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Messages - Nightwish
1
The Pub / XenForo wins
« on February 28th, 2013, 07:39 PM »
Probably off-topic here, but imho still worth to mention:

http://gracelaw.com/NewsXF.html

In short words, XenForo has apparently won the battle. The case has been dismissed after the parties reached a confidential settlement. The public will most likely never learn about the details of the settlement, but the statement by gracelaw implies that Xf will remain an independent entity and IB has no further way to harm their business.

The case was dismissed with prejudice, basically meaning it's over. Once and forever.

These are bad days for IB/vB. First, they lost the Wikitravel case, then came the disaster with vB going "gold" (imho, it's not even iron in its current state :) ) and now this.
2
Development blog / Re: Speeding up development
« on August 8th, 2012, 08:09 PM »
Quote from markham on August 7th, 2012, 04:52 AM
I like the basic premise that Nao proposes. If Wedge calls home when the Admin CP is loaded, it could get all the update information at that time including an indication that the database schema needs to be updated. The Admin could be asked if he wants to update and if so, the entire site is placed in maintenance mode whilst the update script(s) execute. This could possibly be direct server to server so no need for the admin to download the update and then FTP it to his site.
Or is that too simplistic a view? :)
Yes. Because there are a million things that could (and will) go wrong. WordPress does a *fairly* good job for automatically updating the base software, but it can be a nightmare on non-default installation. Forums are rarely run as default installations, most are somewhat, many are heavily modified through mods, plugins, custom themes and some even use custom code modifications. No matter how good you implement an auto-updater for a complex piece of software - it will fail, period. Not for everyone, but for some, at least. The time needed to implement such a feature can be spent elsewhere and unless you have plenty of manpower (which most open source project do not have), wasting time is a no-go.

We are not talking about end-user crap here. This is admin stuff and admins should not give a damn about one-click solutions and getting everything the easy way (and if they do, they should get a different job, because they'll never become good admins).
3
The Pub / Re: Bloc Madness
« on August 2nd, 2012, 04:41 PM »
Quote from PantsManUK on August 2nd, 2012, 10:50 AM
And to post merge (somewhat); less of the "old coders" young R-G. I'm 42 in a month and a smidge and I love Git, but I'm coming at it as a Mac user with Tower. The world of Git is totally coloured by your window onto it, your (graphical) client, and the Wintel marketplace is yet to have a killer graphical git client.
There is smartgit, with decent functionality and crappy look and IDEA's git integration which will basically blow everything out of the water in terms of functionality and coolness (once you spent a couple of months to discover the endless number of cool things in idea).

But Tower *does* look nice and has the potential to make Windows/*nix users jealous :)

Totally disappointed by GitHub's very own Windows client. What a joke, it installs like 30+ megs... for what? Doesn't even *look* cool :)
4
Archived fixes / Theme selector broken + more...
« on July 30th, 2012, 11:24 AM »
First, is the Wuthering sub-skin supposed to look like in the screenshot? The dark grey does look a bit off :)

But, I would simply change to another theme *if* the theme selector in the side bar would let me... Tried to switch to another theme and ended up with an empty page under the url http://wedge.org/?http://wedge.org/theme=1 or something more weird like http://wedge.org/?http://wedge.org/theme=1_c2tpbnM=

The empty page is probably a result of some error not displayed - maybe it's just in the log.

Side note: switching themes in the profile does seem to work.

5
Features / Re: Multiple default skins?
« on April 25th, 2012, 05:40 PM »
Quote from Nao on April 25th, 2012, 01:37 PM
What do you think...?
A session variable is probably the best way to store such short lived objects that have no business in the database. Cookie would probably work equally well, but with all the madness about cookies, it's probably best to avoid them when possible :)

Besides, how often do sessions expire? Shouldn't be a problem to run the detection code every 15 minutes (or so).

P.S. Just noticed. I can like my own posts. Intentional behavior?
6
Features / Re: Multiple default skins?
« on April 25th, 2012, 12:48 PM »
Works fine (Android 2.3, both stock browser and Opera Mobile tested), but the default font size could be a tad bigger.

