Xander: We just saw the zebras mating! Thank you, very exciting... Willow: It was like the Heimlich, with stripes!

'Him'


Buffistas Building a Better Board  

Do you have problems, concerns or recommendations about the technical side of the Phoenix? Air them here. Compliments also welcome.

To-do list


§ ita § - Nov 29, 2002 1:54:22 pm PST #1785 of 10000
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.

I'm sifting them out one by one and looking at them that way, Jon. I want to make sure there's no cross-pollination of weirdness.

Not suggesting for a moment that we don't all write perfect code the first time, or anything.

And then I have to check they don't conflict with any of the changes I implemented in the meanwhile.


Jon B. - Nov 29, 2002 1:55:46 pm PST #1786 of 10000
A turkey in every toilet -- only in America!

Not suggesting for a moment that we don't all write perfect code the first time, or anything.

Heh. I'd be shocked if you didn't find an error somewhere.

t off to see Harry Potter with my brother


John H - Nov 29, 2002 2:08:17 pm PST #1787 of 10000

I'm no regex expert so I've no idea if this is doable, but is there a way to look inside every tag that takes parameters (like a href or font) and "close" every "open" single or double quote?

I think that's heading toward a parser again.

How about this -- we grab the contents of every tag, and count the quotes in it. If it's not an even number, throw the error. Brute force again...


Rob - Nov 29, 2002 8:40:34 pm PST #1788 of 10000

I like John's idea. We can require attribute authors to use the entity forms for quotes inside of attributes, if they want to use them in odd quantities.


John H - Nov 30, 2002 4:24:54 pm PST #1789 of 10000

I was thinking about that outstanding bug/feature where, when you've quit the browser, you're unable to auto-log back in, using "remember me", directly to the message centre, you get taken to the index page.

Here's the code:

  if (!$_user || (!is_array($_user->subs))) {
    Header("Location:" . URL_path() . "index.php");
  }

and I'm hampered only by two things: not knowing where $_user comes from, and where $_user->subs comes from.

I have a copy of the board from a while ago, which predates "remember me", so I can't actually test it, but obviously it's failing one of those tests, either the user doesn't get auto-logged in on this page, or they get logged on but it can't retrieve their subscriptions.

This behaviour also happens if you have no subs and go to the message centre, is that still true now? Rather than it saying "you have no subs, can't help you" it returns the user to the front page?

[Thinks to self: you can test that you know!]

[Goes to test]

[Comes back]

If I have no subs, that's what happens, I get taken to the front page, (and the link to the message centre disappears).

Is it a fair assumption that the message centre is trying to check the subs too early or something?

If we took out that second boolean, what terrible consequences would ensue? People with no subs would get an empty message centre?


John H - Nov 30, 2002 4:52:47 pm PST #1790 of 10000

Coming back with the answer to my question -- rather than showing no threads, it shows all threads. So the tweak would be to check for subs then put "you have no subscriptions, you need the edit profile page" for these hapless users. But who are they anyway? People with no subs don't see the Message Centre link anyway, so how did they get here?

Am I being annoying? Sunday morning, nothing to do, lots of coffee, sorry.


Jon B. - Nov 30, 2002 6:02:01 pm PST #1791 of 10000
A turkey in every toilet -- only in America!

The only difference between the front page and the Message Center is that the former shows all threads while the latter shows only your subscribed threads. For those with no subscribed threads, the coders had a choice to make with respect to the Message Center--- either show no threads, or show all threads. For usability reasons (no one wants to see no threads) they picked the second, but rather than mess with the message center code, they decided to throw those users to the front page, since it does the same thing. I suppose we could have a warning message ("You have no subscribed threads"), but maybe you don't want any subscribed threads. In that case, the warning message would get annoying fast.


John H - Nov 30, 2002 6:24:04 pm PST #1792 of 10000

rather than mess with the message center code, they decided to throw those users to the front page, since it does the same thing.

Absolutely fine, and I agree, but the point I was making is that, despite the fact that I have metric shitloads of subscribed threads, if I start my browser and go straight to the message centre then I get kicked back to the front page.

For some reason, I seem to be erroneously failing the "user has at least one subscribed thread" test at that point.


§ ita § - Nov 30, 2002 7:27:12 pm PST #1793 of 10000
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.

John, your code is old. That bug has been fixed for most people. In fact, I wasn't aware that anyone was still experiencing it.

Can I have your OS/browser info again? And does it happen with all combos thereof?


John H - Nov 30, 2002 9:38:21 pm PST #1794 of 10000

I'm on MacOS 9.2.

I just tried it in Netscape 4.5, Opera 5, and IE5, and they all do the same thing.

In case there's any confusion, what I did was

  1. Launch browser and log in.("Remember Me" is enabled)
  2. Make a bookmark for Message Centre
  3. Quit the browser
  4. Start the browser up again
  5. Click on the bookmark
and every time I was flipped to index.php.