Topic: Little things that bug you/me about the forum - page 5. (Read 2658 times)

Thanks, man! I appreciate your willingness to help (seriously), that's very cool of you!!

It's not a funding problem (theymos pays me, and even if he didn't, there'd still be some subset of work, like this, that I'd be willing to do for free). It's also not a technical problem (I mean, it is a technical problem, but, I'm confident that I either have already solved or can solve all of the issues related to this).

Basically, it's a time problem: I've got a lot on my plate, and I'll likely only get to this late next year.

I didn't plan on re-thinking how image uploading/hosting should really work on Bitcointalk, what happened was that I went through three evolutions of thought, initiated by the Imgur issue:

(*) My first response to this (IIRC; it's been a while) was to re-host Loyce's Imgur backup on TalkImg, and then modify the image proxy to use some kind of lookup table to silently replace Imgur links with "equivalent" TalkImg links.

(*) My second thought (months later; again, IIRC) was to generalize my first thought and add a (pretty elaborate) hashing scheme to it so that there'd be no doubt as to the correctness of the "replaced" images. (I think I called this version of my thinking "CIPP" for "Community Image Preservation Project": I recall PMing theymos about it and getting a lukewarm-at-best response, so I shelved it.)

(*) My third (and current) thought is to leverage the very nice properties of content addressability to solve the Imgur problem in a trustless way: I'd basically add a new BBCode tag (called [cai], for "content-addressable image") that would be used to replace all of the Imgur [img] tags with something that theymos could independently construct (a text-encoded cryptographic hash of the image itself, so, something like: [cai]26MrbcYgzHAo7kxxHSVxbtm6NMHn[/cai]). Getting the whole scheme to work properly involves the writing of two new pieces of software: a resolver-thingy that would be on the same network as the image proxy, and a storage-thingy that some members would (hopefully) choose to run on a volunteer-basis.

It just so happens that the way to comprehensively fix the Imgur problem also puts most of the pieces in place for an image-hosting solution that would be basically perfect for Bitcointalk: one that many users (in principle) can share the responsibility for, one that is tamper-proof by design (because you can't change images without also changing their hashes, which is what identifies them under this scheme in the first place), and one that beats the pants off something traditional (like Chevereto) in terms of hosting costs and reliability (the storage nodes could live even without static IPs, much less anything DNS or SSL/TLS related, and the whole design is filled with little compute, storage, and bandwidth wins).

(I mean, there's an elephant in the room, and it's natural to think: "Erm, but, what about TalkImg?!". I'm not poo-pooing TalkImg, and I think JJ has done a great job with it, but, there are too many advantages to the approach I have in mind to ignore. Just like the Imgur images can all be transformed into [cai] tags and absorbed in a seamless way, the TalkImg images could all be absorbed, too. Honestly, if I were JJ, I'd be kind of relieved that the long-term responsibility/upkeep and succession planning for TalkImg might just "dissolve".)

Thanks PG!! I appreciate you addressing the app question, have always been curious about this particular topic!

“I've been thinking for a while now about some kind of distributed image hosting, run on a volunteer-basis by interested forum members”.  If there’s anything I can ever do to assist, I’m happy to do so, whether on a funding basis or learning to do some basic coding if that’s what’s needed here (I have no clue what this would entail, which will come as no surprise to you lol). This would be such a big deal for us in collectibles who are constantly posting imgs.  The other day when using an image upload service it got me to thinking , when I give the service access to my photos , are they able to see all my images instantly , and are they potentially scrapping / saving them as well   Just another privacy concern out of about a million of them atm that I have as I try to clean my act up online.

Cheers

Something related to persistence: the Post a redirection topic checkbox from the Move Topic page should be disabled by default. Redirection topics left by members are seldom useful and mods leave them sporadically. Having the choice saved would be a small benefit.
Albeit it's more useful for mods when moving lots of threads (had a userscript long time ago disabling the checkbox to save some mouse travel and clicks  ).