BTW: Here is a very reliable, still relatively lightweight PHP class for detecting mobile devices. It pretty much detects everything you throw at it.
7
Archived fixes / Changing password in profile > account settings
« on April 4th, 2012, 09:28 PM »
You get the following when your new password is too short..
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The following errors occurred when trying to save your profile:
Your password must be at least %1$d characters long..
Nothing dramatic, just a visual anomaly, changing the password still works.
8
The Pub / Re: Spell checker
« on October 10th, 2011, 08:07 AM »
Well, I've killed the spell checker entirely after I realized that it doesn't really work well enough with any language other than English.

Can't really see how it can be missed when the majority of users have a spell checker in the browser anyway.
9
The Pub / Re: Replacing the recycle bin
« on October 7th, 2011, 07:29 PM »
Quote from Dragooon on October 7th, 2011, 03:41 PM
Inline deletion is always better IMO, it's generally simpler to handle than moving a post to recycle bin. TBH normal users should not be shown anything, and moderators should be shown that "this post" was deleted in a faded box with the option to view it and restore it. Deleted threads should be similar but in MessageIndex.
Not always better. The soft-deletion is basically a nice feature, but if you have a forum where lots of posts and/or threads are deleted, seeing all these deleted items can quickly turn into a annoying feature (at least, if you are admin or moderator and have no choice other than seeing them).

These deleted posts in a topic view can become as annoying (and disrupting) as topic-embedded ads.

I was tempted to kill the recycle board feature and replace it with soft deletion in my fork, but after talking with a friend (who runs a fairly large forum on vB 3), I'm no longer so sure about it.
10
Other software / Re: More thoughts on SMF 2.1
« on September 21st, 2011, 12:02 PM »
Quote from Arantor on September 21st, 2011, 01:15 AM
I mean:
* Database Support
* Browser Support
* CSS3 & jQuery Implementation
* Bloated Profile Fields

These are things we've actually done already in Wedge, almost word for word.
It's also very close to my list of things some of which I've already done, others are planned. Interesting that I just have wiped the dedicated IM fields and the spell checker a couple of days ago...

However, I see this as a natural development. It's most likely because the known defects and shortcomings of SMF 2 are very well known by many. If a developer with some experience with modern web apps sits down to think about what's wrong by design and what needs to be fixed, most of us will come to more or less identical conclusions.

One of them is that SMF 2 shows its age, everyone can see this at the first glance. It looks old and nowhere close to a modern web application and it is pretty much stuck in the age of first (or second) generation forums like vB 3, phpBB, myBB and others.
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Though I think he's talking out of his ass with PDO. While, yes, PDO does offer some things, sanitisation isn't exactly one of them (though, there is a valid argument to be made that prepared statements can deal with it for the most part), moving it to use PDO "just because" isn't really a good idea - and less hosts have PDO installed. There is an argment for making it an object, which we did, and are likely to expand on in the future.
Imho, PDO doesn't make much sense if you go mysql-only (which is what he proposes). PDO is fine, but it comes with some overhead and unless you need real db abstraction for supporting different database backends, it's bloat, period. For mysql-only I would rather go mysqlI or use a custom implementation for prepared queries (which is what we already have).
11
Off-topic / Re: I am looking for a favour
« on September 19th, 2011, 07:39 PM »
Quote from Norodo on September 18th, 2011, 04:39 PM
Sadly (?) I picked German in school.

Maybe you'd be "Nao der Größte"? (Note, I don't really know German, especially grammar. Der could very well be die or das or des or God knows. German grammar is insane.)
Not so. It's more complex than English grammar, but still fairly easy when you compare it to languages like Czech or Russian. That's real hell, grammar - wise.

