Forum Update - April 6, 2010

Hello everyone,

The forums were updated today (April 6, 2010) to fix some long-standing bugs, add a few new features, and make some minor changes.  The change log is as follows:

Note: If you notice any of the below features are not available or not working properly, please do a hard refresh (hold CTRL and press F5) to retrieve the latest javascript and css files.

1. "Flattened forums" option now available.

The flattened forums option is simply another way of viewing the forums.  The layout and design won't change, but what posts you see will.  What it does is "flatten" all of the posts in a specific forum so that it includes the posts in all of its sub-forums.  For example, the Stardock Games forum on the ImpulseDriven.com would include all of the posts in its sub-forums, such as Indie Games, Stardock Games, and Ubisoft Games.

This means that when you click on a forum now (with this option enabled), it will display many more posts than usual, and you can "dig deeper" into more specific topics by clicking on sub-forums.

You can turn this option on and try it for yourself by going to the My Account Options page.

2. Built-in spellchecker in the editors.  

There is now a spellchecker icon in the new post/reply editor, which will scan your content and highlight mis-spelled items, as well as provide proper spelling options.

After you type out your post, click on the spellchecker icon and it will scan the contents of the post and highlight mis-spelled words.  Left clicking on any mis-spelled word will provide a small popup with suggestions for the mis-spelled word.

The regular Firefox spellchecker is still a bit finicky about how it wants to work in the editor, so you may find that sometimes it works, and other times it doesn't.

3. Auto-resizing editor.

This feature may be more annoying than useful, so if enough of you find it annoying I'll disable it.  Basically, it auto-resizes the editor (vertically) when writing long posts.  

4. Preview button in editor.

This allows you to preview your post before submitting to see what it looks like.  For those of you who do a lot of formatting to your posts, this will help to save a lot of time without having to edit and re-edit to get it just right.

5. Many other minor additions, changes, and bug fixes.

These include the following:

Temporary removal of RSS feed icons in the forum listings.  This is because RSS feeds are not working properly and we are looking into a new solution for them.  We are thinking of removing RSS support for all forums except for specific ones that are important (such as Impulse Announcements or Elemental Dev Journals).  This will reduce the overhead of having these RSS feeds, will make implementing them much easier, and will provide more up-time for these feeds as we don't have to manage hundreds of different feeds.

Your password is now required if you try to change your username or existing password in your My Accounts page.

A "Return to Top" link was added at the bottom of every page (just above the timestamp) to quickly return to the top of the page.

Removed the custom right click menu on the editor, so it now uses the browser's default right click menu.

Bug fixes, karma fixes, CSS fixes, etc.

Note: If you notice any of the above features are not available or not working properly, please do a hard refresh (hold CTRL and press F5) to retrieve the latest javascript and css files.

As always, if you notice any bugs or problems, please let me know by posting in the Forum Issues forum or contacting me via PM.

Bara

184,779 views 101 replies
Reply #1 Top

Very nice upgrades for the forums, and I needed the spellchecker. :-" :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

Reply #2 Top

Thanks!

Reply #3 Top

Spellchecker works in IE6

Reply #4 Top

Spellchecker works in firefox 3.6.3

Reply #5 Top

Nice with the spell checker, I understand that Firefox will not spell check on these forums...Opera does however.... :grin:

Reply #6 Top

Quoting Filthgrinder, reply 5
Nice with the spell checker, I understand that Firefox will not spell check on these forums...Opera does however....

And Chrome does too... sometimes.  It's because of the TinyMCE editor, which uses a lot of javascript to get this editor working the way it does, so it confuses the browsers.  The update I pushed was supposed to fix it according to the TinyMCE devs, but based on my testing it didn't.  I'll do some more research and see what I can find.

Bara

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Reply #7 Top

Thats a great update. Thanks :thumbsup:

The spell checker is really useful, and I dont know about other people, but it works on my Firefox 3.6.3. Maybe you meant that it gets bugged doesnt work only once in a while? :|

3. Auto-resizing editor.

This feature may be more annoying than useful, so if enough of you find it annoying I'll disable it. Basically, it auto-resizes the editor (vertically) when writing long posts.

