[Closed] Forum Update

Things are so much better than a few days ago, good work chaps!

It's almost like when we were told that things would get bad for a while, then improve, you knew what you were talking about...despite the rage from the experts on here.

Are we any closer to having a page that shows us the threads we’ve replied to (and not the actual posts, out of context)?

This would be great, the old way was much better than the current.

The sidebar is not quite as annoying now it looks less adverty.

Found a funny thing with the new search - it seems to target usernames - so if you search for your username you get loads of results from yonks ago. I found people wishing me happy birthday 9 years ago! 🙂

I'll try again, there's no quick way to change between bike,chat etc. Will this be coming in either the buttons back at the top or the 'Forum' in the floating header becoming a drop down like most of the others?

I'll put it down as a request.  It was mentioned earlier, I think it's a good idea.

I can feel Squirrelkings pain he appears to be using Vista too, no wonder nothing works as expected, between that and a browser emulator his experience is ever so slightly a fringe case.

Aside from the Quote weirdness and the use/size of Consolas in the Reply box my experience is much improved compared to last week. Thanks guys (Chrome Win10 and Safari OSX).

IE11 shows quotes in a different font from Chrome - and usernames wrap over 2 lines, stretching the P and making it look crap.

How many fonts on one page?!

Thanks Cougar 🙂

Most of that Facebook stuff has now disappeared from the right hand side of the screen on desktop, which is very much appreciated.

The font within posts is readable, but the forum overview is awful for me, light blue/grey text on a white background, no contrast at all.

Having trouble posting a screenshot, sadly.

the forum overview is awful for me, light blue/grey text on a white background, no contrast at all.

+1. Needs darker test like the rest of it.

Definitely improved over the last week but noticeably slower than almost anything else I visit by quite a long way.

O/T, On the “IE6?” surprise from the last page, in large companies especially with a heavy reliance on Citrix for providing non-local systems, IE6 is still very common. So, while you can reasonably disregard it for home users if you may get traffic from people in offices, it’s a possibility.  I’m sure admin has stats on the browsers visiting, anyway so it’s a bit of a non-point.

Only a slight problem with an iPad Mini using IOS 10.3.3

I paste in text to quote, select it and then get an iPad window that obscures the buttons on the forum.

www.flickr.com/photos/146501625@N06/39502676935/in/album-72157678963880396/

I assume I should just put a couple of carriage returns in before the text.

It’s almost like when we were told that things would get bad for a while, then improve

In fairness, it's almost as good as it was before they broke it.

There is no need to select the text.

Press the quote button, paste the text and then press return on your keypad.

companies especially with a heavy reliance on Citrix

I’ve just broke out into a cold sweat.

There is no need to select the text.

There is for other things, however, eg adding a link: write stuff, select words you want to turn into a link, and you can't get to the toolbar. It just so happens that on an iPhone (my SE at least) the toolbar wraps and the link button is on the upper row, so it's ok. But on the iPad it'll be obscured.

It was also an issue with the previous version of the forum, though.

Thanks Drac.

Edit: and Bez.

Bez if you have the buttons then.

Then do this it works best in portrait mode on mobiles

Then you get this

Yeah, thanks, that's a workaround. Terrible discoverability and usability though (and I know that's Wordpress's fault, and I'm not expecting it to be fixed).

Hahaha!

Maybe for the likes yourself and other tech wide guys Bez but for others it’s a feature to allow them do what you do.

Just back to this after a few days off.

WOW its like going back 10 years.

Apologies if this isnt constructive so feel free to ignore this post but just wanted to vent.

Maybe for the likes yourself and other tech wide guys Bez but for others it’s a feature to allow them do what you do.

No, it's the opposite really. I realised I already knew about it because I use Wordpress (though even then, the hyperlink dialog is probably where I make more mistakes than anywhere else), but in general terms it's not very clear what either of those buttons do. When authoring blog posts I always highlight text and then add the link, so even having used Wordpress for many years it doesn't occur to me to click the cog to write the text. (The unconventional icon on the "apply" button is confusing and unhelpful, too.)

