Wedge

Looks at first glance like a bug in the contact-list code sending an empty list to loadMemberData, or lMD not filtering an empty list and returning safely. Or both.

Also your assertion is vastly incorrect, almost no software uses ?action=something URLs.

Regarding the PS... running OS X on virtual machines is tricky at best. VirtualBox just sits there and complains if you try to run OS X as a guest VM when you're not already on OS X (I tried this before)

So, here we are in a hotel room with decent wifi and we thought we'd check out the sidebar. We have an iPad 2 and an iPad 3 (so, one 1024x768 and one 2048x1536 retina display) both running Safari with iOS 6.1.3, neither has been modified or running dev code at this time.

Here's where it gets funky. On the iPad 3 (retina one), I don't see a sidebar displayed, even in landscape. It's hidden and I have to unhide it, which is fine. The iPad 2 on the other hand, shows the sidebar all the time, even in portrait mode, even after refreshing the page. Both iPads are using wedge.org while logged in so it's not a guest account vs member account. Admittedly the other account is not a beta tester or admin but I fail to see why that would make a difference.

Also, I assume the sidebar button is positioned at the top of the viewport when going to a page? I don't entirely know what is intended but here's what I'm seeing on iPad 3: the button appears at the top of the page for wherever I go to. So for this page for example, I came here from other navigation and arrived at #new, so looking at the last post and the sidebar button is aligned with the last post.

Now, aligning it with the top of the page when the user lands somewhere is neat - provided it follows them. Otherwise they could easily jump to the mid point of a page and then not be able to find the sidebar again because the button is somewhere on the page. Now, if it is supposed to follow my movements, it's not doing that. I did, while writing a long post, see the sidebar button manifest itself on the far right of the page just above the quick reply area, but only for a short while before it disappeared to who knows where - I was writing a long post and didn't see where it went.

Wait, if I'm in the editor and delete a line of text, such that I force the content to come back down to me (e.g. long post, I double-hit enter to make new lines then delete those lines) the button will appear on the far right of the page but will move if I cause the editor to scroll in any direction.

It's interesting but it seems unreliable to me :( (it's a shame because I can see how hard you've worked but I keep finding things that cause it to break)

Hmm. That could get quite expensive... is there not a way we can combine the inserts together? Or perhaps have a situation where the notifications system can be told not to do it and let the calling context manage it for bulk cases? (For newsletters, there's already stop/resume code, adding more to that is not a huge issue)

I think I should do a mockup of how I think it should look, that would probably help a great deal. Certainly better than the fart-arsing I've been doing all day! (And the code's still buggy with a bug I can't fix without reorganising a vast amount of code which I really don't have time for right now, bah!)

Doesn't work like that. Can you, right now, do a search in Google that will find SMF sites based on having action=profile in the URL? (SMF doesn't unlink profiles, so any that has any kind of public presence will have profile links. So any SMF site that has a public presence will have that in it.)

As opposed to a straight up Google search for the phrase 'powered by SMF' which will guarantee to find you SMF installations. By the way, Xrumer knows about this. It also does similar for the other main forum software.Oh, I'm well aware of that, I even mentioned it in my post. Which is why I specifically suggested maybe we need to look at something else that won't be searchable but will be shown to users. Perhaps an image containing it. Perhaps using CSS to insert content. Whatever... as long as it is harder to find through Google to get an easy reduction in spam for no apparent hit to any other SEO factor.

Suggestion, sort of sparked by something Antechinus said on Elk: bringing the profile and PM stuff under one heading...

How about we bring a new top level menu item into play, whose top level heading is the user's own display name? Under it would be the profile stuff, plus the PM stuff and if we wanted to go really crazy we could put the notifications thing there too. Or bring it all together under the notifications popup.

This has a lot of interesting implications that all tie together - I guess the comment I made about the menu bar being hidden on mobile fell into the ether.

So, let's back up. If you're on mobile, you won't see the menu bar because it'll be in the sidebar and most people won't check that because that's how most people are. If they can't see it, they won't check it most of the time simply because if it's not there, it's not relevant to them.[1] And so people who predominantly use mobile won't see that they have personal messages.

Solution 1: send a notification about PMs. It reduces the priority of having messages in the top level menu, there's simply less burning need to have them up there (though I'm not saying they have to go, but they do get to lose some of their otherwise premium status)

Solution 2: pull profile and PMs out of the menu. Pull them up by the notifications area. Maybe even give PMs a similar interface to the notifications one for showing the inbox, and a similar set of controls for configuration and sending a new message. We can also refit the access-to-own-profile from there and make it easier for people to get to their own configurable items. I'm thinking this would ultimately be in line with overhauling the profile anyway.

Solution 2 means we get to separate the profile and messages items which don't really fit in the menu anyway if you stop and think about it, they're just there because there isn't anywhere else for them and it means we have less need to pull the menu out of page layout in mobile because there's less of it and it means what gets up there can be more meaningful to the *site*.

Consider: you get to show: Home, Admin, Media, Members, Logout. (We could even move the login/out options up there, too) Unlike the profile and so on which relate to YOU, these things relate to the SITE. To me this just makes more sense to have as principle navigation. We can still do PMs-getting-notifications and in fact probably should convert it to that if feasible[2] and that would also solve some issues WRT navigation if the menu bar is going to be hidden. (And we get to streamline preferences for PMs, potentially, if not. I dunno. I just think it'd be a nice way to tackle it.)

Pulling this stuff off the menu also means that we don't do weird things like highlighting the profile tab when you're not viewing your own profile which seems semi logical a thing to do but it's also not really so logical when you stop to think about it. The button is highlighted even though you're not actually *there*, on the place you'd be if you'd pressed the button yourself.


As a follow-on to this, I'd consider putting a 'What's new' option or similar on the menu in their place. I'm not sure whether that would be pulling in Unread Posts or Unread Replies or both in some fashion but I'd certainly bring them out of the sidebar to that point.

At this point I'm mindful that the sidebar is increasingly for 'less important content' in which case I'm trying to discourage major navigational items from being hidden - unread posts/unread replies is useful navigation, if not quite as 'major' as perhaps it might be. But if it were on the top level menu, that makes things a bit different.[3]

And now, just because it's that point in time, I'm going to invoke the devil just to reinforce my point.


If it makes you feel any better you can safely ignore the spoiler above and let the arguments stand on their merit. But if you can tolerate my pointing out what the competition does and why they do it and why we should follow a similar path, read it.


@Nao: Random question. I was going to use footnotes in the above spoiler tag but then I realised that footnotes will be pulled out of the spoiler and into the footer list along with the rest. Should footnotes adhere to the same parenting like they do with quotes (i.e. staying inside the quote they were made in?) or have their current behaviour?

1.	This is a killer reason why auto hiding the sidebar is actually a bad idea and if you remember it was the key reason I didn't want the notifications in the sidebar, because being at the bottom means people aren't going to see it. The same argument can and should be made for the principle cross-site navigation: if it's hidden by default, it's a butt ache to navigate around.
2.	Though I'm mindful of the consequences of this in terms of the code if you have PMs going to a bunch of people at once, especially if that's going to include announcements having the same code path. @Dragooon, what are your thoughts on this? How sane/insane is it to try and generate a large number of notifications for large numbers of users at a time? I know in the newsletter code we already have the continue/not-done code so we can stage it a bit better, but I'd rather not generate several queries for each notification if at all possible. But I don't remember how that part works.
3.	See, then, if we kill those two items from the sidebar, we might as well remove the avatar from there too. Time too while we're at it. These things are simply not that useful, doubly so on a sidebar that only some users will even see anyway.