next unread post, and let clicking on the time continue to go to the last post. Same as on the old board.

"Affordance means that you should be able to tell how to use something just by looking at it." Irony is having to look up "affordance" in the dictionary to see if it's a real word. LOL

you could make clicking on the thread title go to the first post This should happen soon (it's not in my levels of settings). the rest is the goal. not sure when

@Nathan: that is an inspired solution to the navigation problem!

I'd have to vote against the formatting changes that were made yesterday. On desktop/laptop browsers, the margins seem to have grown even larger using less of the space for text. On my Android tablet, it now looks like a "mobile" layout, and it does not honor the "Request desktop site" setting. From the main page (bikepgh.org) there are no menus to navigate the site, I couldn't find any way to get to the forums. On the thread list and thread display, there are no margins at all, which might be a good thing except the text is all crammed into the leftmost quarter of the screen. I haven't looked on my phone yet. I can send screenshots if you want them. Also, unrelated but I seem to be getting logged out constantly, on both desktop and mobile I had to log in many times in one day despite checking the "remember me" setting.

Actual Fail from an actual (not hypothetical) event. I wanted to search for a forum thread on "lock your bike". Top of the page, see the word Search, I've read that's the search-box so I type in the search string, click the magnifying glass (none of which is intuitive) All the results are from blog and website posts, nothing from the thread. That's no good. What are they thinking? Scan the screen, no help. Scroll down to below-the-fold, Ah-ha! find another box, SearchTheForums. If there's going to be ONE search box on a forum page above the fold, then it should search the forums, or forums+RestOfSite. This design is a series of workarounds that you can only use after it's left you puzzled and frustrated, and you learn how to use the site in spite of itself. --------------------- Secondary FAIL. I used the SearchForum box to do a search. My search term, "lock you bike" was too generic so I needed to amend the search. How do I do that? There's no way to submit another SearchForum query on the SearchForum results page. Workaround. 1. Click back to Forums page 2. scroll down to find the SearchForums box 3. begin again

Sorry. Abandoned internal search. Used google to find the thread. Posted a photo and some comments in the thread. Additional fail: Forum is losing right-side of the text I entered, here's a screen-shot. (Firefox, XP sp3) (click image to embiggen) I'm sure that BikePgh staff and Nathan (who is excellent) are not having any fun with this. I don't think there's any users who are saying, Wow this is a so much better experience than the old format. Why are we/you doing this?

I'm on a Win7 laptop, usually view the board in Chrome, and all the posts on the love-your-bike-lock-it-right thread are being cut off. In Firefox, they get cut off at a different width, but same problem. Seems to be OK in Internet Explorer.

On the problem of getting logged out. I had a bookmark set to bike-pgh.org/bbpress. It worked fine until a few days ago, redirecting to bike-pgh.org/mb. But then it started redirecting and logging me out. Every time I went to that bookmark I'd have to log in again. Turns out going to bikepgh.org/mb keeps me logged in, but going to bike-pgh.org/mb does not. Unfortunately, both bike-pgh.org/bbpress and bikepgh.org/bbpress are set to redirect to the latter, broken URL. Either bike-pgh.org/mb should be fixed to keep you logged in, or the two redirects should be changed to go to the one working page. Workaround: I changed my bookmark to bikepgh.org/mb. Now I stay logged in. I see that the Latest Activity page now has links for both "first post in thread" and "last post in thread". Thanks, this is much better! I'm still seeing many weird formatting issues, but it looks like you're fiddling with the formatting as I'm typing this. I see the Become a Member box has just turned yellow, for instance, and it's no longer sticking avatars on the Latest Activity page whenever the screen is very narrow.

I just noticed the same problem Stu described - but only on some threads: the text doesn't seem to scroll properly. Instead of returning at the right margin of the "text window" it just runs off into space. I am viewing in Chrome also, if that makes a difference.

I think things are pretty good now. The new stuff with linking to the latest post seems to work OK. One thing, we should think about starting a new Tag-o-Rama thread. I'm pretty sure there's no solution to the problem with it not linking properly to the last post because there are probably too many posts in that thread.

Hi everyone - some updates from your friendly neighborhood web designer, aka. the Spiderman to your J. Jonah Jamesonisms. Firstly, getting the functionality set up to link to the last post you read (and having it be tied to your account vs. your device) is on the list. It involves some custom programming, and therefore will take some time. Another wonderfully dedicated volunteer from the forums and bike community in PGH is working on that. I'll leave his anonymity in check for now as to avoid people showing up at his door with their phones saying, "Hey, can you make all of the text purple on my Blackberry Flip Phone running Windows 95: The Oregon Trail" type stuff. Enough of the potatoes though, let's move onto the meat.

1) Hitting a thread takes you to the last entry. This is disorienting if it’s the first time you go there. I realize that most threads meander and that eventually the title says nothing about the current topic, but it’s hard when you’re dropped into the middle of something that consists of a succession of “+1? reactions to a four word comment.

Again, this is the primary thing we're looking to get fixed. Until it does, some changes have been made to the main forums page:

1. Clicking the title of a post takes you to the first post in that thread.
2. You can still click the "10 mins", "2 days" ago type of links to go to the most recent post in the thread.
3. I've also added pagination buttons which should prove useful in some situations.

I'll henceforth not address any more of these...

2) Signalling new posts by subtle changes in color and luminance doesn’t work. It doesn’t have to be the old yellow ball but you should at least be able to glance at the display and instantly see what’s new.

Changes in color have been made a bit more drastic for now. More to come with the fix mentioned above.

3) The cheat sheet on html markup is a vast improvement over the past but it’s cryptic for non-initiates. Why not a link to a Help or a How To Edit? You can then explain what each of the codes mean. Also your current info seems not to be regular html, unless you expect us to already know about stuff like...

If someone would like to create a cheat sheet, I'll be happy to post it / link to it. My thinking here is that if you don't know HTML you shouldn't use it. :P Tables especially will not be able to be added, it's highly unlikely that anyone will be posting data that is appropriate for a table and since the forums run on tables it makes it all the more likely you could explode the moon by doing so.

5) This may not be easy, but it would be nice if the server could take the client into account. The current schemes seems great for mobiles but doesn’t feel right for desktops; the width feels like maybe good for QVGA. Some of us do work on actual computers.

The entire site has been "shrunk down" a bit in general for desktops.

7) My old PMs seem to have vanished. Sigh.

These have been restored, give it another check and see if yours made the cut.

Erok/Nathan/etc – are there any plans afoot to address any of these issues? Especially the new posts thing – is that something the board supports and it just isn’t enabled, or was that functionality removed? I understand it requires saving extra per-user state on the server, but pretty much every message board I have ever used has that feature – even going back to ‘rn’ in the good old days of usenet.

We are working on it! Also remember that Usenet was a predecessor of Skynet, and we all know that they took over the planet in 1998 and that's probably what's going on here.

Ah, my #8 (or maybe #2b) would be to change the display on the thread list from “thread starter” back to “last poster”.

I've actually added in the last poster…do people want the original poster to be displayed as well or would y'all rather that was disappeared?

Have you guys considered “real” forum software? There are paid and free solutions (free having usual caveats for being free), but most of them have WordPress connectors. bbpress is probably the worst I’ve come across in terms of usability and being programmed properly (the same could be said of WordPress, really).

WordPress is simply put the best content management software out there. BBPress, on the other hand, is not even close to the best forum software but is the best solution for working with WP as of this moment. IMVHO,OC.

People who change their posts in attempt to change after it’s been replied to shall be publicly humiliated.

Yes, I agree. I'm thinking their avatars should be automatically converted to Ohio license plates.

As to searching, one workaround (with the previous as well as the current incarnation) is to use the Google operator site:bike-pgh.org and then my terms.

This is a very valid idea and Google search can be pretty easily integrated into the site. Having a separate search for the website & the forums via Google…not so much. I'll leave that up to Erok to decide for me.

Aside from that, I agree with lots of what is said above, and I want to reiterate what many of us have also said before, a big THANK YOU to Nathan for his pro bono work on this, despite our griping.

Thank you sir! I actually do really appreciate that. :)

Ah, got it! But why wasn’t the brown rectangle there to begin with? How am I supposed to know where to type? And, of course, the field is way too small for me to see what I typed. Affordance means that you should be able to tell how to use something just by looking at it.

It would appear that you did just that, no?

I’d also be really interested (truly) in seeing a comparison of pre-change and post-change Board traffic. I’ve really reduced my participation because of what is (to me) a degradation of the interface.

