Modern Vespa

It's not used by many but I use the Font Color tags to change URL text to blue to make it pop more. The default, at least on my machines, is purple which IDT provides enough color contrast to the normal black text.

See this post for example where I forgot to change the second of the URL text strings to blue. The link just gets lost: https://modernvespa.com/forum/post2474627#2474627. Here's that same URL text in blue for immediate comparison:
https://modernvespa.com/forum/post2474627#2474627

Not that big of a deal. I know I can type in the color tags or edit later on my MacBook.

BTW, I just discovered that when I surround that text with the blue color tags, the URL tags got ignore. Bug?

Thanks for all the site updates.
Miguel

Fair enough to leave well enough alone! I suspect this doesn't come up often enough to make any real difference on forum usability. And it seems the link itself still works in both cases, so it's really just formatting.

Thanks for looking into it.

On my browser, the difference between the standard URL and your blue colored one is minor. Both are shades of blue. Not a bug. The purpose of the URL tag is to tell the site definitively that you are specifying an URL between the tags. If you put something else between the tags that is not an URL, it will break.

EDIT: You can change the order, using color tags on the OUTSIDE of the URL tags. That will at least not break. I've changed your post to experiment with that, and it does seem to work.

EDIT2: Once you've visited the link, though, both turn a different color to indicate they have visited, and so the blue color is disregarded entirely. I think trying to color URLs is probably a bad idea -- if they are not showing up with enough contrast on your browser, it is worth investigating whether you have a user preference setting that is affecting the link colors.

Last edited by jess on Tue, 22 Jun 2021 14:47:18 +0000; edited 2 times

As Coding Horror points out, enclosing an URL in parens is actually an extremely common user behavior -- common enough that it's desirable to handle that case. I think the article points out that the usual weapon of choice -- regex -- fails to be useful in this case, and so other measures have to be employed.

I will revisit the topic at some point in the near future.

Here's the CSS code that specifies what color a link is supposed to be within a post at MV: The color #00A is very much straight blue. It could be slightly higher intensity, but it has no red component whatsoever, so really should not be showing up as purple. I suspect your browser is overriding the color, but I could be wrong.

Again, once visited, the link color changes to vintage red, and the spec above no longer applies.

Thanks Jess. I'm not an Internet engineer nor a person who tweets browser settings (I'd rather be out riding). AFAIK, Safari on my iPhone and MacBook are stock configurations but its possible some config setting has been adjusted over the years and it just never gets reset to factory defaults with each update. This is not the big a deal to me. I make it work. No reason to pursue it further at this juncture. Thanks. Miguel

While you've got your crayons out, can disemvoweling be preceded by turning the text green, "yardsaleification".

*laughs*

Good lord.

It's up to Jess, but I kinda like the surprise of people getting disemvoweled. The shock and indignation always strikes me as funny.

You were a shit head and people slapped you down. Learn from it and move on. Or don't. I couldn't care less.

dude made an impression

For better or for worse, when somebody half way around the world is talking about you, years later- natch, ya definitely made uhhh something?

Why oh why would I do that?

No worries. Just trying to get to the root of the problem. When I see someone attempting to change the way the forum behaves, for whatever reason, I often ask myself if there's something the forum can be doing differently to alleviate whatever motivated them to go out of their way. In this case, you're trying to alter the link color, but there are a bunch of factors involved (such as whether you've visited the link). So I'm just trying to understand what's going on.

I was looking at a thread on my phone and needed to know what scooter the OP had. Gravity assisted investigative manoeuvre now inoperative.

When did the awesomely simple details button get added?

By that, do you mean turning your phone sideways? That should still work -- depending on the exact screen size, you should see the “normal” view, with the author to the side of the post and all of the usual details. That was added shortly after we moved everything over to a single unified view for all users -- and eliminated the circa-2010 iPhone-only view.

iPhone 12 mini, no workee. Even tried to reload in each orientation.

Yeah, iPhone 12 mini is pretty much the worst-case scenario, as far as screen sizes go. Even in landscape mode, it’s not wide enough to trigger the author-on-the-side layout. I could probably move the set point to coax it into triggering in landscape layout, but I’m not convinced that would be better than the details view that you get in portrait.