So yes, it is a feature that allows people to do what they want to do, but the fact remains that the discoverability and usability of the way that feature is implemented are both poor.

If the initial dialog contained two fields—"URL" and "text" (prepopulated if some was selected when the dialog was invoked)—plus a simple "OK" button then all the functionality would be instantly discoverable, without having to know that "text" was hidden behind a cog.

But like I say, it's Wordpress's doing.

Oh it’s not massively intuitive I’ll give you that.

Ooh, that's something I've not spotted before. Clearly Wordpress now has a filter which converts "Wordpress" with a small "p" to… well, all the instances of it here will have been modified, so it should be obvious.

The cheeky buggers. I hate camelcase.

How do some have the buttons and others not?

As far as I can tell, it's related to the account rather than browsers / devices.  Exactly how I'm not sure.

If I select a thread to read it doesn't highlight so until it loads I am not sure if I have clicked on it.

Slow slow slow on Android, takes approx 6-8 seconds to load a reply.

Reminds me of an old Amstrad CPC464 I used to have...

Top row.

Profile |Messages|Log Out

Surely there should be a notification of messages on there rather than an email?

Every single forum but this one does that.

Either by pop up or a notification tag.

Also the capitalisation is borked yet again on iPhone/iPad when hitting return for a new line.

Cougar/Drac, in an attempt to see if it's related to my account I created a duplicate account (I know we aren't supposed to, however since my account was one of the first created post hack I was thinking it might be a useful comparison).

Ignoring that on mobile the registration layout is all over the place my new account can't post topics or replies so I can't test for the editor. Is this something you know about or a new 'feature' that has been picked up? Any chance of getting the account approved or whatever you need to do please? It's username is nixieduplicate (catchy)

It’s a security thing it’ll unlock after 4 hours. Can post your test results on here said account. Thanks for your honesty.

Slow. Very slow.

I can no longer quote on iPad even though I can select text and see all the buttons.  I’ve kind of given up trying to work out which sequence of presses work.  🙁

Press the quote button, paste the text and then press return twice on your keyboard.

Press the quote button, paste the text and then press return twice on your keyboard.

Just tried that

edit: I’m an arse, it wasn’t the quote button I pressed. Thank you. I was using the eraser button out of habit.

puts down the whisky

Press the quote button, paste the text and then press return twice on your keyboard.

We’ll look at a guide when the site is near as done.

Anyone know how to get to the magazine pdfs now, if you are a subscriber? I can't seem to find any links any more?

[i]Bez wrote:[/i]

Ooh, that’s something I’ve not spotted before. Clearly WordPress now has a filter which converts “WordPress” with a small “p” to… well, all the instances of it here will have been modified, so it should be obvious.
The cheeky buggers. I hate camelcase.

Testing: Wоrdpress

I use camelCase as standard when coding (it's often specified in style guides) so it doesn't bother me though.

looks a load better, pages loading ok
some weirdness with the layout if its not full screen (win10, firefox)
no edit buttons visible yet tho

but the quotes look much less intrusive, and manual html tags work ok

The pale font used for the main forum page strains my eyes.

+1 for a forum drop down menu.

So this account gets the editor;

[url= https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4759/40371978532_ba618c3e17.jp g" target="_blank">https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4759/40371978532_ba618c3e17.jp g"/> [/img][/url]

[url= https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4655/39520341495_2d664ebcda_c.jp g" target="_blank">https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4655/39520341495_2d664ebcda_c.jp g"/> [/img][/url]

(click for large)

and this one doesn't

[url= https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4703/25544667227_2d382fe828.jp g" target="_blank">https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4703/25544667227_2d382fe828.jp g"/> [/img][/url]

[url= https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4755/26545411478_1ec1c417d5_c.jp g" target="_blank">https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4755/26545411478_1ec1c417d5_c.jp g"/> [/img][/url]

(again click for large)

Cheers Nixie I’ll pass this on to Tech.

Both posted from same browser on same machine.

If you look at the source html the one with out has the tinymce classes missing. This supports Cougar's thoughts about account related. Should be easy enough to track down, their can't be that many permissions being checked around the editor control!

