Soft merging of posts

Arantor

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Re: Soft merging of posts
« Reply #30, on August 18th, 2013, 07:09 PM »
Scrolling up and down this page I can see issues too... e.g. the userboxes from reply 26 and 27 sometimes overlap when scrolling.

It's always one of those things, we can make it crazy powerful but there are going to be issues with people wanting to customise it. Perhaps it would be better to keep it simple?
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Nao

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Re: Soft merging of posts
« Reply #31, on August 18th, 2013, 07:31 PM »
Yup, as I said, I don't have this locally, so I'm going to try and commit my Msg changes, get ready for that... :-/
Re: Soft merging of posts
« Reply #32, on August 18th, 2013, 07:39 PM »
I don't get it... I uploaded all of my WIP in here, and it still doesn't work, even though it's pretty much the same codebase...
Re: Soft merging of posts
« Reply #33, on August 18th, 2013, 07:39 PM »
Testing.



1




2





3





4





5.

Hmm, working fine on *this* page...
Re: Soft merging of posts
« Reply #34, on August 18th, 2013, 08:05 PM »
Okay... Most of the problems are due to user boxes being taken out of flow, without anything to replace 'em. If your signature is longer than your post, then it's dead, you'll get glitches.

I'm working on a fix, but it involves cloning, and I'm not fond of that...
Posted: August 18th, 2013, 07:56 PM

Made a workaround that avoids using clones, so it's faster.
Unfortunately, it also means the .poster area is now fixed in size, but I think it's acceptable as a trade-off, hmm...

Now, I only need to fix the last post.
Re: Soft merging of posts
« Reply #35, on August 19th, 2013, 12:07 AM »
Just for the record-- I've finally fixed all bugs, I think...

If you're seeing anything 'abnormal' with the user boxes, please post ASAP.
Also, I'd like to ask whether you'd all like to have this as optional rather than forced, and if yes, default or not..?

One of the issues, in terms of usability, is that having the user box always at the same place, you might think the post starts 'there' when you're right in the middle of it, but it probably simply means getting used to look for the 'Reply #' box to see the beginning of the post, I guess...
Re: Soft merging of posts
« Reply #36, on August 19th, 2013, 12:58 AM »
(No one around anymore..? :P)

A small bug... You need a post sent by a guest, or someone with no avatar and no user details.
Go to that post, so that the user name is position:fixed, and hover the name. The menu is shown above everything as expected, but below the user name of the next message. This shouldn't be happening, but stacking contexts are so fucking complicated when you start positioning stuff...

I'm guessing, the only fix for that is to have the menu HTML in a div outside of the main HTML page, and absolutely position it relative to the document itself, but the very reason why I avoided that, is because all hell breaks loose when you start modifying the username's position without hovering out of the menu.

I'm marking this as a cantfix for now, but all suggestions are welcome... Of course.

Arantor

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Re: Soft merging of posts
« Reply #37, on August 19th, 2013, 01:20 AM »
Oh, I'm around but I was trying to figure out how to reply but since we're here... I love the idea. The implementation... not so much. But not for the obvious reason.

We still have the non-zebra striping issue (e.g. previous page, reply 20 has postbg, replies 21-22 are postbg2, reply 23 should logically be postbg but is postbg2, 24-25 are postbg, 26 is postbg as well)

I also don't see themers actually bothering to do anything creative with the templates when, to be blunt, this is going to make them fragile. This is the problem we're going to run into more and more; cool stuff gets implemented but it screws up on anything that isn't the exact structure we've set up.

Does it, for example, work in any other skin? (Haven't tested) And we only have a few skins here. What it will guarantee going forward is that virtually every skin just becomes a knock off of the defaults with slight colour variations because no-one will bother to customise them at all for fear of breaking anything.

Now, that's not unheard of - XenForo and IPB are largely in the same rut but they're not actually as deeply into it as we are, pretty much everything there is still customisable without too much pain but with us it's just going to get worse.

I don't know if that's a trade off you're willing to make, ultimately.

The only way it might work is if it's not really toggleable as such but that themes can override and disable it and just have it that way.


Thought: why are we doing the zebra striping in classes? Can't we just use :nth-child(odd) and :nth-child(even) to handle that? I can think of other places that would be nice (like the thoughts on the front page, it always feels weird when we do anything odd with it)

It also means that infinite scrolling never fights with these issues, and that my dream of AJAX quick reply never has to care either. And it's totally controlled by the style rather than wrangling with template code so the templates get smaller too! (since you don't need postbg, postbg2 alternation, you just declare postbg or even don't bother with that, and just control it straight from CSS)

In fact, the only modern browser that doesn't support it is IE 8 and we can just provide them a default for that without alternation which is fine by me.

