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1
Off-topic / Re: This is why I complain about tracking hits
Nao « on August 19th, 2013, 11:29 AM »
Pete, you (at least) have my go-ahead to stop tracking *guests*, where they be human or bots, and just track members.
I think that this element (number of members online) is still worth tracking, at least on large communities, because it shows the commitment level over time; and if there are many guests (slashdotting etc), some of them are bound to register, and thus increase the number of online members, so as a 'relative' number, it's still working! :)
2
Other software / Re: SM.org compromised
Arantor « on August 5th, 2013, 07:47 AM »
Yeah, the turnaround was pretty good - far better than most I've otherwise been involved in (usually on the clean-up side, sigh)

Changing passwords on a regular basis is not necessarily a good plan. It prompts people picking easier-to-remember passwords.
3
Other software / Powered by SMF footer
Arantor « on July 12th, 2013, 09:43 AM »
Something I've been noticing for a while, but it's only recently that I've had enough information to form any kind of hypothesis about it.

The biggest way of sites getting found is by having the 'Powered by SMF' in the footer. Not a specific version but simply that footer. I have a number of SMF sites that have questions that haven't been changed in months - but that the bots just haven't found the sites. All the sites are in Google but they're not being picked up by the spam bots at all.

It's one more trait to discouraging spam, giving them something less to target. The other software has essentially the same problem: if you have powered-by-whatever in the footer that's common to most installs, it's an easy way to be found.

Of course, this is at odds with the implied advertising of software where the footer is used to indicate what the software is that the site is running in order to get some cheap promotion, but perhaps it's reason to consider something else instead that can't be searched by Google. I don't know what that would entail at this stage but it's something to think about. Meanwhile I'm quite happy being low-spam ;)
4
Features / Re: More useless nonsense
Nao « on June 19th, 2013, 06:21 PM »
Have an argument in its defense. Please wait until I'm on my PC.

In the meantime... why not simply show this only to admins..? Problem solved...
5
Off-topic / Re: In Addition to Post Count - Power Ranking?
« on June 6th, 2013, 01:49 PM »
How useful is post / topic count?
I guess it comes down to what you want with your forum. High post en topic count in general, or meaningful discussions and help.
E.g. on our forum about UPC we are running a word game, just for fun, and there are members with thousands of post, but all of them in that word game topic. Nice for the overall statistics of the forum but the high post count of such a member hardly says anything about the value of the member in relation with the goal of the forum only how active he is.

Writing that.
I know that in SMF post in the trashcan aren't counted, but is there a setting to prevent post count for boards / topics  of your choice? [1]
If not, that would be a nice feature to implement.

Stupid idea.
What if post count would be shown per member per board?
E.g. If I am reading in "FAQ" and the post count of a member shows how many post the member made in "FAQ", if I am reading in "Bug Reports" the post count of that same member shows how many post he made in "Bug Reports".
It would make very clear how active that member is in a particular board. It says something about his interest in the subject of the board.
In his profile it would still show his total number of posts.
Probably a nightmare to program but he I said it was a stupid idea. :eheh:
 1. Sorry if this sounds stupid, but I am just a global moderator and not very familiar with the admin panel of SMF.
6
The Pub / Re: Body tag classes
Nao « on March 29th, 2013, 06:17 PM »
Ah... The joys of Wess... :whistle:

- Browser ID:

@if (opera[12.1-] && !windows)
  .my_class
    display: none
@endif

- action: nothing in Wess, because we already have that, right below the #content div. (And I'm not recompiling a CSS file for every page... :lol:)

<div id="content"><div class="frame" id="pm">

- board number:

Have a file called 'extra.b1,b2,b3.css' with your hacks. It will be applied to boards 1 to 3. (Technically, I *could* add a similar feature for actions... But I'm trying to get away from my suffix system, and emphasize the practical side of @if tests right within CSS files.)

- category:

Same, extra.c1,c2,c3.css

- I'll add the all-important one: @if member / @if guest is very useful on a daily basis.