It's too early to tell with any significance as there will be some amount of time while Google checks all the redirects and agrees they're the same page, but here are a few comparisons (though I won't use actual #s of visits here as I don't know if that would be prudent).

1. Comparing the past 2 weeks to the same two weeks 2 years ago, visits are up 37.25% and pageviews are up 34.7%. New visits are up 60%.
2. Comparing these 2 weeks to the same 2 weeks one month ago, visits are down 24.2% and pageviews are down 11.86%. The Bounce Rate is also down 10% which means that more people are coming to the site and clicking around instead of just leaving after seeing the first page.

Again, it's way too early to tell anything as there can be a whole plethora of factors as to the changes in %s in any given 2 week period, after 2 months or so the data will be more solid. I can say that with every redesign of the website traffic has grown, and if the numbers above hold up the same will prove true again…though I would again be speculating if I took any meaning from those numbers.

I’d have to vote against the formatting changes that were made yesterday. On desktop/laptop browsers, the margins seem to have grown even larger using less of the space for text.

I agree, but this was specifically requested.

On my Android tablet…From the main page (bikepgh.org) there are no menus to navigate the site, I couldn’t find any way to get to the forums. On the thread list and thread display, there are no margins at all, which might be a good thing except the text is all crammed into the leftmost quarter of the screen. I haven’t looked on my phone yet.

What Android device do you have? There should be a "menu" button that you can click to expand the navigation and choose things from there.

Actual Fail from an actual (not hypothetical) event. I wanted to search for a forum thread on “lock your bike”. Top of the page, see the word Search, I’ve read that’s the search-box so I type in the search string, click the magnifying glass (none of which is intuitive)

I'm not sure what isn't intuitive about this. I could defend my own position, but I'll just state that pretty much every device made by apple currently consists of a place to type text and a magnifying glass (the universal symbol for search on the web).

All the results are from blog and website posts, nothing from the thread. That’s no good. What are they thinking? Scan the screen, no help.

This was a specific request from BikePGH because there are like 10 million forum posts per 1 piece of actual BikePGH content so the business was taking a backseat to the pleasure.

Scroll down to below-the-fold, Ah-ha! find another box, SearchTheForums.

Websites do not have folds, scrolling is a natural part of using the Internet. After you learn how to click a mouse button, you learn how to scroll. I think they teach it in kindergarten these days. I've heard that the government is going to require people to know how to scroll before allowing them to ever say lol. Etc, etc. Sorry, I'm getting slightly more snarky as the night goes on… :P

Additional fail: Forum is losing right-side of the text I entered, here’s a screen-shot. (Firefox, XP sp3)

Please do continue to note where this is happening, should be fixed in that thread now but if it happens in other threads let me know.

On the problem of getting logged out. I had a bookmark set to bike-pgh.org/bbpress.

This shouldn't be a continuing thing; the site is in the middle of transitioning from bike-pgh.org to bikepgh.org. As it does, if you were logged into bike-pgh.org, you won't be logged into bikepgh.org. Once you log into the latter, and once everything is setup with that whole "lose the hyphen" thing, this won't be an issue. I'm not in control of this aspect of the site, though.

Unfortunately, both bike-pgh.org/bbpress and bikepgh.org/bbpress are set to redirect to the latter, broken URL.

Both of those properly redirect to the respective /mb/ site. More updates to come, have a great weekend and feel free to keep any bugs coming.

On the android front, I have a nexus 10. Here's a screenshot of this thread, this is fully zoomed out (100%). I can send more screenshots if you want to see them. It looks similar on my phone (galaxy nexus). You are correct about "menu", I didn't notice that at first. Although, I still prefer desktop layout to mobile layout in almost all cases on a tablet, and often even on the phone. Most sites respect the "request desktop site" box but this one does not appear to. I'm not sure exactly what it does' some tweak to user-agent probably. As far as the desktop margins, even before the change i thought the margins were too wide, and I think others were saying the same... What is the benefit of making them wider and using less space for actual content? I do appreciate the work you've done, thanks! Overall I think the new board/site is an improvement over the old one, and when the last read thing is implemented I'll be happy with the functionality. I know not everyone will agree about the layout but especially on the tablet I think it goes beyond aesthetics and impacts useability.

I get the same on my IPad2 as the screenshot Salty showed above.

"The entire site has been “shrunk down” a bit in general for desktops.... this was specifically requested." Who specifically asked for more wasted space on desktops? It seems like people were asking for just the opposite. Maybe there was a miscommunication? "Websites do not have folds, scrolling is a natural part of using the Internet." I think the point was that if a user is on a forum page, wants to search the forums, and sees a search box, it's unreasonable to ask him to begin by scrolling down the page to see if there's a second search box later on. Could the site-wide search results page have a Search Forums button on it, to repeat the search just in the forums? And vice versa for the forum search results: have a button to also search the rest of the site? That would address part of the problem with having two different search functions. (Ideally, there would be an input field, filled in with the search terms, and two buttons next to it for the two types of searching, at the top of the search results.) Also, I think one reason people are complaining about the search is simply that search boxes (and other text input fields) on the web or elsewhere generally have a white background with a border around them, while the ones here have the same background color as a menu item (top search box) or a page title (forum search box) and no border. Give them black text on a white background with a thin dark border and they should look like input fields again, not other types of design elements as they do now. Also, hint text in an input field like "Search..." or "your email" that goes away when you start typing is normally gray, and becomes black when you start typing.

Thanks for posting that screenshot, Salty. That's exactly my experience on the original iPad and it's very annoying. I did not get the PMs back, but then I was one of the ones that got completely dumped in the transition- had to register all over again, and showed up as annonymous for several entries, so I'm guessing I'm SOL there. It may not be "technically" correct, but the reference to "above the fold" is a good, valid description of what you see when you first look at the page - just like you first saw the information above the fold in a newspaper. maybe you have to be of-a-certain-age to get that, but that doesn't invalidate it as a useful, descriptive phrase. You knew what was meant by the comment. Can't find any option to see the desktop version on the iPad. Is there one? Like having the page links on the main message board list and a way to get to the last entry in a thread again. I don't see a reason for having two separate search buttons on one page. That's just confusing. Thanks for providing more time to edit. Please put this inch and a half wide display issue on the front burner? I do know how to scroll, (I have almost never used 'LOL'), but I hate needing to constantly scroll in order to read more than one sentence.

Site size: It was initially designed to be adaptive to screen size. This made it disorienting in terms of how large it looked, especially on smaller laptop screens like Macbook 13" and Macbook Airs to be specific. We heard from a couple of people, and had the experience in-house that the site didn't show enough above the bottom of the screen (the online version of "above the fold"). We wanted to make the site peek up from below so that people were more willing to scroll down a bit to see the blog content, twitter feed, and calendar. This is the reasoning behind putting a threshold on the size.

The site didn't show enough above the fold (i.e. on the display before any scrolling), so you made the content narrower? That made even less show above the fold, no? Making the page narrower makes it taller. Do you have any screen shots of the "bad" version? Maybe people on the forum could suggest other ways to change it. I think one problem here is sorting out the intentional changes from the remaining bugs. Salty's Android screen shot shows text pushed to the left of a big blue box. When I look at the same page in Firefox with a larger display, I see that same paragraph filling the full width of a blue box, with additional wide borders on the sides. I'm guessing the text is supposed to fill the blue box in both cases. It seems like the wide border inside the blue box on Android may be a separate issue from the wide borders outside that box on Firefox.

You're misunderstanding. The entire thing looked enormous. We were trying to shrink the overall look of the site just a bit. We weren't only looking to narrow it, but make everything just a bit smaller looking. Maybe it's not working? Would you rather it be as large as it was when it first launched? Bugs are all logged and being worked out. Hopefully by the end of the week most of this will be taken care of.

I would like to say, sincerely, that I admire Nathan's humor and balance and professionalism. Especially in his posted responses, which are somehow simultaneously specific, technical, humorous and good-natured. I really admire that and had to give him a shout-out. (that combination is hard for anybody, let alone a code-guru) I really appreciate the stats on usage, that's informative (and quantitative and that just does something for me) and also, very few people would share numbers but it does help me to understand. V.

Thanks for clarifying, Scott. Honestly I don't remember all the elements that were different when you guys first introduced the new design. I noticed the avatars got much smaller since then, which was good. I'd prefer somewhat wider message board content. Right now it looks like it's using a fixed width of 500 pixels or so on desktops, no matter how wide the browser window gets. Stories on the PG use 675 pixels. Around there seems a little better (or somewhat higher even). But all this is minor. Looking forward to seeing the bugs squashed.