As an aside, the layout isn’t directly tied to orientation as it was for the older iPhone-only view. The layout is now a function of the screen width, which is itself a function of orientation. It’s a subtle distinction, but one that matters for small screens such as the iPhone 12 mini.

emoji bug?
Was trying to end my last post, with multiple clap emojis -
one emoji was inserted at the end of my post (where the cursor was and where I wanted it to appear) and the other two were inserted in front of the quote
Was easily able to edit

not sure if this is the thread to report stuff or if it should have gone into the MV Entomologist Awards thread

Known issue that I am declining to fix. Every time I touch that code, it gets worse. It’s very browser-specific and I am apparently too stupid to understand it.

I am very glad to hear you say this. The endless hours you have devoted to giving us a nice place to visit ought to have SOME limits. Especially when the solution is an easy edit.

In fact, the most used colors for the pens we use to write are black, blue and red.

Also, I am planning on replacing the entire message-editing page with a more modern, off-the-shelf open source module. So this bit is not long for this world.

Without being logged in, every time I “refresh” a particular thread, using the same device, the “views” count increases. I first noticed this on my iPhone in the last week or two. I now tested my theory, using my PC laptop. IIRC, with an update you made, years ago, this was no longer happening; meaning, same person, using same device (or IP?).

I tested three random “threads,” but decided to report on one of the oldest threads, to ensure no one was actually reviewing/reading it.

Total views, for the thread, prior to me testing this about an hour ago, were 1021. Total views are now 1040. I used both Chrome and Firefox as browsers. Again, not logged in as a user.

Duh!!! I'm an idiot

Hope this helps?

This is exactly the behavior I would expect. Every view of a topic gets counted, regardless of whether a user has seen it before or not. The only caveat (that I can think of) is that the view counts only get updated about every minute or so.

The view counting code has undergone some changes over the years, but I can’t recall the specific variation you’re referring to. Any chance you know what thread it was discussed in?

I am certain I can find it, but a new problem arose as I tried a “search” using me as author in General Discussion. It gives me 653 matches with 14 pages of threads … I am only able to access page one. When I go to access the other pages, I receive message: No topics or posts met your search criteria. This time I’m using an iPad Pro … not the PC laptop. This is happening whether I am logged in or not. :?

Now we're talking!

Found it. Query I used was my name as author with keyword increase in general discussion.
Modern Vespa Performance Revisited,

[MVFR] Modern Vespa Performance Revisited

Hope this helps?

This should now be fixed. The result of me trying to fix a different search related problem. Predictably, I introduced an even worse problem.

For finding and reporting this forum bug, I hereby bestow upon you the MV Entomologist Award. Wear it with pride.

Works like a charm, now! TY for the MV-EA!

Ah. Yes. Back when we switched to SSD-based storage for the database.

As per this post in that thread, the optimization is that we save up the view counts in memory and then periodically commit them to disk. At the time, it was a five-minute period. I've since reduced that to a one-minute period.

Each view count is still counted. Just not in real time. There's no same-user or same-device optimization.

Oooh. Would love to see drag-and-drop image insertion if reasonable and possible. Miguel

Me too.

While you guys are talking about colors and computer codes and stuff like that I am wondering whatever happened to the title window while writing a response to a post?

Bill Dog effectively killed it. That’s why we can’t have nice things.

Gone. It was abused by some to an incredibly irritating degree, it takes up space, and it's pretty meaningless to change a title in the middle of a thread. Just because some idiots do that with email (MAY THEY ROT IN HELL) does not mean it's a Good Idea.

I didn't read through all of the pages on this thread so apologies if its been talked about.

Earlier today I was responding in the covid thread and when I finished I hit space and inserted an emoji. It inserted correctly but the cursor jumped back up to the beginning of the message which was in this case a quote. Not a big deal but something to look at maybe. I was using Chrome Version 91.0.4472.164 (Official Build) (64-bit)

That’s a well known bug. Emoticon insertion tends to move the cursor in odd ways, depending on exact browser. I am opting not to try to fix this at this point, because each successive attempt at improving it has made it worse.

Gotcha. I've been away for awhile and I didn't remember that happening.

Test.

Hmm.. The cursor disappears completely here (Version 91.0.4472.164 (Official Build) (64-bit)) and I have to left-click to get it back where I want.

I don’t have a solution. Chrome, in particular, behaves in weird ways, and I don’t have the capacity to understand it or test it. Even if I make it behave properly on Chrome, it will break other browsers.

The solution is to replace the whole thing with an off-the-shelf editor package.

Yup. Totally livable-with (is that a real phrase?).