So, I guess... The answer is... No need for that..?
7
Features / Crazy idea: fonts as a preference
Arantor « on March 27th, 2013, 11:40 PM »
Forum use is inherently a reading activity and different people prefer different font sizes and styles.

Kindle allows people to choose different themes and font sizes, the iBooks app allows people to choose different themes, font sizes and has a choice of fonts.

The idea of presenting different fonts as a choice to users intrigues me.

Now before anyone goes off and says crazy things like 'well users can have their own style sheet' or 'people can pick different skins if they want different fonts', let me say that you're missing the point. Yes, users can have their own style sheet. They can pick different skins if they want. But if they can pick different skins, why shouldn't they be able to pick a choice of fonts that works better for them than what a skin necessarily mandates?

I'm not saying this has to be a core feature, nor am I saying it has to be a plugin, or anything of the sort. I just want people to consider the idea of having font choices :)
8
OK, so I was talking to Asgard yesterday and he commented about how the search redundancy in SMF always annoyed him, hence the haiku-esque thought yesterday.

His complaint is that we have a search form every page, and we have a search button, why do we need both? Either drop the quick search, or drop the menu item, and be done with it.

And I thought about this, and I thought some more. Then I had some tea and all other arguments are invalid :D

OK, here's what I want to do.
1. Drop the search menu entirely, there's no need for it including all its fun markup.

2. Add a link to the full search page from just under the search form. This isn't duplication. This means when you want to do things the quick search can't do, you can still get to it.

3. Drop the distinction between simple and advanced searching and just have it push to the 'advanced' page and be done with it.

The result is simpler, cleaner functionality without multiple places on the page being duplicated.
9
Off-topic / Opera goes WebKit, RIP Presto
Nao « on February 13th, 2013, 03:27 PM »
http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/300-million-users-and-move-to-webkit

Farewell Presto, you served us well...

I've been an Opera fan since around 2005. At that time, other browsers really sucked for power users. I discovered tabs in Opera, then the low-memory footprint, and decided to call it quits with Maxthon or whatever default browser I was using at the time.

My best memories of Opera are of the 9.xx line, especially 9.2x which was heavily customized for my needs. It was just THE perfect browser: fast, full-featured and extremely stable. I had at some point over 800 tabs on my 2GB machine. It was unthinkable of. All of these tabs were loaded in memory, i.e. when I switched to them, they showed up instantly.
When I made the switch to 10.x, I was really worried with the many changes they'd done that made it slower and gave less acceptable web site layouts. I switched back to 9.64 or something, and stayed with it for many more months.

Then they went for 10.50 which was an improvement, so I started using it. Version 11, which came out in 2011, was better in every respect. They added stackable tabs, which was something I'd been wanting for a long time. Unfortunately, that feature was buggy, and everytime I quit Opera, I would fear that launching it would present me with a flat list of tabs. They eventually fixed that bug, but not before v12 I think.
Still, these were some good days too. I really liked version 11.

And then Opera 12 came out... And was an awful nest of bugs. I'd never seen that. They'd introduced internally 4 major things:
1- tabs loaded in separate process, so that one tab crashing wouldn't crash the others,
2- Flash ran in its own independent process. Same as above.
3- A 64-bit version, allowing for Opera to use more than 3.5GB of Ram.
4- hardware acceleration, not very noticeable except for one thing: fonts were now rendered using Direct2D, i.e. veeeery smooth job.

So... I had to make the switch. As it turned out,
(1) was useless because Opera had become FAR more prone to random crashes, even with less than 100 tabs. This is something that's crucial to me, and eventually drove me away from it. It was always crash-prone since version 10, but v11 was an improvement on that. v12 was a step down. In the real world, (1) never showed its strength to me, because when tabs crashed, they'd probably crash everything.
(2) actually worked, but it turned out that my Opera crashes were only partly due to Flash misbehaving. So, again, a step down...
(3) was horrible. Because of my tendency to use hundreds of tabs, Opera 64 would use absolutely all of my RAM. It usually isn't a problem, because when you launch another program, it'll just reallocate the extra RAM to it. But in the real world, this never happened, or not fast enough. I had a countless number of "Not enough memory, you should close Opera.exe" error messages showing up during my sleep (I mostly keep my PC on 24/24), and sometimes with some major crashes when I'd turn my screen back on. Yay... So, eventually I reluctantly came back to Opera 32, and guess what...? Much better. Still, Opera would usually crash within a few hours of launching it, and that's with ~100 tabs on. I never dared try with more tabs... It just wasn't there any longer. My Opera fanatism had reached an end.