The 40 or 50 or so most common posters on the board have mainly gotten back into the swing of things, but I see too many people have had their identities lost. Any idea what caused that? Mine came through OK, but people like srpit and pbeaver lost theirs and signed up with new IDs. Is there any way of linking back up some of the people who still show up as "anonymous", such as nlesgold?

Here's a shot of the thread list from my phone, like the thread display there is a lot of wasted horizontal space: That is on a Galaxy Nexus, it looks similar on my Nexus 10 (with more wasted space), and as others have indicated above it's not just an Android issue but happens on ipads as well.

And, as far as devices with small screens, I use a range of devices from a desktop with a 30" monitor down to an 11.6" chromebook and I don't agree that squeezing things into a narrow portion of the screen helps on any screen size. Here's a screenshot from my chromebook, maybe 1/3 of the width is used for actual content which means a whole lot of unnecessary scrolling. There is absolutely nothing in the greyish spaces on the sides, so it's just wasted. Also, note the embedded image in the screenshot below (i.e. the N10 screenshot I posted earlier which is 1600px wids) is cut off and there is no way to see the whole image aside from right-clicking and "view image in new tab". It's definitely good to limit the visual width of embedded images since I've seen that wreak havoc on other forums, but there should be some way to click and see the whole image (many users may not realize the "open in new tab" trick), and I think preferably the image should be scaled instead of truncated.

You can see the same issue in Salty's Nexus images on desktops too, when the browser window is narrow enough. Looks like it's still leaving space for the column it omits when the window's narrow.

Posts cut off on right side on iPhone 5 in profile view, no way to scroll right for the rest of the post. :(

Argh, images too on the desktop Screenshot of the previous issue so it fits:

testing 1, 2, check.

http://youtu.be/ptJK9pi-WYU

http://localhost/mb/topic/love-your-bike-lock-it-right/page/3/#post-264128 -- bad formatting for the last two posts.

^yep me too.

I like the current setup. There are enough bells and whistles without there being a ton of crap. Simple and well done.

Okay an update on the read/unread posts front: We've made some progress, though you still can't link to the last post you read, you'll now see yellow icons next to posts you haven't read yet. That means both posts you've never read and those which have new posts on them that you just haven't read yet. As always, let the feedback pour in! @salty and others seeing text / images cut off, please if you would let me know if you're still seeing this. I can't test on every device out there but have done some testing on a few Android devices (phones & tablets) and believe this is largely sorted out, but likely there will still be some additional tweaks needed. One question though @salty, what phone do you The site does not respect "request desktop version" because there is only one version of the site which is changed dynamically based on screen size vs. device.

Could the site-wide search results page have a Search Forums button on it, to repeat the search just in the forums?

Great idea, implemented! I've also added a link on that page to allow you to Google something you were searching for and restrict the results to bikepgh.org.

It may not be “technically” correct, but the reference to “above the fold” is a good, valid description of what you see when you first look at the page

I agree but unlike newspapers which have set sizes, computers, laptops, etc. don't and so there are 1,000 different "folds" and therefore it's a bit impossible to account for them.

The site didn’t show enough above the fold (i.e. on the display before any scrolling), so you made the content narrower? That made even less show above the fold, no? Making the page narrower makes it taller.

No, because while we increased the margins we shrunk everything else down, too. It's all sort of tied together.

I would like to say, sincerely, that I admire Nathan’s humor and balance and professionalism.

And I would like to say that I love you, Vannevar! I'm a very emotional person and spent the weekend crying myself to sleep (instead of drinking myself to said state, so I suppose all worked out for the best!) Sinceriously though, I do appreciate everyone's positive and negative/constructive bits. Still working at everything to make sure it's 100% across all devices.

Kinda curious as to the differentiation among "Key Master", Member, and Participant. The first is Nathan and the Bike-Pgh staffers who have God privileges over the site, or effectively so. As to Members, it only seems to be a precious few people. I see that srpit's new ID classifies as such, same with Mikhail. If there is some cross-reference between paid BP membership and what pops up on the list, it isn't working. I guess it really doesn't matter, and I guess I do long for the old distinctions among * people who are newcomers * people who have made a couple dozen posts * people who have made a couple hundred posts * people who have made over 1,000 posts -- or however that distinction was made.

As of a minute ago, a few posts in the "lock it right" thread are cut off for me (as described above). The words just vanish at the end of the grey/blue blocks as if covered by the white background of the page. It's happening to all of the posts on the page, not just the last few... but it's more evident in some. All of the pictures look a bit off, except for erica's at the top of the page. I'm on a Mac desktop via chrome at the moment.

I finally surrendered and switched to Firefox from IE9 (on W7). My user satisfaction went up 768% as measured by calculating some obscure variables with my blood pressure and overall mood....this regularly fluctuates around 200% on it's own...so this is a good thing! :)

^Oh, and I did that last nonsensical post to test Stu's theory. I'm a member but show up here as a participant...why did I bother to test it?! intellectual curiousity, I guess, because I really don't care what you call me as long as it isn't late for dinner (as my grandparents would say).

I like the yellow icons. And thanks Nathan for introducing me to the word "sinceriously". It looks like the cut off text starts in the post following one with an over-wide image: It's as if it takes the wide image's edge as a new right margin. Also, the topic list is getting pushed in somehow. It's not extending into the area I have subtly indicated below. :-) This is with Firefox on Windows.

I'm not sure at what resolution this starts happening, but if my firefox window is small, the website and forum lose all menu options at the top of the page. All that shows is the search bar. Also, at the small resolution, the avatars are super small. Smaller than the text. Lastly, if I'm not mistaken, in the old forums, clicking on the username in the latest message page would take you to the last message, now it takes you to the user-page

@pierce, clicking usernames i think always takes you to the user-page--clicking the time code for the last post now takes you to that last post.

Thank you for the yellow dots. That definitely helps usability. Meanwhile, I've trained myself to type Ctrl-End then PgUp a time or two, which gets me close enough to the last unread post.

@nathan - right side of text no longer cutting off on iphone... good fix. Thanks!

My scrolling problem is fixed. Thanks Nathan!

Looks much better on my tablet and phone now, the text isn't completely crammed to the left - thanks! Although, there's still a bit of weird line wrapping going on, on both mobile and desktop devices. The first paragraph in each post is formatted slightly differently. I'm on my tablet now so I can't easily look at the CSS but it looks like the font is a tad larger and the line length is a bit longer on the first paragraph vs subsequent paragraphs. I prefer the longer lines, the font size I could go either way on.

nathan wrote:The site does not respect “request desktop version” because there is only one version of the site which is changed dynamically based on screen size vs. device

I see what you're saying but in effect you do get fairly different layouts on desktop vs mobile. On mobile there is only a single "menu" button, the margins are much smaller, and there is no stuff on the right. I actually prefer all of that aside from the menu thing, now that the formatting is fixed. But I'm used to being able to get the "real" site if I want it for some reason. PS, I just discovered one cool feature, if I select a block of text and hit quote it only quotes the selected text. I hoped it worked that way.

Perhaps the next site should just be a custom theme built by everyone here. So much nerdy bike talk goes on here that I just log it on my time sheet as general user research.

Both the dots and the "last posted" names are a great help--thanks, Nathan!

I would love it if the width of the site took in to account whether my phone was in landscape mode or portrait. The layout is currently only ever as wide as portrait mode on safari and chrome on iphone5.

On my tablet the width definitely adjusts for portrait vs landscape, but mostly just by making the fonts larger. The margins also change but the content per line is roughly the same (although not identical).

And, what I just said does not apply to my phone, where I see the same thing as benzo (on a galaxy nexus)

This morning the yellow dots were on about a third of the threads with unread posts. They weren't on most of the ones that should have had them (including this one).

I appreciate how things are evolving during this real-time development cycle and I don't mind being a part of the user testing. I like the solution to the search field problem. Better than my suggestion. Here's a couple of more thoughts: 1) Can we reduce the vertical spacing? I can't quite eyeball it but maybe at least 10px? The current scheme makes it harder to work with if you have limited vertical height on your device. 2) Thank you for the "Help" link! One suggestion; also include a line that demonstrates the effect produced. People might find it useful to be able to look for the effect they want. The current info speaks to html initiates. 3) Add "align" to properties? Pretty please? That's really the only reason I earlier asked for : to be able to run text next to an image using "align=top". It really improves layout and readability. I read the board from either a desktop or from a notebook. I haven't tried it from my "smartphone" (or maybe "superphone"?; it's an N4) or from a tablet. I expect to use it from a tablet soon (given that my $99 HP Touchpad died during an update attempt; no more HP for me...).