Or latin. But we all know the ancient romans only invented that language to torture the next 100 generations of humans, yet we are still stupid enough to teach it :)

For the record: "der" is correct.
12
Off-topic / Re: An Ultimate Forum
« on September 14th, 2011, 11:15 AM »
Quote from Nao on September 14th, 2011, 10:43 AM
I have a feeling that the SMF team will eventually invite you to join their developer team, consider the lack of team thereof. Is that something you'd do?
Definitely: No. Not because I don't like them or because I have some agenda - I don't, but I prefer to work freely and without any constraints and politics.
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You don't seem to put much emphasis on your individuality (e.g. no name for your fork, no credit to yourself AFAIK...), is this because you'd rather work on the official codebase?
Nope, it's because I've not yet put much thought into a name or a logo. I do, however, plan to find a name when I get closer to a possibly releasable product but this is something which is not going to happen in the near future.
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What would you do if they took your fork and reused it as SMF 2.1, for instance?
While I don't think that will happen, because I've already wiped a lot of things of which I believe, they would rather want to keep it in official SMF, let's just assume it happens.

Well, then it happens :) That's open source. From that point of view, I can understand why you have (not yet) a public repository, but I have chosen the fully open way and I'm aware of the possible side effects. If you work on BSD licensed code, you should always be prepared for such things. In theory, one could take the code, turn it into a commercial product and earn a lot of money without ever giving you back a single cent. Unlikely? Sure, but still possible.

Basically, I'm doing it for fun.
13
Off-topic / Re: An Ultimate Forum
« on September 14th, 2011, 10:15 AM »
Quote from nhwd on September 14th, 2011, 03:47 AM
So I've read around here and been here since the almost beginning (noisen). I have seen and understand the not so friendly relationship with this project's devs and SMF. However, I really think if everybody worked hard together (SMF,  Wedge, and Femshep[1]) that you guys can create the ultimate forum software that will blow competitors (free and paid) out of the water.
 1. Who I think is Nightwish on here and is creating another fork.
Well, you're wrong. I'm not Femshep and unlike him, I have not posted a five miles long feature list (which undoubtedly has some nice items on it, but will keep him busy for many months if not years) on the official forum. In fact, I've posted nothing about my fork on the official forum, simply because I believe that it doesn't make much sense at the moment.

Also, some comments on the official fork discussion forum make me believe it would be very hard to spawn a fruitful and constructive discussion about the implementation of new features or other radical changes. The general mind set seems to still be very conservative over there :)

As for re-uniting. I don't think so, really. Officially, SMF is now open source, but behind the scene, I still see a lack of commitment to the actual open source *spirit*. There is still no public repository, still no way to submit bug reports or RFEs on the bug tracker and a general lack of "openness".

In fact, before I started my own fork, I did, for a short while, consider to approach them officially with some of my ideas. Reading through the forums (especially the feature request part of it), I quickly realized that such a step wouldn't make much sense at all. Being a nobody to them, I didn't see much chance to get something done there. That's the point where you consequently fork the code and just go for it instead of wasting your time for arguing.

And just for the record: The ultimate forum is not going to happen, ever. Just like there is no ultimate operating system, no ultimate programming language and no ultimate woman on this world.
14
Off-topic / Re: PHP IDE for windows
« on September 12th, 2011, 05:56 PM »
Quote from Nao on September 12th, 2011, 04:36 PM
Looks like it indeed...
The scrollbar, however, looks a little strange! Isn't there a way to have a normal one...?
Well, not really. The scroll bar is actually a combination of a scroll + annotation bar and looks like a custom control. It's indeed a bit weird, but I rarely use scroll bars anyway.

PhpStorm is using Swing (unlike Eclipse) so it'll never look 100% like a native Windows application.
15
Off-topic / Re: PHP IDE for windows
« on September 12th, 2011, 03:29 PM »
Quote from Nao on September 12th, 2011, 07:48 AM
Does it always have a frame around the code window?
Ultimately I ditched n++ just for that... :^^;:
What do you mean with "frame around the code window"?

You can drag code tabs out of the main window onto the desktop and make them top level windows as you wish. See attached screen shots - first is the complete IDE (it's actually very customizable, all the panels can be set to auto-hide so they'll go away when you don't need them) and the second one is an additional top level window holding just 2 code tabs.