Can't drink, smoke, diddle my willy. Doesn't leave much to do other than watch you blokes stumble around playing Agatha Christie.

Spike ,'The Cautionary Tale of Numero Cinco'


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


John H - Sep 26, 2002 4:10:52 pm PDT #437 of 10000

Again, sorry to make it seem like it was trivial to do all the wonderful work you've done, and I know its not -- all I wanted to do is make people aware that we finally have a board where the workings are not obscure to us.

This should really be divided into two parts:

  • People are asking for cool site features. They should respect the fact that those features will take work to implement.
  • They're asking for them in a way that almost makes me sad, because they seem not to understand the complete coolness of what you've already done, that we have taken control of the data once and for all.

So plaintively asking "can we have a search engine?" or any other feature, makes me want to do the evil laugh thing -- of course we can, because we own the data and we know where everything is.

"Can we have one right away?", different question.


John H - Sep 28, 2002 3:23:29 am PDT #438 of 10000

It's just happened to me again that someone has posted a URL so damn long that it's stretched out my screen so far I can't read the end of posts.

If I was thinking straight I'd actually post some kind of fix, but what we obviously want is, when replacing

http://something/really/long/
with
<a href="http://something/really/long/">http://something/really/long/</a>
we need a subclause along the lines of "unless it's longer than eighty characters, in which case replace it with a truncated version" so you'd get
<a href="http://something/really/long/">http://something/...</a>


Noumenon - Sep 28, 2002 3:38:06 am PDT #439 of 10000
No other candidate is asking the hard questions, like "Did geophysicists assassinate Jim Henson?" or "Why is there hydrogen in America's water supply?" --defective yeti

I noticed your example stretches out my screen -- looks like I get about 65 characters to a line.


Sophia Brooks - Sep 28, 2002 6:52:59 am PDT #440 of 10000
Cats to become a rabbit should gather immediately now here

Is it possible to add the HTML that makes us able to do the pretty links to the lovely HTML instruction pop-up? Because every tim I do one, I think that I have to go to the FAQ and cut and paste, and I am to lazy and end up with a long ass link.


Megan E. - Sep 28, 2002 8:29:55 am PDT #441 of 10000

Just thought I'd say that now that this board has been live for a while, I totally love it. A big thanks to everyone who was a part of creating this user friendly and beautiful place. I love you all!


Rebecca Lizard - Sep 28, 2002 9:12:12 am PDT #442 of 10000
You sip / say it's your crazy / straw say it's you're crazy / as you bicycle your soul / with beauty in your basket

John, that would be a really neat thing.


Rebecca Lizard - Sep 28, 2002 2:46:56 pm PDT #443 of 10000
You sip / say it's your crazy / straw say it's you're crazy / as you bicycle your soul / with beauty in your basket

t cough

Someone-- ita?-- mentioned the Neat Thing that you can request a full view of the entire contents of the thread (s/he also talked about a feature where you could ask to see posts 40-150, which would be even cooler, but I think that one was still in hypotheticality?) -- is that a feature right now? I thought they said it was, but I can't find the button on the page


John H - Sep 28, 2002 3:48:55 pm PDT #444 of 10000

That was all hypothetical, but there is already a facility to dump the contents of threads to flat HTML.

It's not something every user can do, presumably because if a hundred people clicked on "Save This Entire Thread To One File" out of curiosity, that wouldn't be very good for the server or the amount of total bandwidth. ita certainly dumped threads from the pre-launch version of this board, I remember seeing one of them.


John H - Sep 28, 2002 3:53:14 pm PDT #445 of 10000

OK, thinking about this in the shower, should a long-URL-truncation function work like this:

http://something/which/is/too/long/to/display.htm

turns into

http://something/which/[...]

kind of a Windows version, should it turn into

http://something/[...]/display.htm

kind of a Mac version -- gives more of a hint about contents if you can see the end of it, like if the document's called "porn.html" -- or should it just do this:

[URL too long for display]

which is kind of abrupt, but it does encourage people to think before they post really really long ones.


Burrell - Sep 28, 2002 4:16:10 pm PDT #446 of 10000
Why did Darth Vader cross the road? To get to the Dark Side!

In WX and TT, you could avoid the problem by putting brackets around the URL, as in t Overly long URL , and the software would automatically break it so that it fit the proper size of the window. Wouldn't that work here as well? Or does it specifically need to be coded?