When I look at my profile (or anyone else's) I can't see the username as it is blocked out by the bike-pgh logo. Also, the drop down menus seem to be all messed up on that same page, can't click any of the drop down items. Chrome and IE on win7.

benzo

2013-02-20 16:18:04

Yeah, the yellow dots seem to appear on threads I haven't read at all, but there's no indicator of new posts in a thread I have read. anyhow, the reason I came in here is because I tried to add an event to the cycling events calendar, and got this "Page not found" page: http://bike-pgh.org/events/calendar/tell-us-about-your-cycling-related-event/

rubberfactory

2013-02-20 20:28:47

Erica- go here: http://localhost/calendar/tell-us-about-your-cycling-related-event/ that should have forwarded to the new site. either way, i fixed the link

erok

2013-02-21 00:08:58

It still logs me out every time I come here.

stefb

2013-02-21 07:26:15

Awesome, pinned threads are back, I dig it.

benzo

2013-02-21 08:05:13

And profile pages are fixed as well.

benzo

2013-02-21 08:06:10

This was discusssed somewhere earlier but I can't find it. Maybe on the other thread about the new board. Anyway, I keep losing the formatting of messageboard threads once the thread page loads. Home page seems to be holding the formatting OK. IE8 and Win 7 Pro Plus.

cdavey

2013-02-21 08:54:15

If there is some cross-reference between paid BP membership and what pops up on the list, it isn’t working. I guess it really doesn’t matter, and I guess I do long for the old distinctions among

There wasn't, and honestly I'm not even sure where that "Member" thing is coming from, but it's definitely not tied to who is a paid member of BikePGH or anything. I'm looking into it but for now I've removed it all together. @Drewbacca & @Steven & @everyoneelseonFirefox - okay the cut off text caused by too big images should be fixed. Please let me know if you see any other issues with this!

I’m not sure at what resolution this starts happening, but if my firefox window is small, the website and forum lose all menu options at the top of the page. All that shows is the search bar. Also, at the small resolution, the avatars are super small. Smaller than the text.

This happens at resolutions smaller than 1000px, you're getting the mobile version because your screen is small enough to warrant it. Slide it open a bit and you'll get everything "desktoppy" again.

This morning the yellow dots were on about a third of the threads with unread posts. They weren’t on most of the ones that should have had them (including this one).

I brought this up with the fine fella who has been wonderful enough to create this functionality for us, but I am guessing that it's a result of us updating that functionality to also allow for the new blue stars (which I just added about 10 minutes ago vs. the plugin update which happened the other day). So @Steven you shouldn't see this again but let me know if you do of course!

When I look at my profile (or anyone else’s) I can’t see the username as it is blocked out by the bike-pgh logo.

Fixed.

Yeah, the yellow dots seem to appear on threads I haven’t read at all, but there’s no indicator of new posts in a thread I have read.

Again just to double clarify, the blue stars are now threads you've never read, the yellow ones are those you've read and which have new replies since you last dropped by.

Anyway, I keep losing the formatting of messageboard threads once the thread page loads.

I have noticed this on IE a few times and am currently trying to troubleshoot it, very strange behavior and I honestly think it has something to do with how that browser was raised. I know I went over to its house as a kid and I could tell right away that, while mom clearly kept the cabinets stocked with plenty of Kraft Mac & Cheese and everyone loving referred to their soda as pop, there was something off about the way dad was. I don't think he ever said I love you, thus the acting out nowadays. I'll let you know if I find otherwise. ___________ And again, I'll be back in a few days to see what new adventures in Nathan's f*ck ups have arisen.

admin

2013-02-21 09:08:07

Excellent explanation, esp at the end! *tries not to snort too loudly at work*

stuinmccandless

2013-02-21 09:14:52

If you've ever been in a meeting where someone explains the shenanigans they have to go through to get something to look the same on different browsers you'll understand what Nathan means about the way the browser was raised. It's all like, well, the standard says this, and Firefox does it right, except for that, but Microsoft did this in IE 6 and then this completely different thing in IE 7 and in IE 8 they do this, which is more or less right, etc. And then there's Chrome, not to mention Safari, and the turf wars between the different companies. It's far more complicated than anything in the "real" world, something like you have to design a derailleur which is compatible with Shimano, SRAM, or Campy, and which would automatically adjust to fit any derailleur hanger or shifting system.

jonawebb

2013-02-21 09:36:40

test

erok

2013-02-21 10:04:01

Firefox big-image bug is gone, thanks! On Firefox there's no longer a focus rectangle around a link you've just middle-clicked on the list of topics (either a time or topic name). This makes it harder to scroll through a list of topics and middle-click the interesting ones, since you can no longer see which you clicked last. (I think it's a general problem with the focus rectangle on links, not confined to middle-clicking or that particular page.)

steven

2013-02-21 12:33:37

Thanks for fixing stuff, it really did help!

rubberfactory

2013-02-21 15:45:27

Iphone5 with chrome Can't see pinned threads and new topic button floats over the subject text of the first post. Iphone 5 with safari Can see pinned threads, but the 2nd pinned thread subject is cutoff, and pinned threads seem to float over some of the lower topics. I'll try to add pics.

benzo

2013-02-22 07:49:33

Chrome Safari

benzo

2013-02-22 07:54:09

Minor point -- on the login page, I don't think tab order is set correctly for the anti-spam textbox.

jonawebb

2013-02-25 08:48:42

Kind of funny, on android/chrome I see something similar to benzo's safari pic, the line obscures the first unpinned topic. And, on desktop (Linux/chrome) I see something like his chrome picture, no pinned topics at all. Also, I am not a fan of having to captcha every time you log in (if indeed that is the case as it appears to be), and I can't recall any other site that does that.

salty

2013-02-25 09:14:15

Too many damn web (non)standards. And I thought Netscape/IE was bad!

rice-rocket

2013-02-25 16:43:51

The link from the list of threads to go to the last message in a thread isn't working properly on two very long threads: Tag-O-Rama and Play Wheelset of Fortune. The site links to the first page, using a fragment ID from a different page. Incidentally, it would be nice if the link to an individual post didn't have to include the page number, and the board could look this up. For instance, right now the URL to a post in this thread ends with .../topic/message-board-usability/page/3/#post-264654 It would be nice if you could use a URL like .../topic/message-board-usability/post?264654 and this would redirect to the actual link, adding in the correct page number. Advantage: permalinks wouldn't break whenever the number of links per page changed, or whenever messages moved from page to page for other reasons. (This happened regularly on the old board.)

steven

2013-02-26 00:14:25

@nathan, I'm getting the cut off text thing again starting with the third post down on this page http://localhost/mb/topic/a-moderately-safe-way-to-get-to-the-oval-highland-park-reservoir/ Currently on most recent Chrome for MacOS 10.8

headloss

2013-02-27 13:36:30

Having to do captcha on every login is far more annoying than the occasional spam I used to see. Especially when the text input box requires scrolling down.

josgood

2013-02-27 16:07:01

+1. Especially annoying when logging in via phone. (I use the stock Browser on one of the cheapest available Android Phones, so I acknowledge this may be an equipment issue. But it's nevertheless obnoxious.)

epanastrophe

2013-02-27 16:07:42

Hm, search soes not work at all. I know I was talking about gloves for Marko82 at one thread. Search for "gloves" returned something in 2011 and older stuff. Enforcement of the 4-foot Law by Nick D 14 6 mins by Vannevar whith URL _http://localhost/mb/topic/enforcement-of-the-4-foot-law/#post-265016 opens topic at the first message and the last message is from Steven with URL _http://localhost/mb/topic/enforcement-of-the-4-foot-law/#post-265005

mikhail

2013-03-03 19:25:38

Just entered a new thread on what seems a new issue, it wouldn't let me add a comment to the thread you described Mikhail. There was a URL in the thread. When I removed the URL it accepted it first time. Here's examples of what did and didn't work go figure? Firefox on XP, logged in under my username.

vannever

2013-03-03 19:36:55

Ok, while I totally respect and appreciate Nathan's hard work, I absolutely HATE the new message board. The message board appears to load nicely, but I have the same third thread cut off issue identified above. The minute I click on a thread, and sometimes before, I get dumped into some format that almost resembles something dos based. I see avatars, but the links at the top of the page are just word based hyperlinks - no graphics at all. Then there is the scroll issue. When I try to log in on my cell phone, the text rolls with every sway of the bus. On a good day I can read the first message in a thread. Nothing beyond what fits on my initial screen load. That just rolls up, rolls down, and makes me seasick in the process. I've used Chrome at home, IE at work, and my phone is an android. All behave more or less the same. Could we OPT to go back to the old format? My board utilization rate is down about 50% since the new format. I just can't use it unless I am at my desk, and then I can only look at it for so long. Sorry, Nathan. This is not directed at you -- just at technology in general, I think.