Auk

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Re: Soft merging of posts
« Reply #38, on August 19th, 2013, 02:35 AM »
Woah, sooo coooooool! :cool:

Weeee





EeeEEee




eEeeeeeeEeeeEeE





eeEeeeeEee




eeeEeeEeee!!! :D

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Aaron

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Re: Soft merging of posts
« Reply #39, on August 20th, 2013, 03:51 PM »
Quote from Arantor on August 19th, 2013, 01:20 AM
Thought: why are we doing the zebra striping in classes? Can't we just use :nth-child(odd) and :nth-child(even) to handle that? I can think of other places that would be nice (like the thoughts on the front page, it always feels weird when we do anything odd with it)
Yes, please. Saves a lot of headaches.
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Nao

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Re: Soft merging of posts
« Reply #40, on August 20th, 2013, 04:26 PM »
CSS-based zebra striping has actually been a high-level to-do in my list for a LONG while, and I really, really want to do it, but it also implies getting rid of windowbg everywhere, something I'm willing to do, but when...?

Well, OF COURSE now I want to do it as my next mission... :lol:

Anyway, Pete, I need to comment your post point by point, and I'll do it, but I just want to say, your post seems to question the need for soft-merging, rather than the more recent userbox changes..?

Arantor

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Re: Soft merging of posts
« Reply #41, on August 20th, 2013, 04:34 PM »
You don't need to get rid of windowbg everywhere. One at a time - there's already postbg specifically for posts, target that first. Then one for the thoughts list, and so on and so on. Eventually yes, windowbg will go and that's a good thing. Ideally each major area should have its own set of classes so that it's easier to style at will - while it will take slightly more CSS, the per-page saving could be surprising - because you wouldn't necessarily need to leave in all the classes; I don't know what 'root' does but I see no reason why you couldn't flatten down 'root postbg(2)' to simply postbg, which would give you the same targeting in the JS as root did, whilst giving you all the styling options you needed. And then you save 5 or 6 bytes per post, every post. It will quickly make up for extra CSS.

I'm not questioning soft merging or the userbox changes per se, though they're both intertwined. Anything that makes it harder for themers to theme means we're just going to see what IPB and XenForo have for theming; which is to say we have much the same as SMF, only a bajillion times more entrenched.

There are precisely two XenForo sites I know of that don't look like XenForo. Every other installation just screams XenForo. Ditto for IPB. Anything that introduces behaviour that is dependent on rewriting layout markup is going to be fragile.

Nao

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Re: Soft merging of posts
« Reply #42, on August 21st, 2013, 05:55 PM »
Quote from Arantor on August 19th, 2013, 01:20 AM
We still have the non-zebra striping issue (e.g. previous page, reply 20 has postbg, replies 21-22 are postbg2, reply 23 should logically be postbg but is postbg2, 24-25 are postbg, 26 is postbg as well)
Yeah, looks like I forgot about that uh..?
Interestingly, the JS prototype version I wrote accounted for that, although not in a obvious way.
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I also don't see themers actually bothering to do anything creative with the templates when, to be blunt, this is going to make them fragile. This is the problem we're going to run into more and more; cool stuff gets implemented but it screws up on anything that isn't the exact structure we've set up.
I've tried really hard to make the process as solid as possible, although it always has limits...
It can be disabled by setting the <mobile> option to 1, although I'm considering adding a <softmerge> option, to make things clearer, I guess... (Or a <userbox-direction>horizontal</userbox-direction> setting, or something.)
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Does it, for example, work in any other skin? (Haven't tested)
Yes, it works in all skins.
Right now, short of changing the template files or Msg skeleton or modifying userbox visibility, you can't 'break it', unless you really want to, I guess...
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And we only have a few skins here. What it will guarantee going forward is that virtually every skin just becomes a knock off of the defaults with slight colour variations because no-one will bother to customise them at all for fear of breaking anything.
Worst that can happen, I guess, is skin authors will need to explicitly disable that feature, of course...
Adding new settings to a skin is really, really easy.
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Now, that's not unheard of - XenForo and IPB are largely in the same rut but they're not actually as deeply into it as we are, pretty much everything there is still customisable without too much pain but with us it's just going to get worse.
The least IPB-ish IPB forum I've ever seen, has got to be this one...
http://forum.frandroid.com/
It's just using someone else's skin, though. But as flat designs go, it's an interesting one.
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The only way it might work is if it's not really toggleable as such but that themes can override and disable it and just have it that way.
Yup, it can be done...
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In fact, the only modern browser that doesn't support it is IE 8 and we can just provide them a default for that without alternation which is fine by me.
Quite honestly, we're far, far away from 2010 now. At the time, I still felt it was important to have some basic IE6 support. I haven't tested IE6 in weeks (months?), IE7 pretty much the same, IE8... Not in a while, but to me it's important to get this one right, but there's certainly one thing I'll never give a damn about: getting the colors to be the same... If it doesn't support :nth-child, it just won't do zebra striping, so... Who cares! ;)