Modern Vespa

You can also quote the text (as if replying) and then copy-paste the quoted text into a PM to a moderator.

great, I just sent him along another this way

The esoteric MV word-change doesn't play well with URLs. e.g.
https://www.gabrian.com/aluminum-or-aluminium becomes:
https://www.gabrian.com/aluminum-or-aluminium

which gets a 404 for its efforts.

This make me strangely happy.

But you're right, that should be fixed.

It also changes words quoted from external sources, but that's no biggie, as work-arounds exist.

This is now fixed, as we are no longer enforcing the correct spelling of aluminum on MV. It's a sad day, for sure.

Ah, but what about https://piejunkie.ca/

and https://Toreador Pants.com/

Only one of these fails, and I can live with that.

I guess I just meant it's the same bug as above, and removing the aluminum keyword substitution doesn't really fix the underlying issue? (That is, if we agree urls shouldn't be tampered with because that breaks functionality.)

Here's a better example that also "fails":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/cupcake

Of course, these are all bound to be rare cases. So I understand it may not be worth changing anything here.

Agreed in principal. In practice, it's much harder to do a word substitution and exclude URLs from said substitution.

(Regex is the answer, but it's an answer that also tends to make one want to insert sharp things into one's eyes).

A favourite quote

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems.

I would argue that now they have N problems.

Is it possible to have the base64-encoded body of an [‍img] tag be inserted as a src attribute, to enable this to work as expected? Not sure if this is more or less feasible than supporting SVGs in the image uploader.

Is there any way in the vertical view of the Topics on a smartphone to show the possibility to jump directly to the last page of the thread? In the horizontal view and on the desktop it works.

Does not "Jump to first unread or last post" (the right arrowhead) work well enough?

Learned something again…

Would it be difficult to change the address bar on desktop to the thread title instead of the topic number? Sometimes I forget what the thread topic is and have to scroll up to the top to find out. Maybe it's just my short attention span.


Change "topic183278.6" to "[MVFR] POLL: What should Jess fix next?"

Not something "to be fixed" - just a new feature suggestion:

USER MAP

The idea is loosely based on bunk-a-biker. Bunk-a-biker is a website/community where you can put a pin on a map, to represent your "home" and let other riders know what you're willing to help out with if they are passing through your area.

I've had people host me in a tent in the backyards, others right in their homes, offer to let me use their motorcycle lifts or chain lube while passing through town for minor maintenance, etc.

Map for reference: https://www.zeemaps.com/bunk-a-biker_world

Wondering if there's any interest in a Vespa-specific community map, for those of us who like to travel beyond our front door. It might be handy seeing who in the community is around where we'll be going, just to get input from locals... (good roads, food, accommodation, dealer/parts/service support, any scooter-specific rules, what traffic/parking/cops are like, etc.)

Food for thought.

You win the prize for most obscure feature request!

I would have to do some investigation to understand whether it was feasible or not. Seems like it's probably do-able, but I can't promise anything until I've looked at it.

I've put it on the list.

As Jim says, the arrowhead on the left is the preferred way to get to the end of a thread, or to the first unread post in the thread. That applies to all formats, all devices, and all situations.

What's shown in the address bar is up to your browser, not me.

What you see there is the canonical address for that page of the topic. The title of the topic IS actually provided, but your browser is probably not showing it to you because the people that design UI for browsers are largely idiots who don't actually understand the first thing about human-computer interaction. But now I'm just ranting.

If your browser supports it, you might try setting it to always show the tabbed view, where the title of the page will typically show up properly. Why they think that's an optional bit of information is beyond me, but as I said, the browser UI people are idiots and I hold them in utter contempt.

And now I'm ranting again.

I like the general idea, and we've experimented in the past with various map features. That said, I have a suspicion that the MV community isn't large enough to reach critical mass for said feature. There's also some worrisome details about privacy and moderation that cause me to lose sleep at night, though that alone isn't actually a dealbreaker.

I'll put it on the list and let it stew for a bit. It's a good idea, just not sure I want to put in the effort to support it.

Thanks!

