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
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>
I noticed your example stretches out my screen -- looks like I get about 65 characters to a line.
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.
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!
John, that would be a really neat thing.
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
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.
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.
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?
does it specifically need to be coded?
Yes it does, unless there's something I'm missing, but, that reminds me, there was of course the other possibility -- of just having it break:
http://something/which/is/
too/long/to/display.htm
which leaves it onscreen so that someone could for instance copy it, but I don't know if copyability matters very much to people. You can always copy it by right-clicking or whatever.
