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Arantor

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More stuff for the removal of
« on August 18th, 2011, 12:16 PM »
I'm aware that I haven't shown too many pictures of the being-revised admin panel thus far but you can see from the changelog that I'm quite keen on cleaning things up and removing options.

I actually believe that, to a point, it is possible to have too much flexibility and that a certain realm of 'this is what you get' is not inherently a bad thing.

Some of the options I've removed I did just remove, some I put up for debate. Here's some more that I'm putting up for debate.

* Enable shorthand date display (for the Today / Today + Yesterday / always just do the date) option

I'm not convinced this needs to be optional, per se. I don't think it would make it any more meaningful for it to be purely optional than it would for it to be permanently set to 'Today + Yesterday'. (Those who want purely relative dates are still going to want more thoroughly relative dates, of course, a setup that is not accounted for currently and is probably not going to be present in the core itself)

How many admins actually change it from the default?

* Members per page in member list

Again, how many admins change it? 30's a nice number, for quite a few reasons; it strikes a balance between limiting how many you're throwing at the member list queries, and again I don't think many admins ever change it because it's a nice amount, not too few, not too many. (Particularly if we do what is in place here, and add the avatar in)

* Show online/offline in posts and PMs

This is off by default, and I have yet to understand why. It's the option which triggers the little green box next to a user's name if they're online, or grey if they're hidden/offline. Seems to me that it's a no-brainer to have it on, and if the theme decides to change it, that's up to the theme, not the core to configure it.

* Disable administration security

I don't like this option as a rule. The only time I ever find myself turning it off is on a localhost machine where I have total control over it anyway.

What I'd probably do here is remove the UI item, but leave the hidden setting in place so that I could still configure it myself on a localhost through a small tweak in phpMyAdmin. It isn't the sort of thing that needs to be left hanging around normally.

* Enable reporting of personal messages

Is there any time you *don't* want PMs to be able to be reported? Should it be a permission?

I'm actually just inclined to remove the option and force it so PMs can always be reported. If it's a problem you can just restrict people from sending PMs, and of course there's always the ignore list.


Thoughts?
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Dodo

  • Posts: 2
Re: More stuff for the removal of
« Reply #1, on August 18th, 2011, 12:35 PM »
Quote
* Disable administration security

I don't like this option as a rule. The only time I ever find myself turning it off is on a localhost machine where I have total control over it anyway.

What I'd probably do here is remove the UI item, but leave the hidden setting in place so that I could still configure it myself on a localhost through a small tweak in phpMyAdmin. It isn't the sort of thing that needs to be left hanging around normally.
+1


PantsManUK

  • [me=PantsManUK]would dearly love to dump SMF 1.X at this juncture...[/me]
  • Posts: 174
Re: More stuff for the removal of
« Reply #2, on August 18th, 2011, 01:01 PM »
+1 on all of those Pete.

(I installed a brand new 2.0 Gold yesterday to have a play, rather than my usual "take a copy of our live 1.1.X and upgrade"... the admin panel is a right CF, so you have my admiration for wanting to take it on.)
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Nao

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Re: More stuff for the removal of
« Reply #3, on August 18th, 2011, 01:18 PM »
Shorthand date: Yes and no. I like always having 'Today' specified, but Nightwish's fork and xenForo go even further (à la Facebook) by giving fully relative dates. I don't like this either, but I think it'd be interesting to find the best of both worlds. Maybe by having the relative date on hover, or something? Thing is, I'm not excited with the idea of updating the dates every minute, so technically having a relative date show up on hover would allow JavaScript to only be run when hovering. I don't know. This warrants discussion.

- Members per page: +1. Possibly could be made into a plugin or simply a hidden setting, if we keep the number stored somewhere... But having the number set in the UI is something that's pretty much overkill.

- Online/offline: +1.

- Admin security: Yes and no, again. You're mister Security, so maybe you can tell me if this is realistic: offer to enter a list of IPs that are free from confirming their password. Or even just the 'one' IP, if the admin is on a static IP...

