Thread: Major Forum Changes Ahead

It's on the list.

Hello Vadim.

p.s. Search works well. +1,000,000 for using DuckDuckGo because screw Google just like screw Facebook. #Don'tGetZuck'd

Update

TL;DR - Unexpected log-outs when making posts/PMs should not happen anymore. No one should suffer losing minutes or hours of work anymore.

I've fixed an issue we've had for a long time now. If a user logs in and does not choose "remember me" then they should be logged in for as long as their browser is open. If you do choose to "remember me" then you should remain logged in for 90 days (no matter how many times you close your browser) or until you manually log out. In either of these situations, users were encountering situations way too often where they would type out a post or PM (possibly taking a bit of time before starting the post and finishing the post) and then when they submit the post, they are logged out instead. The post they'd typed never got submitted, and it was lost forever. This can be annoying for short posts, and absolutely infuriating for longer posts. This is 2019, and stuff like this should not happen. This is 1990's era bullshit. This is obviously unacceptable.

I know this situation turned Jay off a while back, and I've personally run into it so many times I almost always instinctively copy my posts before submitting now. The SR2019 National Convention happened recently, and more users are complaining about this problem (Kyle particularly) as they post about the event. I don't want another day to go by where another user loses another post.

The first idea for a fix was to present to the user the content of their post/PM after being logged out so they could copy the content, log back in, navigate to where they wanted to be, paste the content back, and continue on their way. This was not a great solution, but I figured it would mostly alleviate the problem. I started looking into this solution, and found two things. 1) The proposed solution is WAY harder to implement than expected, and something else might need to be done instead. 2) The reason people are being logged out when trying to make posts is because I'd forgotten about a well-meaning (but ultimately disastrous) time limit I'd placed on input forms.

So, since I'd found out about the 1-hour time limit I'd placed on forms, I was able to increase that to 72 hours (3 days). If you begin a post/PM and finish it within 3 days of starting it, you should be fine now. Whereas in the past, if you started a post/PM and didn't complete it within the hour, you were screwed.
This 1-hour limit was actually way easier to trigger than you'd expect. The "Quick Reply" text box at the end of every thread also has this limit, so you could view a thread, and while you're reading the thread the timer is counting down. Maybe you leave a thread open overnight, come back in the morning and want to post... That 1-hour timer has LONG gone by... There are lots of unexpected ways to get screwed by this time limit.

So that's it. Problem solved, I hope. No one should suffer this obnoxious problem anymore. If for some reason this does happen to someone in the future, I've changed the error message so that it is obvious that the form expired, and you're instructed to let me know if this happens to you so I can add more layers of fix to this if required.

If you'd like to know what in the world this 1-hour limit was all about, it is part of our cross-site request forgery defense. I make sure form submissions to the site come from a form on the site itself, not some other form someone else created. Part of that forgery protection uses a token, and this token has an expiration time. I've increased the token expiration time from 1 hour to 72 hours. I'm so sorry we've dealt with this for so long.

Update

The server hosting the forum auto-updates packages for security. A major update was performed today, and it has caused some problems with the forum. I've recovered from the worst of it, but chat is still borked and possibly some other things. If you notice anything else broken, post here please.

Edit: We seem to have escaped the worst of it. This is the update to end all updates. We finally went from PHP 5.x to PHP 7.x (I actually thought this happened a while back) and this can be a game-ender for many sites. I was a little worried about it, but it seems out of all the code I wrote myself, only one line needed to be updated. It just so happened to be a routing file that effects almost the entire site. So it seems for maybe 2 hours today the site wasn't really working.

Now, the chat is not something I wrote myself, and it is being all sorts of dumb. So I'm looking at that next in detail. Hang tight.

Noted.

Yah, chat's not going to be available for a little bit. I'm working on it, but I have a relative's wedding taking priority this week into next.
I'll do my best.

If anyone wants to try to debug the chat, it's something going on with the JavaScript I'm quite sure and you can probably debug it from your own browser. That would be legendary.

Hey Kyle!

And agreed to screwing google along with facebook .

Update

Chat is mostly working again. There may be one or two small issues left that I may or may not take care of (like one of the button images is borked?). And then there is one pretty large issue still left that I need to take care of. The auto-linking feature isn't working, so URLs aren't turned into links automatically. That's actually where the problem started, and I finally tracked it down.

So, I'll try to get URLs to auto-link again here soon, but for now enjoy the working chat and let me know about any other issues with chat if you come across them.

Edit: I got the URL linking working in chat now, so chat is basically fully functional again.

Update

I took a few moments today to fix two small bugs related to password resets.

1) 1fastser let me know there was a typo in the password reset feature that made the CAPTCHA difficult. I've fixed that, updating "alternations" to "alterations".

2) There was also a user a few weeks ago who couldn't reset their password because the e-mail address they were entering for their account didn't match the one the forum had on file. I got them sorted.
The problem was, the user was entering the correct e-mail address but with different capitalization than what they used when they signed up for the forum. Most e-mail systems are not case-sensitive (I think the spec says to ignore case) so I've changed the e-mail check to ignore case as well which will prevent anyone else from having this issue.

Edit: About 6 weeks after "fixing" the e-mail address comparison code to ignore case, I looked at it again and realized I'd used the wrong comparison. It's been broken this whole time, but I guess no one reported it. I've actually fixed it now (while I was doing preliminary work on breadcrumbs).

Update

I quit my job 2 weeks ago and have a bit of time (should have a lot more if Plan A works out) and got breadcrumbs working this morning. This was an important feature I missed every day and when I was reminded a few weeks ago in chat how important it was to others I figured I'd work on it soon. Well, soon is this morning (since I woke up very early and could not get back to sleep).

Finally we can all know what section of the forum we're in when viewing a thread. How quaint.

Generally it works well, but our forum is pretty complicated and tough to do breadcrumbs for perfectly. If you see any issues, please let me know.




As a side note, while working on the breadcrumbs I realized that our highest-level forum sections that all other forum sections reside under (like SR20 Community, Vendors, Classifieds, etc.) can be visited and viewed on their own. Since that is the case, I made their links on the main forum page actually go to those sections instead of just scrolling down to them in the main forum page. A tiny little improvement, but just thought I'd mention it.