Thanks for putting that on your list! IMO it's an easy way to a sort of faux conversation style PMs by having the ability to show all messages to and from a certain user without needing to search for a keyword (there's always that off chance you might miss a PM because it didn't contain that common character you used to search for  ).

That's good point. Although the only workaround (not solution) i found is manually click "watch" on thread i'm interested and click "unwatch" when i'm no longer interested.

it's called "hotlinking". no one wants to be used as a hotlink repository. which is why most image hosting services don't allow hotlinking anymore.

@PowerGlove
I detected a small bug that you might be interested in solving.

Based on the conversation about the "new" and "latest post" button we found in the "watchlist".

When we click on "last post" it takes us to the post in question, with the adjustment you made to highlight the post in question.



But, if you click on the "new" button this no longer happens.


I know why, because it is not highlighting a specific post, but the information that is in the database for each user.

But it would be much more relevant in this scenario to have this highlighted. Do you think it’s viable?

Dark theme works well and issue only appears if you're reading a highlighted text.

In light theme, highlighted text works well, even so some people will see annoying. But issue is more severe in dark theme, with too bright highlighted text, depends on chosen color, it would become annoying.

You can feel this annoying issue if you use dark theme and my post is to say, whether there is solution for it in dark theme.

Does it make any discomfort for anyone if there is a light/dark theme switcher? I think that absolutely everyone will be grateful, that's how I have made it in my BT template.

No, I am not discouraged in any way. Instead, I want to thank you again for everything that you have done for this forum and yes, I know what I did is a very small part of the puzzle. When I did it, my intention was to experience the responsive Bitcointalk on my devices, to see how this forum would look like in my smartphone if it was responsive. The only way to test that in real life was to write the template from scratch. It just then came as an idea for me to offer the community to make this change on the forum.

That sounds like a really nice feature, but I can think of so many ways it can fail. To start, what if one of the hosts replaces images by his own? This is one of the things I'd like to see, but the fact that nobody has done this before makes me think the drawbacks don't outweigh the benefits.

When this layout and forum structure were made, it was based more on tables than on CSS divs. Therefore, changing from one to another is really a very difficult task. I've already done this, and it really takes a lot of hours, to understand how each element fits together.
Furthermore, the HTML layout is spread across several forum script files, which makes things even more laborious and complicated.


_{If you ever want to go down this path. You don't have to do it alone.} 

I wouldn't say it's very difficult, but it's hard, yeah. It's hard for three reasons (from my perspective):

(1) There's a lot of subtlety to the current HTML/CSS. That is, in a lot of places, it works well, but it's kind of ossified into this fragile mass of markup and styling interdependencies. For example, it took me ages to figure out exactly the right way to fix this (almost every small adjustment I made ending up breaking the layout in some subtle and sometimes very difficult-to-reproduce way; in the end, I found the right spell/incantation, but, damn, it wasn't easy). So, I expect a serious effort to modernize SMF's markup/styling to be a much larger undertaking than it might initially appear.

(2) As a (kind of) corollary to the previous point: there's also a history-preservation/conservator lens to look at this issue through. I think the forum has a very important legacy, and it shouldn't be messed with by just anybody. It's kind of like if you wanted to have a very important artwork restored: you'd look for someone that seriously knows what they're doing; it would be a mistake to let the wrong person anywhere near it. Anybody that says: "Sure, I can do that, it's easy!" is going to mess it up, mark my words. (I mean, "mess it up" is different for different people, and I've witnessed what I consider to be a total fuckup go on to be praised by others, so, I'm not speaking in absolutes, I'm just saying that the end result wouldn't pass muster with me.)

(3) There's a way to completely avoid the previous two hazards, by doing the visual overhaul within the context of an alternative frontend. That way, SMF is left (just about) as-is, with only minor changes to it every once in a while, but there'd be another frontend where we could basically go nuts and try all sorts of fun stuff (without worrying about either of my previous two points). In fact, I'm pretty certain that I could make it so that switching (in either direction) between the legacy frontend and the modern one would be as simple as clicking a button. The problem with that approach is that there's a large amount of technical groundwork to be laid before it would become feasible (and, though I'm willing to do that work myself, it currently falls outside my purview).