swalfoort

2013-03-03 19:58:36

Oh, also frustrated by the lag before a post appears. Sometimes seems like 10 or more seconds pass before you know if your comment has been posted or not.

swalfoort

2013-03-03 20:02:27

MB just swallowed pretty big message to"Riding in casual cloth…" :(

mikhail

2013-03-03 20:28:06

I haven't seen the lag, or at least that is no different than the old board... Sometimes it's slow and people make double posts all the time as a result. I've seen the "dos" formatting too. I'm not really a web expert but I think sometimes the content loads before the style sheet (which specifies the formatting). I don't know why it happens, although it doesn't happen to me very often. Maybe some caching issue? I have not seen the scrolling behavior you describe (on android) - that is weird. Maybe try installing chrome if you're not using it?

salty

2013-03-03 23:28:54

I had a really bad experience with search. - as noted before, search finds individual messages not threads. This should really be a search option, but if I can only have one threads is more useful. - once you've found a message, the link takes you only to that message and there is apparently no way to get back to the thread that message is a part of. It looks like a "breadcrumb" at the top but you can't click on it. - OK, so I gave up and searched on Google to find the thread I wanted. But, when I clicked on the link, I was no longer logged in to the board so I can't reply. - so I click the "login" link at the top, and after I log in it doesn't return me to where I was, it takes me to the front page of the forum. - well, at least I'm logged in now, so I can just use my browser's back button to go back to the thread, right? No, when I do that I'm not logged in again, even if I reload. - so, let me copy the URL for the thread to my clipboard, log in again, then paste in the URL to get back to the thread. Inexplicably, I'm not logged in on the thread page. Wtf? - repeat some variants of the above then give up.

salty

2013-03-03 23:41:37

I think some of the above is due to a general tendency of the board to not keep you logged in. On the old board I had to log in once every couple months, which is in line with most other sites around the net. Now I have to do it a few times a week, or maybe even multiple times in a day. In fact if I type "bike-pgh.org/mb/" into the URL bar, it seems that I am always not logged in. I always check the "remember me" box when I log in. Is there something wrong with how the site is setting cookies or something?

salty

2013-03-03 23:50:37

Going to bikepgh.org, not the one with the dash, mostly fixed the not-logged-in problems for me. Salty, when you searched on Google, did you use site:bike-pgh.org? If so that might explain the program you had while searching too. Always omit the dash (until Nathan fixes this, anyway). I haven't seen the DOS-like formatting, but I'm guessing it's because the new site uses a very large number of external stylesheets (at least one of which uses a bad URL, so it's just pointlessly clogging things up). A browser isn't going to be able to retrieve all 8 stylesheets, 12 external scripts, etc. all at once. Every browser has a different number of maximum connections. Go over, and the browser will wait until it's finished retrieving some items before it starts on the rest. Sometimes sites can combine and simplify external pages to fix these issues.

steven

2013-03-04 00:46:43

Ah... indeed if I type "bikepgh.org/mb" I no longer have the login problem... And that may indeed be the cause of my searching issues and other login nonsense. Thanks for the tip. bike-pgh.org should probably just redirect to bikepgh.org if they really want to kill the former. Actually the front page does, but not /mb/. When I see the formatting issue (maybe once a week) it just shows up like that for a fraction of a second and then fixes itself... So that fits with your theory.

salty

2013-03-04 00:57:01

Swalfoort wrote:Ok, while I totally respect and appreciate Nathan’s hard work, I absolutely HATE the new message board. ... Could we OPT to go back to the old format? My board utilization rate is down about 50% since the new format. I just can’t use it unless I am at my desk, and then I can only look at it for so long. Sorry, Nathan. This is not directed at you — just at technology in general, I think.

Completely agree with Swalfoort's preference - can we please go back to the old format? This is no good. It doesn't work at all on my cellphone. Can we quantify what site users want with a survey? Choose only one: A. return to old format with minor tweaks B. stay with new format and continue tweaks C. no preference (I am NOT asking people to answer these questions, I'm just suggesting that if the web forum is "for the users", then let's quantify what the users want and get on with it.)

vannever

2013-03-04 07:32:40

I disagree. I think the new board is an improvement over the old, particularly with regard to search. It is true there are still some formatting issues, and it doesn't seem to hold on to login very well, but I can live with that. Plus, since I'll bet a lot of the underlying infrastructure is changed, going back to the old board isn't really possible anyway. Nathan's been very good about fixing the remaining issues; I think we can live with what is up right now, and keep suggesting tweaks to fix the remaining problems.

jonawebb

2013-03-04 08:21:32

IIRC, was this a change necessitated by a change to bbpress or something and not an optional change by choice on the part of Bike Pgh? So, going back may not be an option. Having said that, what swalfoort said^ I haven't commented on this issue, being not well versed in the innards of these things, and generally tending to work around things. But the perception is that the general bugginess of this thing seems to have driven down use, and seems highly unlikely to encourage mildly interested uninitiated newbies, and that would be a shame. If this change was something necessitated by forces outside Bike Pgh, I would be ripping said outside forces new asses.

edmonds59

2013-03-04 08:25:56

+1 for believing the new board is better than the old board. I think the new board is still experiencing growing pains, but Nathan has been very open to bug reports (via this thread) and pretty good about fixing things where possible. That said, here's what I like about the new board: 1) Pagination buttons under the thread titles at the main page 2) ability to embed youtube videos! 3) direct uploading of photos (even from my phone!) 4) html hints where I can see them And here's a list of ongoing usability issues I'm still experiencing: 1) When I login, instead of returning to the page I was viewing (e.g. this thread), I'm taken back to the main page. This is monumentally annoying, especially when trying to reply to an older thread. 2) unstyled page in IE9-- I saw Nathan's post about this earlier in the thread, so for now I am patiently waiting for it to be fixed. I only use IE9 at work (because we all know that IE is only good for downloading a real browser), so really it's not even an issue for me. 3) persistent page sizing issues when viewing the site on my phone (Firefox on Android 4.1.1). I still see text that gets cut off by the right side of the screen with no way to scroll horizontally. I'll try to send screencaps later. Finally, a feature I would like to see: the ability to reply to a thread without bumping it. Some threads I find tedious, repetitive, and generally not useful to anyone, but I still want to leave snarky comments (e.g. any thread about Lance Armstrong). However, I'd prefer those threads not take priority over threads that are actually useful and interesting (e.g. making the Waterfront into Biketopia). So, having a way to reply without bumping (sometimes called "sage-ing" a thread) would be useful. That's the end of my new-board vs old-board diatribe. I think the new board definitely gives a more feature-rich experience, but it still needs refinement. Keep up the good work!

jaysherman5000

2013-03-04 09:11:33

salty wrote:I’m not logged in on the thread page. Wtf?

Used to be bike-pgh.org and I believe google finds references to this domain. Now it's bikepgh.org. These are two different domains and cookies (especially login ones) are single domain only. Cross domain cookies are considered as a hole in security.

mikhail

2013-03-04 09:29:48

My residual irritations: * Having to Ctrl-End, PgUp, PgUp, on every re-visited thread, then repeated PgUp until I get to the last unread post. I visit the board at least four times a day, so this is almost second nature, but it's annoying to have to, when the old board simply "knew" where in the post to go. * Captcha on logins. I guess if that's what we have to do not to get spam, OK, but it'd be nice not to have to do this at all. I think if we need to get past a captcha to post the very first time, or to get an account in the first place, fine, but not on logins of known users. * I am not convinced that searching is better. I tried to get to the breakaneuring thread earlier, and had to go to Google to get a link to the thread I wanted. But at least I learned about Miriam Makeba, today's doodle. * Page 2 of the thread list still jumps from a week old to a year old, nothing in between (see reference above to the breakaneuring thread). This morning, I hit all four of those. * I still lament the loss of account info for many people. Did we ever figure out why that happened? So many old posts just say "anonymous" where there used to be a name.

stuinmccandless

2013-03-04 09:50:34

Mikhail wrote: Used to be bike-pgh.org and I believe google finds references to this domain. Now it’s bikepgh.org. These are two different domains and cookies (especially login ones) are single domain only. Cross domain cookies are considered as a hole in security.

