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Messages - Arantor
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Off-topic / Re: Google Plus
« on August 15th, 2011, 02:44 PM »
I've used it. But I'm increasingly hearing horror stories that make FB look tame by comparison.

Such as the fact that your public posts are being tied into search. So your searches are being tagged explicitly as yours, and remember you have to use your real name on Google+.

Just remember: the adage of 'if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear' doesn't really ring true. Everyone should fear because very soon if things continue as they are, you will have no ability to hide anything from anyone again. Every action will be transparent, to someone. And that someone will likely be a private company that can effectively bar you at will. Not a pretty prospect, is it.
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Off-topic / Re: Firefox 6 tomorrow
« on August 15th, 2011, 02:33 PM »
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Seem that the normal user is more worried about the plugins working or not working more than the actual version of FF
Correct. They don't care about versions of things, if it isn't broken, they don't want it touched. Even if you give them all the compelling reasons (security etc), if it isn't broken, don't 'fix' it.

The problem is you get versions with bug fixes intermixed with new stuff and the new stuff tends to upset people because it's not what they're used to etc.
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Off-topic / Re: Doctor Who
« on August 15th, 2011, 01:54 PM »
He knows something, he so clearly knows something, something so terrible that he'd rather know it and keep it from his best friends.

I said when AGMGTW came out that it wasn't his 'falling so much further', it wasn't nearly enough.
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Off-topic / Re: Firefox 6 tomorrow
« on August 15th, 2011, 01:50 PM »
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Which is a bit of a bugger. Who remembers what version of Chrome added support for what CSS3 feature, eh...?
Not really, because as you mentioned, it's self updating and we can rely on users having at least the current minus one stable version (so 14's in beta, 13's stable, we can expect most people to have 12+)

But such stuff is documented - and generally if it works on stable, it'll work in any in-use version of Chrome.
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And every major version had a feature list that was a very honorable size.
:)
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The thing that most people don't know is that Chrome's most interesting experimental features aren't documented and accessible at all from the main interface. Just like Opera's opera:config, Chrome has chrome:flags, with things like tab grouping (unfortunately NOT stacking) and vertical tabs (which are enabled on my copy. Way better...)
Most people don't want 'interesting or experimental'...
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Sure, but it's always the case for every single plugin on every single app... The only way not to have this happen, is to never update the main application. Which, on the web, is unlikely to be a good idea.
It's swings and roundabouts. On the one hand you can be forward thinking and assume it'll work on later versions, which there is a decent chance of, and be speculative about putting in version numbers, or you can be conservative and only put in the branches you've tested, which leads to the usual setup of people having to wait or bodge it themselves.
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I should have said, Chrome doesn't provide it from a usable place (upgrade-time tab, About box...)
AFAIK.
Who reads the changelogs? Most users do not care exactly what changed in a browser unless they're developers/geeks, and/or something breaks, in which case they turn to their friendly dev/geek to fix it anyway.

Only last week someone asked me to downgrade their IE to 7 instead of 8 because apparently they thought it would make it faster. They don't care that it's more secure to run 8, nor that it's more standards compliant or indeed anything else that changed.
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The Pub / [Archive] Re: Logo Madness
« on August 15th, 2011, 01:37 PM »
I like that. It's nice and for some reason makes me think 'old school'[1] when 88x31 banners were all the rage.
 1. Technically my reaction is neo-retro.
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Off-topic / Re: Firefox 6 tomorrow
« on August 15th, 2011, 01:30 PM »
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Well, I would have WTFed Chrome first...
Oh, we already did. It just bothers me that FF feels it has to emulate this approach.
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I don't mind that they're doing that. I mean, if it can help regain some market shares, why not. They're targetting those who think that if Firefox is "at version 4", it must be incredibly older (and thus worse) than Chrome 17.51...
Chrome 13 isn't the target per se, Internet Explorer 9 and Opera 11.50 are notionally the more important targets (since I think only web developers even care what version of Chrome it is)
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Even I was pretty much a fan of large version numbers back in the KMJ days. As a reminder, the final version of it (after 9+ years of development) was v21.42.
After 9 years of dev, version 21 is allowed.
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Firefox 6 still has a couple of nice freebies. At least I can tell. I can't remember what FF5 added to FF4 in the first place...
Most of the stuff that's changed in Chrome is stuff that isn't here yet for everyone else. Stuff like WebSockets support, for example.
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I'm on the beta channel so I've been using FF6 for a few weeks now, with no problems. I'm mainly worried about plugins because of the max versions for them. Thankfully the big mods know what to do and plan ahead, but the smaller ones, they're still limited to FF4.* or so...
Say, does that remind you of something? ;) If only they provided an API that didn't rely on version detection... :whistle:
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Most of the important FF plugins provide for this. You can specify a far max version, most do either 6.* or 7.*, and that was back when FF announced they were following the Chrome versioning concept.
Then they have to scramble to fix it if FF6 or 7 breaks something unexpectedly...
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Chrome major updates don't have many changes either... I don't even know where to find their changelog. At least FF provides one...
So does Chrome. http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/
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Off-topic / Firefox 6 tomorrow
« on August 15th, 2011, 01:14 PM »
Seriously, they're emulating Chrome's game.

