Modern Vespa

In furtherance of my goals of hardening MV to withstand the next 5 years of continuous use (which will take past the mind-boggling 20 year anniversary of MV) I am pushing another software update to the server. This one touches the vast majority of the files that make up this forum's source code, and eliminates some very crufty (and now deprecated) PHP coding patterns.

Sadly, after I push the change, you will either notice nothing different (if we're lucky) or Lots of Broken Stuff. I can't say for sure which, but that's the best we can hope for: nothing noticeable changes.

I'm going to take down the server for a few minutes, due to the large number of files that I have to push. Here we go.

Okay, it's still humming after the update.

Can't say I expected that.

MV Entomologists and Wannabe MV Entomologists: Now is your chance. See anything broken? Let me know right here in this thread.

Image attachments in pms broken again. Testing in thread posts here..

Edit: image attachments broken in posts as well. Sent you pm with image attachments so hopefully the pm was sent, but it shows attachments broken in my outbox.

Every time i edit this post, it adds another error message for the same attachment

The Extension '' was deactivated by an board admin, therefore this Attachment is not displayed.

The Extension '' was deactivated by an board admin, therefore this Attachment is not displayed.

The Extension '' was deactivated by an board admin, therefore this Attachment is not displayed.

The Extension '' was deactivated by an board admin, therefore this Attachment is not displayed.

The Extension '' was deactivated by an board admin, therefore this Attachment is not displayed.

Okay. The hunt is on. Thanks for the tip!

I told you I would break something!

Okay, I think the upload bug is fixed now. Or, more precisely, I reverted that one small piece of code.

Awesome!

My favorite website right now:

https://whydoesitsuck.com/why-does-php-suck/

VideosURLs still work too.

Awesome vid.

In case anyone is interested (and no, I honestly don't think anyone is) here's the replacement for the offending code that broke attachments: Took me a bit to figure out how each() was being used here in the old code. I had it wrong the first go round, as PHP arrays are exceptionally weird.

Oh, all right...put this one up before, but relevant to both testing and the site itself.

modernest

[list=]looks like
selecting some lines
and clicking list=
breaks in chrome on mac[/list]

the buttons also seem to ignore your cursor position and insert the tag at the end.

the buttons have some interesting state mechanics: they insert a close tag on even numbered clicks, even if you've deleted the open tag. if you click b, i, u, delete all the open tags, and then click b*, you'll get all the close tags at once.

I created a search with a massive result list - 78262 matches and pages 1, 2, 3, ... 1564, 1565, 1566. Unlike before, I can advance beyond page 2, but when I click on page 1565, there are no results. I can see the column headers and there's another row beneath it, but it's a solid grey cell.


:)

Wow who needs stress/beta testers when you have MVers? Of course the post may turn on to a music video thread but that just MV.

On my end the site seems snapper and through regular use I've found no bugs.

As far as music goes. Enjoy yourself by the Specials is hopefully on Jess' agenda soon and not Frustration by the Purple Hearts. (Hey a Ska and a Mod reference)

Going straight for the soft underbelly of MV, I see.

You are correct, though: the finer points of the editor are currently somewhat dysfunctional on Chrome. It's unrelated to last night's update, but it's still a legitimate bug. It's all related to the cursor position (or apparent lack of it on Chrome, I gather) and emoticon insertion is particularly screwed up.

Also, I'm not convinced the List buttons have ever worked properly. I'm not even sure I understand how they're supposed to work, and I've been staring at them for 15 years.

So I don't have an immediate remedy for this, but it's on my short list to fix.

My canonical "large search test" is to search for the word GTS, which returns almost 36,000 hits. I do see the behavior you're seeing, too: a good number of the tail pages are missing.

Seems like big searches miscount the number of actual hits. My suspicion is that it is conflating matches with matched topics, and setting the theoretical number of pages based on that mis-estimate. I don't think this is related to the update yesterday -- I reverted the small bit of changed code related to search on the test server and tried it out, but got the same results. So this one might go to the very heart of the search design used by the forum.

I will add this to my list of things to investigate. Thanks much, Oliver, I appreciate the tip-off.

Addendum: I should probably add that by "fix", I am investigating various open-source javascript-based WYSIWYG editors to replace the current primitive editor used by the forum. That's going to be a challenge to integrate, though.

Yeah i've tried understanding the list tag on here many times and it confounds me. I have no idea how its supposed to be correctly used. It's more like a bullet tag than a list, and the list wrapper tag has absolutely no purpose as far as I can tell!

Agreed.

Suggestion - remove the list tag (from the list of tags...) and replace it with the strike-though tag. strike through

I think that's an excellent idea.

I guess I'm a sucker for flair. 💁🏽‍♂️

Image embedding via the Img tags still works. Thanks for the update Jess.
Miguel

Also, I just wanted to bump "Dark Mode" and/or "Show Reader View" on the iPhone if possible. It's just easier to in a dark environment.

Thanks.
Miguel

I have looked into the reader view a bit. From my (admittedly brief) research, it sounds like the decision to show a reader view resides with the browser, and the key metric the browser is looking for is a lot of uninterrupted text. Since topics are generally laid out as non-contiguous text (i.e. broken up into individual posts) it seems like the browsers are not considering forum topics worthy of a reader view. At least, that's what I've surmised so far. There might be some alternative that I just haven't discovered yet.

The main reason I'm avoiding the dark mode feature thus far is that there are much larger issues with the forum's page layout. Specifically, Google is penalizing us because the pages are not mobile-friendly. Of course, they are, but only for iPhone users, which matters not at all to Google. So really, the whole thing needs to be redesigned. I'm quite reluctant to invest time in a feature (dark mode) that is likely to get thrown away in the near term.

Did I mention I'm getting pretty tired of doing Google's bidding? Yeah.

Thanks Jess. I completely understand. I was hoping it was just a switch. No further investigation needed.
Miguel

I just did a search that only pulled up about 10 pages worth of results, and it conked out when I tried the second page. Might not just be an issue with mega-hit searches.

Interesting , I did a search for "Malossi" that brought up 137 pages of results. 137-132 were blank but the rest seemed to work.

FWIW - Safari on Big Sur running on a MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2019) .

I did this to myself.

Maybe we will "accidently" get those things at the top of the page that we are not allowed to talk about (yet).

You have been away too long...
The breakable lights?

Oh, those.

Yeah. Seems unlikely. Not because I'm against them, but because trying to push sound out to a browser in 2021 is... challenging.

Hmmm.. I'm using MV through Firefox browser, from a tablet with Android 9.

It looks like if you'll place an Emoticon next to a piece of text, it doesn't work:?:

If you'll have a space after text, then it works as it used to

Yep. This was reported yesterday, but as it hadn't actually been fixed yet, I'll grant an MV Entomologist award to all who reported it.

It should now be fixed, for various definitions of "fixed". Emoticons inserted into the text will now have spaces on either side. The insertion point may still be somewhat wonky, especially on Chrome.

EDIT: The other person reporting it was, I think, jimc -- and he has already earned an MV Entomologist award (well, many times over, actually).

8)

The preview formatting needs a tidy.

Ok. It's not the preview. They really do run off the edge like that in iOS.