"Used to be" is not accurate since it still serves pages as bike-pgh.org instead of redirecting. Fix that and the indexing will fix itself.. And the login cookie problems as well.

salty

2013-03-04 09:58:59

^^^ Ooh, Nathan, please do that!

jonawebb

2013-03-04 10:15:31

In IE 8, I stil have trouble seeing all the text - the right side gets cut off.

mick

2013-03-04 12:48:37

Ah, I just found something out based on Salty's post. I was getting logged out every time I opened this site. The problem was that my bookmarks still referred to bike-pgh.org. When I edited the bookmark to removed the hyphen the problem went away.

jonawebb

2013-03-04 13:08:52

apparently sessions time out now. who knew? Would be real nice if instead of throwing a nonspecific error message ("Are you sure you wanted to do that?" Yes, actually, I am.), it said "You're no longer logged in" and--perhaps more importantly--saved the comment that didn't post, so that it could be retried. In response to jonawebb & salty's comments, it's been said here and elsewhere a couple times that we need to switch from bike-pgh to bikepgh. of course, if anyone bothered to use redirect permanent, the problem could be solved pretty simply... (also, didn't this place used to have a preview option, or is that just every other messageboard and forum I use?)

epanastrophe

2013-03-04 17:19:13

I was trying to revive the ‘cars hitting buildings’ thread and the board search just takes you to individual posts with no way of going to the old thread (as mentioned by a few others). I found that if you use google to find the previous thread & copy the address into the browser that has your logged-in MB session – minus the “http://www” part of the address - you will be taken to the old thread and still logged in. If you don’t eliminate the “http” part you end up with some text-based-looking page and you will not be logged in.

marko82

2013-03-04 17:42:45

The old site is using "301 Moved Permanently", as it should, for the home page. Not for /mb/ or other pages, though. There should be a site-wide redirect on the old site, not just one page. This site never had a preview option. You must be thinking of every other message board. And I recommend always copying your post to the clipboard before posting (on this or any site). A simple habit of Ctrl-A Ctrl-C can save a lot of retyping when you discover the board's flaky, your connection just dropped, or whatever.

steven

2013-03-04 17:50:23

ok... now the pinned topics are gone. intentional or not? there's still a gap there where they should be.

salty

2013-03-05 18:56:15

http://thisisareallylonglink.com/asdfadfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdf Here's another one but this time it's right in the content https://maps.google.com/?ll=40.47655,-79.910903&spn=0.004611,0.00773&t=h&z=18&layer=c&cbl of the paragraph

clicknathantest

2013-03-06 08:09:57

Well, let's try a really long domain name, just for giggles. I brought up the page first, to make sure it works, then copy/pasted it here. Let's see what happens: http://thelongestlistofthelongeststuffatthelongestdomainnameatlonglast.com/first215.html

stuinmccandless

2013-03-06 08:23:47

Yep, seems to work OK, even if half the domain name gets cut off on my laptop screen after the first 41 characters. Win 7 Enterprise, Chrome Version 25.0.1364.152, Dell laptop.

stuinmccandless

2013-03-06 08:25:16

Howdy everyone. Latest updates. #1 the Big One On the homepage of the forums (ie, bikepgh.org/mb/) when you click the title of a thread that you've read and which has new replies, you should now be taken to the correct post. That is, the newest thread that you haven't read.

I am not a fan of having to captcha every time you log in (if indeed that is the case as it appears to be), and I can’t recall any other site that does that.

This was requested by BikePGH as the board gets a ton of SPAM and this seems to be the most efficient way, short of hiring a full-time "Mark as SPAM" clicker, to handle it.

@drewbacca, I’m getting the cut off text thing again starting with the third post down on this page http://localhost/mb/topic/a-moderately-safe-way-to-get-to-the-oval-highland-park-reservoir/

This should be fixed, the links that are superlong should now be truncated. Let me know folks if you find anywhere this isn't happening.

Hm, search soes not work at all. I know I was talking about gloves for Marko82 at one thread. Search for “gloves” returned something in 2011 and older stuff.

You're using the site search (ie, top o' the page), which doesn't include forum topics as it would make it impossible to find anything on the main website as there are about 10 forum posts to every 1 piece of actual BikePGH content. Use the Forums search instead, I searched for gloves and found this thread.

I’ve seen the “dos” formatting too. I’m not really a web expert but I think sometimes the content loads before the style sheet (which specifies the formatting). I don’t know why it happens, although it doesn’t happen to me very often. Maybe some caching issue?

This is annoying and it's next on my list to sort out.

@Steven It would be nice if you could use a URL like …/topic/message-board-usability/post?264654

You can do this, the URL structure is http://localhost/?p=264667 where you swap out the 264667 (which is your reply above) with whatever the ID / number of the reply is you want to link to. That removes all /page/ changes, concerns.

[regarding search]...once you’ve found a message, the link takes you only to that message and there is apparently no way to get back to the thread that message is a part of. It looks like a “breadcrumb” at the top but you can’t click on it.

This has been fixed.

I think some of the above is due to a general tendency of the board to not keep you logged in.

These issues are stemming from issues where bike-pgh.org/whatever is not correctly redirecting to bikepgh.org/whatever You should never be able to go to bike-pgh.org, though obviously you still are able to. This is an issue with the host that's out of my personal control.

But at least I learned about Miriam Makeba, today’s doodle.

Ah, then my grand scheme to convert the forums and make the search hard to use in order to help spread the word about Miriam Makeba worked! Anyone who's comments were not replied to, it's either because they're simply redundant and I covered them already, or because they're still being worked on or possibly because they're not going to happen / out of my jurisdiction.

admin

2013-03-06 08:54:18

I am not a fan of having to captcha every time you log in I was spending way too much time fighting spam. I even enlisted several other users to help me. Just think of this as your little contribution to my sanity. i don't know if there is a better technical solution than the current one, but i haven't had to delete one spam post since.

erok

2013-03-06 08:58:23

Since I changed my bookmarks so they refer to bikepgh not bike-pgh, I haven't had to login once, on my PC or phone.

jonawebb

2013-03-06 09:06:40

It hasn't been an excessive pain for me, and I haven't had to deal with "...beautiful making purses for your utmost social group capability..."

edmonds59

2013-03-06 09:07:12

I have the cutoff text problem again on my android tablet... Maybe due to the long link?

salty

2013-03-06 09:24:24

This just started happening: if I am not logged in, when I click on the title of a thread, instead of being taken to the thread, the bikepgh.org/mb page simply refreshes. Clicking on the latest post link worked. Once I logged in, everything seemed to be okay. IE9, W7

jaysherman5000

2013-03-06 09:58:51

I now don't see pinned threads at all in either safari or chrome on iOS on iPhone 5.

benzo

2013-03-06 10:11:08

JaySherman5000 wrote:if I am not logged in, when I click on the title of a thread, instead of being taken to the thread, the bikepgh.org/mb page simply refreshes. Clicking on the latest post link worked. Once I logged in, everything seemed to be okay.

I am experiencing this, too. Chrome on OSX

pseudacris

2013-03-06 11:33:26

JaySherman5000 wrote:

if I am not logged in, when I click on the title of a thread, instead of being taken to the thread, the bikepgh.org/mb page simply refreshes. Clicking on the latest post link worked. Once I logged in, everything seemed to be okay.

This has been fixed.

admin

2013-03-06 11:41:58

Nathan, thanks for the update, and the humor in your response. I appreciated both very much this morning. You even made me giggle a little bit. That was MUCH appreciated.

swalfoort

2013-03-06 12:37:09

nathan wrote:On the homepage of the forums (ie, bikepgh.org/mb/) when you click the title of a thread that you’ve read and which has new replies, you should now be taken to the correct post.

This is awesome, thanks! Unfortunately, it's not working for me on this thread (and only this one, so far). The list of topics always says this thread has a new post, and it always takes me to Stu's post at the bottom of the third page.

This was requested by BikePGH as the board gets a ton of SPAM and this seems to be the most efficient way, short of hiring a full-time “Mark as SPAM” clicker, to handle it.

I'm surprised that every-login CAPTCHA would be more effective than every-registration CAPTCHA. Don't spammers create a new account for pretty much every spam? But it seems to be working great!

You can do this, the URL structure is http://localhost/?p=264667 where you swap out the 264667 (which is your reply above) with whatever the ID / number of the reply is you want to link to.