Thats perfect and not annoying at all. The ability to be able to see my whole post, without having to use the scrollbar all the time (especially when I quote long posts) is really great! Please do not remove it ;P

Oh and here is k1

Reply #8 Top

Forums look great Bara! Nice job! :thumbsup: k5

Reply #10 Top

We still don't have a "make a poll" option! :-"

Reply #11 Top

Fabulous and needed updates!:meow:   Now if spell check could only fix our grammer !!!!!!!!!!! LOL

Reply #12 Top

Don't worry, that's what us grammar nazis are here for. ;)

Reply #13 Top

I've noticed this returning bug in the past week or so that when I read a thread and go back to the recent posts, it doesn't actually mark the thread as read, still shows it as new. And also, when I make a reply, sometimes the reply won't actually show up until several minutes later. Or I'll check a thread because there's been a new post, but the new post isn't visible until I check it again later. I remember this bug was an issue some time back, then it was gone, and just recently it's popped up again.

On another note, the Firefox spell checker seems to be doing it's job for me in here.

Reply #14 Top

:thumbsup:

Reply #16 Top

I see most everyone is enamoured with the spell checker. I think the spell checker is a nice feature but I think some of the other changes are much more interesting.

1. "Flattened forums" option now available.
Nice. They've actually been trying to get this to work this way for years. Congratulations, you'll be the first one to get this to work.

Initially posts were supposed to "bubble up" from any lower level subforum which turns viewing any specific forum into a mini "recent posts list".

I'll be sure to check out this feature but does this work at *any* level of the forum hierarchy? Also I *assume* that this works based on what forums are accessible on the site that you're currently on. In other words if you're on a site where a particular forum has only three subforums then I assume you only get posts from those three subforums but if you're on another site where the same forum has 10 subforums then you see posts from all ten subforums. Right?

To a large extent this addresses the problem of "forum consolidation" that I mentioned elsewhere. It's no big deal if there are 14 subforums to the GalCiv II forum if I can monitor them all just by monitoring the superior forum.

4. Preview button in editor.
This can also be a big help although it doesn't seem to interpret the quote boxes for display which is one of the main reasons I often feel the need for a preview function.

Particularly when you get a bit fancy with the quote function and try to quote within quotes or even multiple quotes within another level of quoting. The most difficult is when using multiple quotes in a post that use the ID tag, that really seems to screw things up.

Reply #18 Top

Ok....the built in FF spellchecker is only half working. It'll underline the words that are spelt incorrectly, but when you click on it, there's no options to fix the spelling.

Reply #19 Top

Looks awesome thanks!

 

The End.

Reply #20 Top

Thanks, Bara. Poor Zubaz. Might get to understand his writing, now. He might end up 'ignoring all' or breaking the spellchecker.

So, how come the other 'hot topics' aren't on the right, anymore? One has to navigate back to the main forums page or the home page to find another post.

Any plans about this for the future? Present?

Reply #21 Top

I tried the flatten but didn't see any changes? must not be in zone for it to make any difference???

spellchecker, love it, thank you for finally incorporating this feature. now I don't have to cut and paste to word to check my spelling.

Reply #22 Top

Quoting Tormy-, reply 10
We still don't have a "make a poll" option!

This feature was mentioned by Brad a few days ago.  We haven't decided if we'll do it or not yet.

Quoting Bebi, reply 13
I've noticed this returning bug in the past week or so that when I read a thread and go back to the recent posts, it doesn't actually mark the thread as read, still shows it as new. And also, when I make a reply, sometimes the reply won't actually show up until several minutes later. Or I'll check a thread because there's been a new post, but the new post isn't visible until I check it again later. I remember this bug was an issue some time back, then it was gone, and just recently it's popped up again.

On another note, the Firefox spell checker seems to be doing it's job for me in here.

If you just press back on your browser then no, it won't be marked as read.  This is a browser thing, not really something I want to try and fix through code.  