- Reporting: +1.

Aaron

  • Posts: 356
Re: More stuff for the removal of
« Reply #4, on August 18th, 2011, 01:27 PM »
Quote from Nao/Gilles on August 18th, 2011, 01:18 PM
Shorthand date: Yes and no. I like always having 'Today' specified, but Nightwish's fork and xenForo go even further (à la Facebook) by giving fully relative dates. I don't like this either, but I think it'd be interesting to find the best of both worlds. Maybe by having the relative date on hover, or something? Thing is, I'm not excited with the idea of updating the dates every minute, so technically having a relative date show up on hover would allow JavaScript to only be run when hovering. I don't know. This warrants discussion.
If you're going do do shorthand dates, I think you should do it the other way around, i.e. give the full date in a tooltip when hovering a shortened date.

I personally like having it optional. I don't think Today and Yesterday need their own option (as is the case now), but I'd like to see an option to choose full dates, 'today/yesterday mode' and fully 'human-readable' shortened dates.
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Arantor

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Re: More stuff for the removal of
« Reply #5, on August 18th, 2011, 01:29 PM »
Quote
the admin panel is a right CF
That's my exact thinking on it. I did, a long time ago, comment on it - not mentioning names at the time - in a blog post: http://innovatenotimitate.com/?p=105

I did, as will be noted, relent on my stance of how broken it is, because I'm not pulling it apart and rewriting from scratch like I debated there, but I have made some quite sweeping changes in places, with more to come.

The really big test is permission, and whether I can make that sane or not.
Quote
Shorthand date: Yes and no. I like always having 'Today' specified, but Nightwish's fork and xenForo go even further (à la Facebook) by giving fully relative dates. I don't like this either, but I think it'd be interesting to find the best of both worlds. Maybe by having the relative date on hover, or something? Thing is, I'm not excited with the idea of updating the dates every minute, so technically having a relative date show up on hover would allow JavaScript to only be run when hovering. I don't know. This warrants discussion.
Well, Today + Yesterday is the default, and I'm perfectly happy with the default as are a lot of people. In fact, the only people who seem to dislike this view, are those who want fully relative dates. I'm not saying that's a good thing or a bad thing in itself, because it isn't either good or bad in itself. It's simply not your preference (nor mine, as it happens)

Note that the relative date does not have to be updated except on page load, that's a setup that works well enough in a real world use.

The line ultimately is thus, we have three options:
* We do nothing and leave it as is.
* We do something and make Wedge just handle Today + Yesterday, i.e. removing this option and the surrounding code that complicates timeformat and on_timeformat. (My preference)
* We do fully relative dates throughout.
Quote
- Members per page: +1. Possibly could be made into a plugin or simply a hidden setting, if we keep the number stored somewhere... But having the number set in the UI is something that's pretty much overkill.
Hidden setting is not my first choice, but I'd rather a hidden setting (or even just the number plainly specified in the code) than having it as a UI option. But if we do make it a hidden setting rather than ripping it out, a plugin author can reinstate it quite trivially.
Quote
- Admin security: Yes and no, again. You're mister Security, so maybe you can tell me if this is realistic: offer to enter a list of IPs that are free from confirming their password. Or even just the 'one' IP, if the admin is on a static IP...
Not really, no, because you just know you're going to get an idiot careless enough to set their IP address to include a wifi cafe and then have their account hijacked while they're in there.

It would almost be better to go the other way and offer to whitelist IP addresses that can even get into the admin panel - if IP addresses were even remotely usable as a means of identifying a user.
Quote
If you're going do do shorthand dates, I think you should do it the other way around, i.e. give the full date in a tooltip when hovering a shortened date.

I personally like having it optional. I don't think Today and Yesterday need their own option (as is the case now), but I'd like to see an option to choose full dates, 'today/yesterday mode' and fully 'human-readable' shortened dates.
Interesting approach, very interesting.

spoogs

  • Posts: 417
Re: More stuff for the removal of
« Reply #6, on August 18th, 2011, 03:14 PM »
Enable shorthand date - I've never changed it from default and have had a user ask about it either.

