Thread: Major Forum Changes Ahead

It's been a long time since I've visited the site... I wish it were more active, instead of the Facebook group(s) personally. Ben, I'm glad to see you're giving it some much needed attention!

Do you have a timeline for when the User CP will be live? My main reasoning for visiting was just to change my password, but it appears that the user Settings is still not enabled. No rush, I know it's a lot of work. Now that I see this is actively being worked on, I'll visit more regularly to check out the updates and hopefully new posts.

Edit: Just found a page or two back where you had the password reset/recovery page as one of your priorities, I had missed that previously. Keep chugging along as you can.

It's good to see you Nathan. You have a legitimate question and I'm glad you asked it here.
I'm still working on the proper password change feature, but PLEASE feel welcome to use this work-around in the mean time:



Assuming you have access to your e-mail account on file with the forum, you can log out, go to that link above, and go through the password reset procedure. It should let you set a new password of your choosing. Let me know if there are any problems. It's had limited testing.

Update

URLs (and e-mail addresses) posted in threads and private messages without URL tags will automatically get URL tags applied to them now (like we used to have).
In other words, web site addresses will automatically turn into click-able hyperlinks.

Not only that, but the title of the destination page will be used as the link text if a title is found. This even works for private sections of the forum. If a user links to a section of the forum they have access to, the title will be looked up. This might not seem like a big deal, but it was tough to figure out how to get it working.
This seemingly simple feature has lots of "gotchas" and it took all weekend to work through, with one major hiccup and a couple smaller stumbling blocks. I wasn't expecting it to take nearly this much time, but it was well spent IMO. We needed this.

If a URL happens to be surrounded by IMG or VIDEO tags, or any other tag, it won't be auto-linked obviously. And when a post is edited, the linking stays, and double links are avoided. Again, all very technical things I had to get working.

As a consequence of this work, if you go back and edit a post you've made with URLs that aren't linked, they will automatically get linked if you just save the post again without doing anything. If you absolutely do not want a URL to be linked, surround it with CODE tags as you would anything else.

While I was working on this, I noticed that post and PM previews did not preview emoji properly, so I fixed that while I was in there.

Here are a few examples or URLs auto-linking. If you see issues with this in your travels, please let me know.

test.email@nodomain.com

test.email@nodomain.com

slashdot.org

Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters

http://slashdot.org

Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters

https://slashdot.org

Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters

www.sr20-forum.com

SR20 Community Forum - The Dash

http://www.sr20-forum.com

SR20 Community Forum - The Dash

https://www.sr20-forum.com

SR20 Community Forum - The Dash

https://www.sr20-forum.com/new_posts.php

New Posts

https://www.sr20-forum.com/sentra-se-r/!37591-what-did-you-do-to-your-b13-today.html

What Did You Do To Your B13 Today?

https://www.sr20-forum.com/music/!12195-what-are-you-listening-to.html

What are you listening to.

https://www.sr20-forum.com/server-news/!77169-major-forum-changes-ahead.html?post_id=1045473#post!1045473

Major Forum Changes Ahead

https://www.youtube.com

YouTube

Damn, I just keep finding BBC that I haven't sorted yet. I need to get TABLE (and associated) working, but it shouldn't take long at all. Here's an extreme example: BMW Z3 rear shock mount options (all inclusive).

Update

I got TABLE tags working. It actually uncovered an issue with the BBC parsing which I had to figure out a fix for. Basically newlines were being inserted where they shouldn't, and that made tables (and to a lesser extent, lists) display with way too many newlines in and around them. Sorting that out, I also found many places where I forgot to get emoji working, mostly in PMs and signatures.

For an example of tables in action, see the thread linked in the post above.

Now that I've sorted all that out I should be able to focus on more important things.

Update

I've just noticed e-mails originating from the site don't seem to arrive properly. This means new user registration won't work, password recovery won't work, and members won't get notified of new PMs.
I'm not sure how long this has been going on, but it's been at least 2 days, possibly a good bit longer.
I've been working on it all morning, and have a help ticket into our web host now to get this sorted.
Sorry for the trouble, hopefully I'll have better news soon.

Edit: It turns out e-mails were working this whole time. I'd actually changed my own user account's e-mail address a while back to test something out, and I never changed it back. So I wasn't getting e-mails, and I assumed no one else was too. Turns out e-mails were working just fine. Whoops.

Update

For a while now you could see all threads started by a user by visiting their profile page and clicking the "View Forum Threads" link. For example, you'd get something like this: all Kong's threads.
However, the "View Forum Posts" link right above it did not work. I got that feature working tonight. Here's an example: all Kong's posts.

This is actually a big deal, and was very important to implement. This is the first implementation of post summary display, which is essential to getting search to work. I'll say that again. This is the first major step I've taken to directly implement the search feature. There are other building blocks in place already that I'll be using too obviously, but this was sort of the last stumbling block before I could work on the meat and potatoes of search.

The feature isn't perfect. I saw in testing that there are even more BBC tags I still need to implement (EMAIL is one off the top of my head). Since they don't exist yet, the BBC parser doesn't know to remove them from post summaries, so they show up. That'll just have to do for now. The larger issue with the feature is that it is not nearly a fast as I'd like it to be. If a user has less than 3,000 posts or so, it's fast enough. No one would likely notice an issue. But if you check a user with over 20,000 posts like me, the pages take A LONG time and use A LOT of resources to load. I could spend a bunch of time right now trying to address that issue, but I feel my time is better spent working on other things. I'm sure most of you would agree.

I'm sorry there haven't been more updates lately. This feature actually took the entire month to implement. The bulk of the work was done weeks ago, but I had to take some time off to clear my head and the final hurdle of this feature. I took a break (which almost always works to help me come up with coding solutions) to do a bunch of yard work that became top priority. I'm still in the middle of that yard work (building a retaining wall, and a "catio") so don't expect lots of new work in the near future, but I'm still plugging away at it, and eventually I'll get more and more free time.

Cheers!

Big time step! Awesome!

Thanks Ben for all the hard work, been a while since I last visited the forum. Glad it's still alive and kicking.

Anyone has issues changing passwords? I don't find an option to change it and reset doesn't seem to be working for me.

Thanks for the kind words Nicoxis.
Right now, this is the best, and only automatic way to change your password:


If that doesn't work, let me know which step is broken. Are you able to complete the reset form? Did you get an e-mail with further instructions? Does clicking the link in the e-mail take you somewhere where you can input a new password? Is inputting a new password not working for some reason?

Cheers!