Very nice. Further suggestion: Have the "#" links at the left of each post use this type of URL, so they function as permalinks.

steven

2013-03-06 16:05:46

I’m surprised that every-login CAPTCHA would be more effective than every-registration CAPTCHA. Don’t spammers create a new account for pretty much every spam? But it seems to be working great! Of course professional spammers simply accumulate every image-to-letters mapping and breeze through these challenges. Fun fact: mappings are "crowd-sourced" in exchange for providing access to porn. I understand that this is a very efficient approach. I also understand that some of the flimsier CAPTCHA services have maybe a total of ~400 images, so they're particularly easy to crack. You might consider using RECAPTCHA which in principle has a non-closed set of prompts and, as a by-product., does something useful. So maybe RECAPTCHA at sign-up and if that's not enough maybe re-entry every n logins? Or at least the first several logins

ahlir

2013-03-06 19:27:44

I've been using reCAPTCHA on two of my sites for a few years now, protecting a mailing list signup and a contact-us form. Spammers solve a fresh reCAPTCHA and send a message to us several times a week through both. (Unlike message boards, there's no hint that anything entered on my forms will ever be publicly posted, but the spammers keep sending pages of links, hoping for the best I guess.) I've been thinking of trying out HelloCAPTCHA to see if that works any better. (Alternatively, I could take advantage of the fact that I ask for a company name and serial number on one form. 99% of the spam has "google" and "123456" entered for these.) Nathan, for the record the last-post feature is now working for me on this thread, but on some others it's jumping to posts from February. Perhaps that will go away in time.

steven

2013-03-07 00:52:11

@nathan, congrats on getting the last-unread-post thing working. I note that you said that fixing that would be as hard as getting gravity to work differently. I look forward to the anti-grav device, enabling us to bicycle up buildings, soon. Though it will be a shame if Western PA cyclists lose their reputation for toughness, due to our no longer having to contend with hills.

jonawebb

2013-03-07 09:01:09

I’m surprised that every-login CAPTCHA would be more effective than every-registration CAPTCHA. Don’t spammers create a new account for pretty much every spam? But it seems to be working great! I have no clue how these work, but being able to see the back end of the site leads me to believe that they would login and spam a ton under one account. There were accounts that would post 15-50 times, even if each got picked up by the spam filter. They would try to create threads, post in threads, etc. There hasn't been a spam thread in 3 weeks.

erok

2013-03-07 09:46:28

Would they keep logging in between posts, though, or just attempt dozens of posts until some worked, all in one login session? Did the old board have a CAPTCHA for registrations? Suggestion: When you have a private message, the text Messages at the top of each page should change in some way to alert you (maybe a color and the number of unread messages). Right now, it sends an email, but sometimes people forget to update their new email addresses here, and there's currently no other reminder.

steven

2013-03-07 12:12:58

Spammers solve a fresh reCAPTCHA and send a message to us several times a week through both. Cool. Something like reCAPTCHA, like all crownsourcing schemes, use a voting approach. This means than each pattern gets presented n times and the majority label is taken as truth. We've actually published on this and found that accuracy starts to asymptote at about 5 inputs. But with reCAPTCHA you probably want (and can afford) a larger sample. What this really means is that the same pattern will show up a bunch of times. So once you see it for the first time (assuming your coders have reasonably high accuracy, which you know because you got in), you have the answer for successive appearances of the pattern. Now, imagine you've built up a system that has ~1k porn enthusiasts on line at any given time. Every time you need a new pattern decoded you tap one or more of your viewers. Think peep-show. The only counter-measure that might work is to drive up the cost. For example, require a sequence of decodings (sign-up, first n posts). Maybe each randomly selected from a different provider. Of course you have to balance this against annoying your legitimate users. On the other hand, maybe bikepgh.com (as opposed to bike-pgh.com) is not quite yet on the spammer industry's radar. We should revisit this in a couple of months. Is human ingenuity great or what? Seriously.

ahlir

2013-03-07 23:04:26

I'm completely in support of doing a capcha (and even email activation) for account registration. If it's stopping people on the login page it could stop them on the registration page just as well. I hate to be pessimistic but what ahlir said could well be the reason for the drop in spam, that they just haven't updated their scripts yet. Should be easy to tell from the logs.

salty

2013-03-08 00:19:59

Anyways, now that I know never to use bike-pgh.org I don't have to log in as much, so the captcha isn't too bad. What I really have problems with is the formatting, some of these issues are old but I think some are new. Text is getting cut off on my tablet again (i think this was fixed for a while but now it's broken again) as noted above. I cannot zoom or scroll to see the cutoff text, it's inaccessible. I think it has to do with the link formatting, which is also odd, there's often a lot of blank space around a link, it's almost as if it's leaving space for the whole URL and not the displayed text. Font sizes also remain inconsistent, some posts have small fonts, some have large fonts, sometimes the same post has multiple font sizes. It makes it hard to read and the large fonts are too large. On my phone, the line length is way too short. I mean I get 2-3 words of text on a line and it's all smashed over to the right, it's hard to read.

salty

2013-03-08 01:15:37

Also, this may be browser dependent but someone else (stu?) noted before that there seems to be an increased tendency to lose the message you're composing if you switch tabs or something. I often go off to research something or to copy & paste a link, and I often (almost always) come back to a blank box now. Even if it's browser dependent I don't remember that being an issue before, and it's something I do all the time. It's very frustrating. The "obvious" solution of copying the message just in case doesn't really work if you're switching tabs in order to copy and paste.

salty

2013-03-08 01:20:49

Can we get the page handling at the base of the first page to work correctly? Once a thread falls off the first page, it's lost to the ages. Separately but related (I think), the "2" link does not go to the 2nd most recent page of posts, but to one of the sub-categories that used to be on the old site: http://localhost/mb/forum/bike-advocacy-and-safety/page/2/

stuinmccandless

2013-03-10 06:53:55

Pagination is all screwed up. If I click page 2 at the bottom of the list of threads, it takes me to http://localhost/mb/forum/bike-advocacy-and-safety/page/2/ instead of what I think it should take me to http://localhost/mb/page/2/. This means I'm seeing stuff over a year old instead of the next set of posts which I'm expecting. I couldn't find this thread. Oh, and I don't think there are pinned threads anymore... not sure what's up with that. I'm on Chrome on WIN7.

benzo

2013-03-11 12:07:17

OK, this is a test. I want to see what the time is on this post. I have a hunch the board did not detect the switch to Daylight Saving Time. As I am about to push the button, the clock on my laptop (which is within a couple of seconds of exact) says 3:20 p.m. If the post says 2:20 p.m., then something in the browser script is incorrectly (or not at all) checking for whether we are on Daylight Time.

stuinmccandless

2013-03-11 14:20:48

Yep. Wrong.

stuinmccandless

2013-03-11 14:21:15

On a positive note, I found this thread by searching "usability" in the "search the forums" box. Hooray for a working search tool! On a less than positive note, I was looking for this thread to report the time being wrong on posts made since Sunday at 3:00am, but I see Stu beat me to it. To complete the compliment sandwich, I no longer see text-wrap issues on my personal laptop (Opera 12.14, X11; Linux x86_64).

jaysherman5000

2013-03-11 22:51:30

On the "cut off" problem. The first paragraph of any post gets cut off at ~71 characters, but doesn't get wrapped until maybe 90? 100? characters. Paragraphs after that are OK and wrapped at ~55 characters. If someone says "Hello" and hits , they can go on as long as they want in the second paragraph and I see it all. (wraps at about 55 characters) If someone starts out with a dissertation without hitting at all, I can't really read their post. It makes it very hard to follow serious discussions, like the bike-share thread. I have IE 8

mick

2013-03-12 10:57:39

The wrapping is annoying. But for some reason it's especially annoying on this thread. Some of the other threads seem to have narrower right margins, and only the first paragraph is wider (but still fits). It's not a font size issue. My (very) vague impression is that using the quote environment screws things up: more and more stuff goes missing after each quote instance.

ahlir

2013-03-12 12:13:18

Can we please get the system clock fixed so that the proper time is shown for when messages are posted?

josgood

2013-03-15 08:55:00

I prefer not to stay logged in to any website, including this one (I actually have my browsers set to auto-clear cache and cookies when I close them). When I want to reply to a thread, I hit the login button and go through the portal. On the old board, a successful login would return me to the thread I was just looking at. On the new board, a successful login takes me all the back to the website homepage. This is supremely annoying, user-unfriendly behavior. Can we please get this fixed?