In summary: It's harder than it looks, it's probably not a good idea to begin with, and the work necessary to make it easy and sensible hasn't been done yet.

P.S. Don't be discouraged by my answer, the work you did is really cool, it's just that, when looked at from many angles, it's a very small part of the puzzle.

"Show new replies to your posts." doesn't really do what it suggests. A more appropriate phrase would be "Show threads you have commented in that have new replies" and that's really fine. But there really should be a way to unfollow threads that I am no longer interested in receiving updates about. So they won't continue to show up everytime someone posts a new reply in it. Because I am not interested in some of them anymore. Why should I have to be reminded about them forever just because I made one comment one time?

Before someone says "just click on mark all messages as read" yeah that doesn't do anything. that's not what i'm trying to do. i just don't want to see updates about some threads anymore.

Don't know how this would seem like but it's a suggestion anyway.

We repeatedly have newbies making similar posts as a way of introducing their ignorance about the forum or creating thread for  repeatedly asked newbie questions.

I know there are relevant pinned posts on each board that newbies are expected to intimate themselves with to prevent those errors but they keep making it.

So my suggestion is, why not create a child-board  and name it newbie zone  with an explanation like (everything a newbie would want to ask) about the board just beside as it's done with all existing boards on the forum. And this child-board should be place just next below the Beginners and Help board  it will be easier for them to see there.

Now, the board will contain all well selected  questions (threads) from the beginners and help board that newbies have been known to repeated asked upon registration.  All they will have to do is to  check-in and scroll for them in the pages and read previous replies.

I presume that even the newbies (especially those that want to actually learn fast) will love it that way.
What this will do is that it will help reduce spam from both the newbies and the old forum members repeating replies to thread similar new threads.

I don't know if I was able to make my idea clear.

Then from what IP addresses and more privacy-broken features. Years ago theymos disabled "Show general statistics for this member." and possible reasons can be privacy.

Well I read what he said and was about to tell him fuck off.

But you did a much better job and were polite here are some merits.

Some users want to have dark mode, some users don't want it. Not all forum members have a same demand on forum displaying mode (dark or light).

Some past works from forum members for reference.
Dark theme for Bitcointalk(CSS only)
Bitcointalk Dark Theme
Bitcointalk Dark Theme by franckuestein.
(GUIDE) How to easy change the appearance of Bitcointalk to dark (Dark Theme)?
Bitcointalk Extension - All In One - Available on Chrome store - Version 2.5

With a dark mode, you might have problems with highlighted texts so developers must think of possible solutions with too bright highlighted texts with glow block

First of all, thank you for your contribution and support on this forum, you are an amazing member. I have posted this before but I don't know if you missed it or not, so I'll post it again.

I think that responsive forum with dark mode is what we all want. We want to be able to access Bitcointalk from our smartphones with a mobile friendly UI and there are also many people who want dark mode too. The current template of Bitcointalk is built in a very old-fashioned way, in html tables but can you change that structure and use flexbox or grid? I built Bitcointalk's website from scratch, used CSS Grid and Flexbox, used CSS gradients instead of images and also implemented dark mode because all colors and backgrounds are in a CSS code instead of in an image form.

Have a look at this post: bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5414229

Can you do it or is it very difficult on SMF? I think that there is a demand and in 2024 website, especially as famous as Bitcointalk is, should meet the basic modern standards.

What about something like the notification if someone quotes your post, like it should be shown at the bottom of the post you made instead of clicking it yourself, what I'm saying is it should be in auto active so you just click it and it goes straight to where the next person who quoted your post...🤔🤔

When it comes to hosting images, there are several aspects involved. And they all must be taken into account.

But, you already know that for this area, you can count on me. 

In the meanwhile...