I think I made the switch to Firefox around last summer, but found it to be so incredibly slow. I loved it when they implemented lazy loading tabs, though. i.e. Firefox no longer tries to load all tabs at startup, it will only load a tab when you activate it. Which effectively makes it currently the best browser for power users with 500+ tabs.

Then I started using Chrome more and more. I always hated its "no geeky stuff" approach, more especially the fact that it removed the vertical tabs feature, which was THE very best Chrome feature. Actually, after trying it out in Chrome (and Firefox's Tree Tabs add-on), I discovered that Opera allowed me to do the same (it has a side tab, and there's a Window feature in it that must be added manually, but then you get a tree-style list that works really well.)
So, what made me switch to Chrome then...?
One word: Sidewise.
It's a plugin that opens a new window on the left side, and attempts to emulate what vertical tabs did. But the developer is hard at work on it, and added many sensible features. For one, you can stack tabs in a tree style. Secondly, you can 'hibernate' a tab, just like in Firefox (using an add-on). Thirdly, and that's for the best -- when Chrome crashes (which it ALSO does on a daily basis, sometimes more), the tab list never gets lost, and it usually reopens my many tabs in hibernating mode, meaning I have the benefits of a fast browser (not many tabs) while still having my tabs available if I choose so. I can also, similarly to Opera (but not Firefox!) search my tabs quickly by entering part of the tab name or URL in an input box at the top. For instance, if I want to clean up all of my local install test tabs, I can just type 'unwedge' in the input text, and then middle-click on all of the tabs that get filtered. It just WORKS.

So... Opera is dropping Presto (only keeping it, from what I understand, for Opera Mini, where pages are generated on their local servers and then dispatched to requesters), and using WebKit.
What does it mean for us? Well, Wedge compatibility will be made easier. I'm a bit sad because I was also very proud about our compatibility with Opera -- I did 90% of my overall testing on it, after all... But it'll be good not to have to focus on so many engines.
Myself, I may very well come back to Opera. If the Sidewide plugin works on it (as it should), then I'll definitely give the new Opera a try. And if it doesn't work, I'll come back to test it on every new version. Because Opera deserves it. It deserves having advocates. Even though version 12 was a failure, it still doesn't mean they should be forgotten for what they did for so many years.

You may ask, why use WebKit and not Gecko..? After all, Opera has always been friends with the Mozilla foundation, and they served as moral support on their fight against the H264 format. But that war was lost last year, and worst of all -- Firefox started losing market shares. Opera knows what it means. It lost market shares to Chrome, too. I think it's simply a matter of Opera finally being realistic (in their decision to dump Presto for another rendering engine), and thus, if they want to be realistic all the way, the only engine they can rely on is WebKit, not Gecko. Because it's no longer about making your point and winning a way; it's about focusing on what they're really best at: user experience and new innovative features. WebKit is now the leader in rendering innovation. Opera will help them stay on that road.

I think it's a good decision that they made. Opera indeed had a superior engine (Presto's HTML, Vega's layout and Carakan's JS), but I don't know of many people who used it for *that*. They used Opera because it was the best user experience they could have -- everything could be modified in the interface. And that's what I mostly miss with Firefox and Chrome. Using plugins for everything isn't always practical. Opera had it all. Now it has even more. I can't wait to try it...
10
The Pub / Re: Infinite Scroll
Arantor « on February 10th, 2013, 07:00 PM »
Just as a thought, how about a compromise of 'load the next x items AJAXively' as a button, without having to actually go to the next page?