jaysherman5000

2013-03-18 08:59:56

Nathan, I noticed something that might help you track down the issue with last-unread-post failing on certain long threads. Using the ?p= URL syntax to locate a specific post, I found that it works fine in the Tag-O-Rama 2 thread for all posts except those on the very last page. For those it goes to the first or second page instead. I'm guessing the glitch causing this is the same glitch that makes last-unread-post fail sometimes.

steven

2013-03-18 16:37:46

BTW, minor problem -- when I open a thread I've read before the positioning shows not the first unread post, but the last read post at the top. Normally this does not matter and is sort of convenient since it gives me context, but when the first unread post is on a new page the new page is not opened; instead I see the last read post on the previous page. So unless I notice there's a new page there I don't see any new posts. It would be better to position things so I see the first unread post at the top of the page, always.

jonawebb

2013-03-19 09:17:00

I still have the text wrapping problem I reported 2 weeks ago. It makes the threads where it happens on frustratingly unusable and there is no workaround I can find.

salty

2013-03-19 22:16:08

It seems that new youtube links on the Bike Music Video thread seem to be set to a width too small to actually play videos without going to youtube. They just say "Video Player Too Small". I don't know if this is due to the way the poster posted the video or the auto formatting done when you paste a youtube link. The first few posts in that thread are ok, but after a certain point, all the videos are smaller and can't be played.

benzo

2013-03-21 06:59:30

Earlier today, I had the most miserable time trying to get a link to work. Top of page 35 of the Wheelset thread (http://localhost/mb/topic/play-wheelset-of-fortune/page/35/), I tried to link back to a particular post about halfway down the page. I could not get that link to work! The link I tried to use first was captured by clicking on the "#" under my name. I almost never have a problem posting links; I can almost do it in my sleep. No typos. The solution appears to be to hard-code the page number as part of the link. But isn't the number of the post unique? Isn't that enough to pull it out of whatever database it's in? (Sorry, I don't know the structure, but why should that matter?) I needed both the page number and the post number. If this is what's necessary, then please provide it in that "#" thing that is supplied. Edit: I just looked at the value for this post. Seems to be there. In fact, it looks like this has been addressed before, in this post. Yeah, worked fine that time.

stuinmccandless

2013-03-24 20:07:40

The website is looking great! One thing I've noticed is that there doesn't seem to be a direct way to get to the message board (bikepgh.org/mb/). There's a section called "the Forums" that features current items but there's no way to get to the page itself. I get the sense that unless you are interested in one of the 4 topics that happen to be listed you may not bother to click through. So anyway: 1. The (clickable) header "[BikePGH] Message Board" ought to be on the front page, as part of the "Get Involved" stack. 2. The current-items display might be prefaced with "Latest Posts". (Also, adding posting times might help signal that this board is a happenin' place.) 3. This might just be me, but the Msg Board seems more like a "Forum" in the singular (unless the old subdivisions are hiding someplace). Btw for some reason the "Becoming a Member" and "Volunteer" captions are centered but the other items are left-flushed. It looks a bit off. Make all of them the same? Picky, I know...

ahlir

2013-03-26 13:40:05

I'm not sure I agree about the “Becoming a Member” and “Volunteer” captions. Those two are buttons, while the rest are merely non-clickable headings. The two types shouldn't be made to look any more similar. (If anything, they should look more distinct, and more like buttons.) Agree about the rest. Good points. It's been a while since we've heard from Nathan. Hope he hasn't been squandering his time working on projects that pay actual money, when he could be working on this site for free. Shelter and food are nice, but hello, we've got links that don't work right. Priorities, man.

steven

2013-03-26 15:27:25

The message board is the first entry under the Resources pull-down. I've used that a time or two, and it's easy enough to tell people about via email even when you don't have the link.

stuinmccandless

2013-03-26 16:24:33

Yes, but the list of recent forum posts at the bottom of the home page should have a link to the rest of the posts in the same part of the home page. You shouldn't have to scroll back up to the top and look for it.

steven

2013-03-26 17:01:45

Long-time lurker, just actually signed up for a message board username today -- I can't figure out how to change my avatar. Am I missing something? There doesn't seem to be any option to change it in the "Your Account" section (just Name, Contact Info, etc.) Any help? Am I just totally missing it? Thanks!

virb

2013-03-29 21:32:55

This thread explains how to upload your image to gravatar.com. (Maybe the "Your Account" page should explain this.)

steven

2013-03-30 02:27:58

Aha! Thanks for the help!

virb

2013-03-30 09:59:24

Wow. Very nice. I like how the color coding of the headers is starting to work. Putting the member/volunteer buttons up top makes those opportunities that much more salient. I would still think that "Get Involved" is too diffuse, especially now that the member/volunteer buttons have moved. Maybe something like "What's Happening" would communicate the intent better. I agree with Steven that the message board feed should somehow lead the visitor to the right place. I'm not sure of how to work that in into the design. But labeling it "Message Board(s)" might help to tie it to the menu item in Resources (or, if you want, just call that item "The Forums"; I promise that I won't complain that the correct plural of forum is fora...) Finally (and isn't there always a "finally"?), it might help if the "More from our blog" button didn't look so much like a banner. Maybe flip the triangle thingie to point up? Or narrow the banner? At least use a suitable glyph. At this time it doesn't communicate "buttonability". Or maybe the blog, forums and events section could just end with a "See more ..." button (say) the width of the column. To Stu: I don't see these posts as complaints. It's just user feedback, hopefully of some use to Nathan. Since this website is volunteer work this is how all that usability stuff is going to happen (i.e., there's no budget for testing). It's part of "Get Involved", I guess. Nathan: if you need a beer or two, or a case. Let me know and we'll work it out.

ahlir

2013-03-30 21:00:49

This is less a Nathan thing than a Scott or Erok or whoever-on-staff thing: It would help if the board had a sticky thread that had some basic how-to stuff in it. In fact, I have a sheet of paper I've scribbled some ideas of what to put and in what form. That first post on that thread would need to have enough info to inform, without also being so long or dense as to overwhelm. PM me and I can go into more detail. But it would have helped virb, and I think would help get more new folks on the board and participating. Seems to me we used to get a lot more new people than we do now, and this might be a part of that.

stuinmccandless

2013-03-31 09:00:14

apparently there is something special about a thread's first post that it gets to quote twitter posts properly and the rest of us lowly peons don't. See, for example, the b.rad's post at http://localhost/mb/topic/another-hit-and-run-on-liberty-ave/#post-0 vs. mine at http://localhost/mb/topic/blocked-bike-racks/#post-267252 some kind of documentation--or at least an interstitial "hey, some of your code's gonna get dropped---post as is [OK] or rewrite [Cancel]?"--might've been nice.

epanastrophe

2013-04-01 17:30:00

Will the text wrapping issue I reported a month ago ever be fixed? I'm definitely not using the board as much and that is at least part of the reason. Most of the other issues I can live with but having text cut off with no way to scroll/zoom/etc to see it is just irritating.

salty

2013-04-05 23:56:46

BTW, why, oh why, haven't you made the "image" button larger above the text box? Just make it say "Click here to add an image". It seems like such an easy thing to do, and it would eliminate a lot of "I can't figure out how to upload an image here" posts, which are pretty frequent, especially from people who just got their bike stolen. Please fix this!

jonawebb

2013-04-08 10:08:32

Might have already been discussed, but I hate logging in on a thread to comment, and then getting bumped back to the main BikePGH page

sgtjonson

2013-04-08 15:38:29

salty wrote:Will the text wrapping issue I reported a month ago ever be fixed? I’m definitely not using the board as much and that is at least part of the reason. Most of the other issues I can live with but having text cut off with no way to scroll/zoom/etc to see it is just irritating.

+1

mick

2013-04-08 23:24:40

People talk about there being an icon/button for posting picutres. I have IE8 and I see no such thing. People are fairly clear about where it should be, and there is nothing there in IE8. I'm not just missing it.

mick

2013-04-12 12:42:22

Pagination of time-sequenced posts I have a problem with continuing through the pages of previous posts. When I start on the "main forum page", the URL is: http://localhost/mb/ and at the bottom of the page, the oldest post is 1 week and 4 days old. But when I progress to the second page of posts, by clicking either the "2" or the "RTY" (right arrow thingy) at the bottom of the page, the new page has a URL of http://localhost/mb/forum/bike-advocacy-and-safety/page/2/ and the top of the page displays a headline of Forum: Comments Ideas Actions Alerts and the most recent post at the top of the page is 1year 7 months old. Something seems awry. It seems unlikely that the list of posts jumps from 1week4days old to 1year7months old. Thanks, V.

vannever

2013-04-21 23:02:52