Thread: Major Forum Changes Ahead

Update (Version 1.7.6)

The chat room should work again for Chrome users. See here for a bit more details: Can't post in chat after recent update.

I also updated our URL auto-linker to recognize more top-level-domains (TLDs). That hadn't been updated since 2017, and I noticed when trying to link a URL with TLD of "lol".
Back in 2017 there were 613 TLDs, but now there are 1,445.

I plan to continue to work on a few small updates this morning before hopefully, finally, taking that short break from forum work I keep talking about.

Update (Version 1.7.7)

User "roles" have been communicated via username colors for a long time now: Username colors.

But, that's pretty much the only way we communicate user roles right now, and if you weren't around for that thread back in mid-2012 you'd really have no idea and relying on that plus people's memory is a bad idea. I noticed this recently when I saw a post by a Super Moderator and wanted to know if they were a Super Moderator or a Moderator (because the colors are close), so I hovered my pointer over their username expecting to get some detail about their user role. That didn't work, because it never has.

So I've made that work now. Hovering a colored username will now let you know the user's role.

Ideally we'd also have a list of all Admins, Mods, and Vendors somewhere easily accessible (maybe linked in the forum footer) but that's not happening right now.
However, a member's profile page really should display their user role, so I've gone and added it to the Basic Information section of the member profile pages.

(Hovering a colorized username in chat still shows the time the message was sent, not the user role. Eventually when the chat room shows a list of members currently "in" the room, those names will show the user's role when hovered.)

Update (Version 1.7.8)

I recently noticed a row in the footer (the one with the "Contact Us" link) was scrollable with the mouse wheel. That should not be possible, so I've fixed that. Let me know if things don't look right down there.

Also, while looking at the footer I realized it has a completely redundant row. The first row of the footer is lightly colored and contains only one link on the left side called "Back to top". But the "Top" link all the way to the right in the row below it does the exact same thing. I'm not sure what the designer was thinking there, but it was how the forum looked before 2017 so I copied it exactly. By now it seems obvious this could be improved. Basically, I should just remove the first row of the footer entirely and be done with it. However, that would make every page look different and feel different for a while until people got used to it. That would be fine, but I decided for now to keep it exactly the way it is, except add in an Easter egg (the forum's second of such) to it instead. One I've been wanting to add for a very long time. Let me know if you see it in your travels.

Update (Version 1.7.9)

Still here picking nits. I swear I'm going to give it a rest for the day.

There is a section way at the bottom of the home page where we display some forum stats. Some of those are placeholders, but I filled out one today. The place where we welcome our newest member has been implemented properly and no longer has a placeholder. This was an easy win, so I took it.

As of right now, @tonni is our newest member (joined 2 days ago).

Update (Version 1.7.10)

I'm still working on some little things. I made more updates to the way we handle sessions (not sure I mentioned it before) and then started working on recovering a long-lost thread. In the process of getting that thread reconstructed I noticed that the forum section display (example) was showing threads as being started on the wrong date. Instead of showing the date the thread was created, the "Started by USERNAME, YYY-MM-DD HH:MM" part was showing the date of the most recent post in the thread. I have no idea how long this has been the case. It could be this has been wrong for ~8 years! I'm surprised no one noticed.

Anyway, I've fixed that. So now I'll get back to restoring that thread.