The div [i]#wp-bbp_reply_content_wrap[/i] has different classes
With editor: [i]wp-core wp-editor-wrap [b]tmce-active[/b][/i]
Without editor: [i]wp-core wp-editor-wrap [b]html-active[/b][/i]

No worries

No green here either. Scardypants, if you press ctrl and f5 together does the green go away?

Testing, testing...

edit...

Nope, didn't work.

[i]nixie wrote:[/i]

Both posted from same browser on same machine.
If you look at the source html the one with out has the tinymce classes missing. This supports Cougar’s thoughts about account related. Should be easy enough to track down, their can’t be that many permissions being checked around the editor control!
The div #wp-bbp_reply_content_wrap has different classes
With editor: wp-core wp-editor-wrap tmce-active
Without editor: wp-core wp-editor-wrap html-active

I think I mentioned this before (chvck posted up his html and I compared with mine), but in case the devs need extra help that seems to be set in the inline script right at the end of the source code and it's related to whether the tinymce scripts are working (tinymce is what seems to provide the edit box clever functionality)

Yup I think you did Aracer, cheers, it’s handy to have more for them to work with,

GlenH I’ll see if I can get an answer for you.

Worth mentioning then that I don't have the fancy edit box functionality when logged in on any of my devices (mobile dev, so logged in on multiple Android devices, 3 x PCs and a solitary iOS device).

Very slow.

Looks worse than before.

Quick report of usability problem, apologies if it's already been covered: Including images in posts when using a phone is extremely painful and makes some things impossible. (NB again this is a Wordpress problem.)

To replicate:

Copy the URL of a photo you want to include. Go to the reply form on a thread and type "Hey, here's an awesome picture" or something, then hit the image button. You can paste the URL into the resulting dialog, but you can't hit the button required to insert it into the post. If you happen to have auto-rotate turned on, you can get to it by rotating the phone and hiding the keypad. If you reached this stage, you now have a post with a socking great image in it, and there's no horizontal scrolling, so you can't get the caret to the end of the line to continue typing. The workaround is to start again, write all your text first, go back to where you wanted to insert the image, and then insert it.

Example post which was painful to write as a result: (with bonus markup fail)

https://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/f1-2018-spoilers-abound/page/5/#post-9855695

HTH

Not sure if it's already been requested but......

Is there any chance you could put a pull-down menu on the forum link on the floating title menu? Most the other links (News, Reviews, Opinion and Features) are all pull downs and it would make navigating from one sub-forum to another much quicker.

Cheers!

Is there any chance you could put a pull-down menu on the forum link on the floating title menu? Most the other links (News, Reviews, Opinion and Features) are all pull downs and it would make navigating from one sub-forum to another much quicker.

Oh and that previous post of mine now reminds me: The constant conversion of URLs to embedded content can be a nightmare on small screens. It frequently causes nested scrolling, which is nearly always undesirable: eg if you paste a Twitter account URL the page embeds the feed from that account. So as you swipe down the page, you hit that feed, which scrolls, and the actual page doesn't move at all until you hit the bottom of that feed, making it extremely laborious to get to the bottom of the page. (Reiterating the point that a "go to the last post" link would be really handy.)

There is a workaround: you can swipe the narrow margin either side to scroll the page rather than the nested content, but (a) that's a very small affordance and (b) you first have to notice that you've hit a nested scrolling element, which is tricky when you're just trying to get to the bottom of the thread as quickly as possible. (Related point: the content that gets wrapped to the bottom of the page on thread pages is an additional bit of a pain here: a fast scroll down ends up flying into that and then you have to swipe back up a few times to get to the end of the thread.)

HTH again 🙂

GlenH,

the access to the mags will return soon they’re developing a page for them as a priority. Mean time you can access the current issue here.

https://singletrackworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/singletrack-magazine-issue-117/

Overall for me it's a big improvement, know how much work it must have taken and a pain Wordpress can be when trying to do anything that isn't whats is intended straight out the box.

One thing - seeing as I seem to be logged out daily could we please make "logged in" a link to the login page to save having to scroll right back to the top? 