Firefox 6 is quietly accessible today, but the official release is tomorrow with 7 beta available on the same day as well... seriously WTF?

The trouble is, it breaks plugins (Chrome doesn't really have such a strong element here anyway) and I can only wonder why they feel the need to bump major version numbers so often. The latter is true of Chrome, of course, but the difference is I don't really notice massive changes, and I don't really have to worry about the version - I can legitimately just say 'Chrome latest' even though 'latest is not a version'... :whistle:


http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/15/firefox_6_code_lands/ has a little more.
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The Pub / Re: Jump box and its stupid Go button
« on August 15th, 2011, 01:04 PM »
Well, it depends how much other stuff they were planning to use. SMF isn't exactly blessed with CMS type stuff - sure, the portals can expand it reasonably well but for any large scale CMS stuff, they're not really up to the job.

Looking briefly at the site I'd also speculate that they were after something considered 'stable' which at the time, SMF 2 wasn't (and most of the better CMS stuff is available for SMF 2 only anyway), and that it wasn't at risk of drama and/or implosion.
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and knowing what you all are cooking up now, makes me want this project to go very very far.
We think it has the potential, certainly :)
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The Pub / Re: Jump box and its stupid Go button
« on August 15th, 2011, 01:01 PM »
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but i jsut don't feel like an all day event with drupal
That's the thing. Virtually every mod I did for SMF (with the exception of SimpleDesk, naturally), took under a day to write, even the very earliest ones where I was still getting to know the code - I doubt you could say the same of Drupal.[1]
 1. You definitely can't say the same for MediaWiki. Jesus what a mindfuck trying to write parser extensions for MW is.
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The Pub / Re: Jump box and its stupid Go button
« on August 15th, 2011, 12:55 PM »
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and i say keep the go up and down buttons as permanent
That was my take on it too; it's sufficiently useful to leave in all the time to quickly go up and down the page and IMO too many people were asking how to turn it on, on sm.org; if it's that unobvious it either needs to be made more prominent or simply on by default - I just too it one step further.
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I'm sorry but their Up/Down links are both intrusive and ugly to me..?
The go up link isn't too bad, it's not too big and it's tucked out of the way IMO but the 'last post' / down button is far too big and it doesn't fit with the rest of the stuff that it's around.
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but im sure if one has skills, one can tell a price instead of ask
That's the thing with Drupal. You can do a fantastic amount with it but coding it is less like a hobby and more like a vocation, you really have to want to get to know it to achieve anything with any real complexity. (I doubt you could implement Aeva or SimpleDesk in the same volume of code as they currently exist for SMF, but to be fair Drupal isn't designed to be a forum, but a massively extensible CMS.)
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The Pub / Re: Jump box and its stupid Go button
« on August 15th, 2011, 09:04 AM »
They serve two totally different purposes and I really don't see us removing either.

The Jump To facility lets you move to a different board to the one you're in, not necessarily higher up the chain, while the linktree lets you move higher up the chain specifically - and I do a lot of navigating by the lower linktree.
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Other software / Re: To upgrade or not to upgrade...
« on August 15th, 2011, 12:18 AM »
That's the fix to it; the original QR box didn't have that, and it had a tendency to mess with entities in all kinds of bad ways.
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Other software / Re: To upgrade or not to upgrade...
« on August 14th, 2011, 11:45 PM »
Actually, quick reply used to have issues with entity handling anyway, but I seem to recall it's since been fixed (fairly sure I ended up fixing it by proxy when adding the hybrid editor)
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Features: Posts & Topics / Re: Merge Double Posts
« on August 13th, 2011, 12:05 PM »
The effort of coding/testing it ;)
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Features: Posts & Topics / Re: Merge Double Posts
« on August 13th, 2011, 10:11 AM »
Virtual merging. Real merging, you'd still end up physically merging stuff, but in virtual merging, it sounds like you would be putting all this effort in only not to merge on threaded replies, which to me seems to defeat the point a bit.