Members per page in member list - never changed this either

Show online/offline - I agree with you there, besides unless a user chooses to be hidden they're shown in who is online anyway. I agree with on by default or even on permanently.

Disable administration security - I agree here as well, though it was nice to have the setting immediately available to be disabled on localhost.

Enable reporting of personal messages - I agree with this as well, having in on by default or even permanently on reduces the chance of a user posting the PM public. I had this problem when I didnt know I had to specifically turn that on... a user was being harassed and didnt have athe option to report the PM so the next best this was to post them publicly.

In short +1 to all
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Arantor

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Re: More stuff for the removal of
« Reply #7, on August 18th, 2011, 03:20 PM »
Well, Enable reporting of personal messages and Show online/offline are now set on permanently (the settings physically removed etc)

Interestingly as I noted in the New Revs topic, the online/offline icon is additionally driven by whether you can send PMs or not, and if you can't, you see nothing (and the icon is a PM link if you can)

DirtRider

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karlbenson

  • Posts: 44
Re: More stuff for the removal of
« Reply #9, on August 19th, 2011, 09:53 PM »
I like the idea of having the dates constantly update themselves. Its facebook'esc.
Essentially users not having to refresh to be shown how long ago that message was actually posted.

"it was 1min ago when you loaded the page, but by the time your reading the last post on this 20 post topic its now 10mins ago.
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Nightwish

  • Posts: 41
Re: More stuff for the removal of
« Reply #10, on August 19th, 2011, 10:51 PM »
Quote from karlbenson on August 19th, 2011, 09:53 PM
I like the idea of having the dates constantly update themselves. Its facebook'esc.
Already done this on my fork, but there are some specific cases where time stamps should neither be relative nor update themselves. Example: Local time display on the profile page

Local time: 2 hours ago *does* look weird :)

It's not really a big deal and can easily be solved with an extra parameter for timeformat() and by telling the JavaScript to only look at timestamps with a specific CSS class.

I like it though I understand that it is not everyone's preference, so there should be a profile option to disable these dynamic and relative time stamps.

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Snape

  • Posts: 14
Re: More stuff for the removal of
« Reply #11, on August 19th, 2011, 11:17 PM »
There are certain uses for not showing a user's online status to all other users on the system.  The main quirk of SMF's implementation was that even if you checked to not show it, it showed it anyway on the user profile (ultimately corrected by a mod)...but generally in most of the forum softwares I've seen, it's been an available option to the end user.

Arantor

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Re: More stuff for the removal of
« Reply #12, on August 19th, 2011, 11:18 PM »
Quote
There are certain uses for not showing a user's online status to all other users on the system.
Like what?

If a user doesn't want their status known, that's fine, they have the power to opt out. But I have yet to see a case where you would summarily rule it out entirely, especially given how you can see who's online on the front page.

Snape

  • Posts: 14
Re: More stuff for the removal of
« Reply #13, on August 19th, 2011, 11:22 PM »
Oh re-read your original post- you're not taking away the user's ability to hide..just making an indicator show in posts.  The user would just display as hidden.  Nevermind then.

Namely the feature comes into play with stalking issues or users who tend to hassle other users.

Arantor

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Re: More stuff for the removal of
« Reply #14, on August 19th, 2011, 11:26 PM »
Quote
The user would just display as hidden.  Nevermind then.
Yup. Removing the ability to actually be hidden would be a very big, very nasty step, and I fully agree about the privacy reasons.

I'm literally only talking about the little icon:


Specifically whether that's displayed or not, and now it's forcibly displayed (except when you can't send PMs, but I think we'll end up changing that)
Posted: August 19th, 2011, 11:25 PM

@Nao: There's a bug in the Noisen code for the img tag; it's eating all the whitespace around it (even if that space happens to be newlines/line breaks!)
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