Also, it took me bloody ages to figure out how to search the forum, and even then I had to bugger about going from searching classified then hacking back to search the forum - any pointers on that?

The search is still under development.

Each forum has it’s own search box when you’re in that forum index.

Another thing I've noticed a few times. I seem to have seen it on older threads, but that may just be coincidence.

The first post of a thread sometimes comes out in the wrong place: either mid-thread or at the end. (I have a vague feeling that I once found a thread where the first post was missing completely, but that may just be my memory playing tricks so don't rely on it.) I've not checked whether there are any secondary effects (eg replies going missing or ending up out of order).

Here's an example, where the original post is displayed as the 11th.

https://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/what-car-do-i-want-clue-its-not-the-one-i-thought-it-was/

Regarding the button bar ...

 Cheers Nixie I’ll pass this on to Tech.

Yes thanks for spending your time and pointing this out Nixie. We have a fix for this in place. It seems that this affected our long time users and was due to a user setting introduced into Wordpress a while ago which prevented the wysiwyg editor from appearing for you.

If you don't see the button bar - please try logging on again but that should be not be neccessery.

I have buttons now!

Yay!

Cheers to Aracer too for the initial steer in the right direction.

Cheers to Aracer too for the initial steer in the right direction.

Yep, me too. Any chance of a button to turn it off? At least 'till the tinkering with it is finished?

Oh aye and you Kelvin.

Yay.... <span style="text-decoration: underline;">BUTTONS !!!</span>

oh crap 🙁

Are RSS feeds ever going to return, or is it considered old?
I used to use it to get a feed of every post on my 'Favourited' threads.

e.g. I used to get posts coming through to this:
http://singletrackworld.com/forum/rss/profile/alexsimon

Not been on STW for a while but WTF has happened to this forum - it looks terrible and is very un-user friendly.

Frankly it's all been downhill since the good old days of the browny/reddy/greeny forum:

http://www.singletrackworld.co.uk:80/forum/list.php?f=2&menu=14&PHPSESSID=8fb27c3fb9d3233e32b98f0d23a7dcc 1"> https://web.archive.org/web/20070429120631/http://www.singletrackworld.co.uk:80/forum/list.php?f=2&menu=14&PHPSESSID=8fb27c3fb9d3233e32b98f0d23a7dcc1

See, lovely and clear - all topics lumped in together.  Love(d) it.

Yay buttons :). Thank you.

Buttons back here too 🙂

And preview works!

No emoticons though.

No emoticons though.

🤷🏻‍♂️

Blimey - preview does work!
(well kinda, BBCode seems to break it, but it's progress)

Emoticons would be the final nail in the coffin. What are you, 12 years old?!

Emotioncons were on here for years.

🤦🏼‍♂️

UnusableUonoandandr

Starting a new thread in wrong forum (classified wanted) and then editing it to appear in chat results in it appearing with  a chat icon, but still in the classified forum.

Yay! Buttons.

Yay! Buttons.

Yay! Buttons.

<span style="text-decoration: underline;">Yay! Buttons.</span>

However. Whilst I can in theory quote, in practice once I’m in the text box it’s impossible to select text outside to to copy in and quote. Also, the usual double space = new sentence seems to have stopped. Both very annoying and worse than no buttons time. Both iPhone with latest iOS.

...and underline now gives me the joys of all that markup crap. So, two steps forward, maybe two back. Sorry guys, but if the aim is usability then there is still considerable work to do.

Oddly in this post the double space thing works. Perhaps because I’ve not tried any formatting?

BUTTONS! #welcomeback

The quote function is a bit tricky to get to grips with, I’m not sure how you’re supposed to use it; I’ve had to make a number of amendments to get it right, and I’m still not certain what I did.

Bold, italic, and underscore seem ok, I just highlight the word/s, and tap the appropriate button, not sure if that’s how it’s supposed to be done, but it works, but strike through seems to be missing, which is a bit of a pain.

Overall, though, it’s looking much better, guys! 😄

Anyone else unable to access from iPad. Same for past week now.

Get basic front page with empty blue bar, some photos and links to sections (look like hyperlinks) that don’t work. So cannot access forum at all