As for replies not showing up properly, I've seen others mention this too and it's related to caching.  I'm not exactly sure where the problem is in caching, but I'll see what I can do.

Quoting Mumblefratz, reply 16
I see most everyone is enamoured with the spell checker. I think the spell checker is a nice feature but I think some of the other changes are much more interesting.

1. "Flattened forums" option now available.Nice. They've actually been trying to get this to work this way for years. Congratulations, you'll be the first one to get this to work.

Initially posts were supposed to "bubble up" from any lower level subforum which turns viewing any specific forum into a mini "recent posts list".

I'll be sure to check out this feature but does this work at *any* level of the forum hierarchy? Also I *assume* that this works based on what forums are accessible on the site that you're currently on. In other words if you're on a site where a particular forum has only three subforums then I assume you only get posts from those three subforums but if you're on another site where the same forum has 10 subforums then you see posts from all ten subforums. Right?

To a large extent this addresses the problem of "forum consolidation" that I mentioned elsewhere. It's no big deal if there are 14 subforums to the GalCiv II forum if I can monitor them all just by monitoring the superior forum.

4. Preview button in editor.This can also be a big help although it doesn't seem to interpret the quote boxes for display which is one of the main reasons I often feel the need for a preview function.

Particularly when you get a bit fancy with the quote function and try to quote within quotes or even multiple quotes within another level of quoting. The most difficult is when using multiple quotes in a post that use the ID tag, that really seems to screw things up.

Yes, it works at any level of the forum heirarchy.  And yes, it also only shows posts in sub-forums available only on that specific site.  

You're right about the quoting, but unfortunately I'm not sure of a quick fix for this.  You see, the quoting is handled on the server side while the Preview button simply shows the HTML in the editor window.  Fixing it would require mimicing the code on the client-side, specifically as a plugin for TinyMCE.  Not sure how hard this would be, but I'll take a look.

Quoting DrJBHL, reply 20
Thanks, Bara. Poor Zubaz. Might get to understand his writing, now. He might end up 'ignoring all' or breaking the spellchecker.

So, how come the other 'hot topics' aren't on the right, anymore? One has to navigate back to the main forums page or the home page to find another post.

Any plans about this for the future? Present?

I'm not exactly sure what "hot topics on the right" is referring to... Please provide more details :)

Quoting gmc2, reply 21
I tried the flatten but didn't see any changes? must not be in zone for it to make any difference???

spellchecker, love it, thank you for finally incorporating this feature. now I don't have to cut and paste to word to check my spelling.

The changes will be in the posts list for any forum, eg: https://forums.stardock.com/forum/171 will show far more posts when the forum is flattened than when it isn't.

Bara

Reply #23 Top

Quoting DrJBHL, reply 20
Thanks, Bara. Poor Zubaz. Might get to understand his writing, now. He might end up 'ignoring all' or breaking the spellchecker.

So, how come the other 'hot topics' aren't on the right, anymore? One has to navigate back to the main forums page or the home page to find another post.

Any plans about this for the future? Present?

 

Zubaz won't know why the word(S) are underlined so don't expect much improvement.

Reply #24 Top

1. "Flattened forums" option now available.
Doesn't appear to be working.

I tried to reply with screen shots and links but gave up after timing out three different times.

I'll try just the links.

Basically when looking at the GalCiv II forum I should see replies to threads in subforums as well but I'm not.

Here's the links I hope these will work. There are five threads that exist in GalCiv II subforums that have a reply later than the first reply in this list.

Starting near Agressive Race makes game near impossible in the Strategies subforum.

Stealth Discussion thread in the Game Talk subforum.

peacekeeper help in the Dark Avatar subforum.

Game Crash When Using Custom Tech Tree in the Bug Reports subforum.

Making ships appear larger in the Modding subforum.

All of these threads should appear before the Twilight of The Arnor Ship Editor thread in the GalCiv II forum but none of them appear anywhere in the list.

So am I doing something wrong or what?

Reply #25 Top

Perhaps I can get the screenshots in separately.

Here's my account settings.

Here's my view of the GalCiv II forum which is apparently unchanged.