It's a workaround for not being able to host SVGs with the image uploader.

Just to play devil's advocate, I would ask what kind of content genuinely needs to be kept in SVG format?

Maps look better as vectors, but more importantly, it's easier to amend them when the source of truth is readily available. I want to keep that on MV, so I don't need to worry about which device I was on when I made the previous iteration.

Fair.

There are times when another's ranting opens my eyes and mind to a welcome education. At times like that i think THANK YOU for that rant. TY Jess

could make the url something like mv.com/fourm/topic12354?t=Some_Title and then just ignore the extra. the Some Title could have the spaces etc replace with _ to keep it look good as it's ignored anyway

when searching by topic and there is the sort by newest (which I feel should be default), can we have two versions of this so we can sort by the date the post was made and by the date the most recent comment was made?

When searching by topic (which is the worst-case scenario, btw) the default is to sort by newest -- right up until the moment you specify a search string, at which point the only sorting you can have is sorting by relevance. If you do a non-text search (e.g. applying various filters but no text) the sort order will remain newest.

Do you perhaps mean searching by title, rather than topic?

As for sorting by topic date vs reply date, I get where you're coming from, but my gut tells me that trying to represent that idea in a web UI will make an already-complicated UI even more overwhelming for average users.

yup, I slipped

Okay, assuming we are in fact talking about searching by titles, here's what that would look like. Note that it's not just adding one more option, it's adding two, plus additional words to the original two options.

I'm also unhappy with the terms here -- using the word Topic (when we are searching by topic TITLES) tends to add more of the same confusion that just happened a few posts up.

yeah, I'm not going to suggest a particular answer it's just that I had just been struggling to find a Thread (added this word on purposed ) by trying to remember words in it's Title, which I knew had been alive recently but turns out was a couple of years old.

Yep. Totally get it. And it's not even an unreasonable request -- I'm just not sure how to fit it in without succumbing to excess complexity.

I'm going down the path of trying to prototype that change. The first obstacle I've hit is that the date of the most recent reply isn't actually in the topics table. The only connection we have is the post_id, so we would be doing an SQL JOIN of the topics table with the posts table. The posts table, of course, is by far the largest table in the database, both by sheer storage size as well as number of rows.

This does not bode well.

Actually, strike that. Knowing the actual date is unnecessary. Just knowing the post_id is sufficient, as post_id correlates sufficiently well with time that it makes no difference which is used (in this context).

Okay, this is now done and pushed to the main server instance.

I've made several compromises along the way -- I've given up on "Oldest Last Post", because that's a corner case that I don't think needs to be supported. The completists might whinge, but tough noogies.

The other is that I'm not calling this "Newest Reply", but rather just "Last Post". I've also decided to keep "Newest" and "Oldest" grouped together, pushing "Last Post" after that pair.

For mobile users, I've also had to modify the screen pivot point at which the option bar becomes a drop-down menu, as the option bar is longer now and wraps (or worse, goes off the screen) sooner than it used to.

Finally, I fixed a bug where changes to the sort-order drop-down menu weren't triggering a refresh. This didn't affect the option bar version, just the drop-down menu version. No idea how long that's been broken.

Reported that May, 10th: https://modernvespa.com/forum/post2615478#2615478 (and the prior reported 404-Bug in members section is also still alive)

New Bug:

The "Sort By" Drop-down disappear after typing when searching Posts and Topics (works when searching in Titels).

That's not a bug, that's by design. You can't do any sorting when doing a text search in posts or topics, as the search queries can take several minutes to complete. The MySQL full-text search is optimized to deliver results by relevance, and doing anything else becomes extremely difficult. Trust me, I've tried. A lot.

We can get away with alternate sort orders when we confine our search to topic titles, as the search space is much much smaller than posts or topics.

To compensate for the lack of additional sort orders when sorting by posts or topics, there are some filters that can be applied that at least narrow the results -- you can limit to a specific year or range of years, a specific user, or a specific forum.

If love to see a "mods" forum with subheadings under it so discussions about variators, rollers, exhausts, suspensions, etc would all be segregated into their own place.