Folks,
I’ll be updating the site today and tomorrow to bring everything up to date. I’ll also be investigating some issues that have been reported. I’ll be hitting low-hanging fruit today and prepping to update the theme tomorrow. Feel free to use this thread to report issues or otherwise bitch about functionality. No promises, but I’ll see what I can do, if not today or tomorrow, then soon.
Otherwise, Open Thread!
EricNNY
Grumble. There I’ve complained.
Major Major Major Major
Ping me if needed, naturally.
Sab
Thank you, Alain. Don’t ping me. I can barely make a comment without borking my own device.
Mnemosyne
A weird thing that may be unsolveable — sometimes if I’m surfing the mobile site on my phone and listening to music on Bluetooth, the music will suddenly pause. I finally figured out that it happens because that goddamn video ad that can’t be turned off is hidden by the mobile site but is still lurking, and it auto-pauses my iTunes even though it’s not visible on mobile.
I fucking hate that video ad.
rikyrah
Thanks for the warning
Spanky
Ping me if you need my mad FORTRAN IV skilz.
James E. Powell
We have faith in you, Alain the site fixer, but we will still howl like entitled frat boys at the slightest inconvenience.
CapnMubbers
It’s probably the Firefox update, as someone else––Ruckus?? noted––but the pie filter fails on a Mac OS 10.11.8 when I leave or refresh the page.
Alain the site fixer
@Major Major Major Major: I’d love to figure out why some posts from the form don’t work. I’m going to increase file size in WordPress but the pics make it, just the text doesn’t and the form doesn’t report an error. Also I’d like to make two small edits on the form; I’ll email privately about that, likely tomorrow.
BellyCat
Mobile site: Ditto the music interruption problem (although on iOS phone I see no video ad, or maybe I never noticed?). Have to restart music every time a page is refreshed to read new comments (if I recall correctly) and for sure there is an interruption each time a new post is selected.
It would also be great if the font could be enlarged by user if desired in iOS settings. And if not possible by user, maybe at least one (or two?) points bigger? (Text looks like it’s about 8 or 9 pt fatiguing to read for extended times even with brand spanking new glasses and almost impossible without, and I have only a very mild prescription).
This would be great for those of us who knew The Cranberries, back in the day, and the rest of us Olds of even earlier vintage.
First-World gripes, admittedly, but since ya’ asked. Thanks for the great work!
sharl
Here are a few items, all pretty trivial IMO, and all can wait as far as I’m concerned.
1. On very rare occasion I’ve had comments with links to tweets – usually multiple tweets – thrown into moderation. At first I was mystified, then I figured out it was probably due to WordPress deciding that I had too many links in my comment, probably due to twitter hashtags being converted to functional links.
…….So now, whenever I see hashtags in a tweet I want to include here, I manually strip out the html mark-up within the tweet, leaving just the (unlinked) ascii. For example, I would convert the twitter hashtag #MeToo:
to #MeToo, so that there isn’t a link that counts against my allowance of 3 links. [Of course, if for whatever reason I consider the link to be essential, I leave it in and make allowance(s) elsewhere].
……..AFAICT this happens so rarely that I don’t see it being very important. On the software/coding side, I assume there are ways to either automate the stripping out of the html links for hashtags, or to exclude hashtag links from the FYWP link count, perhaps by looking for the
search?q=%{hashtag-name}&src=tyahhashtag html markup formatting.2. In the Lexicon, under “Cavuto Mark”, the link to the relevant Jon Stewart (old Daily Show) clip needs to be updated, since Comedy Central rejiggered their site a while back. The link for that 2006 clip is now here.
3. This one is more of a suggestion – a candidate submission for the Lexicon. People occasionally ask what the TBogg Unit is. It came from comments in this 2013 post, the combined effort of Trollhattan (comment #2) and different-church-lady (comment #4). So maybe TBogg Unit deserves a place in the Lexicon?
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Again, nothing big here, and certainly nothing worth urgent attention.
As always, thanks for everything you do here Alain!
Roger Moore
@Alain the site fixer:
I don’t know how it’s connected to the web site, but the autotweeting new headlines is borked. It doesn’t include links anymore, even though they should be easier with the 280 character limit.
Alain the site fixer
@Alain the site fixer: It wasn’t a size issue; up to 256 MB uploads allowed.
Ok folks, major updates done for today. I’m tweaking a few more things and working on customizing the theme files to apply them seamlessly tomorrow. Feel free to comment here folks, I’ll check this post tomorrow.
As for the mobile site, I don’t believe that the video ad is on the mobile site at all, but I’ll check. I did just update it; hopefully this is an improvement.
I’m still investigating some bizarre issues so will likely post again tomorrow to get some feedback/testers.
Alain the site fixer
@Roger Moore: I just fixed that, I think. It may take a new browser window to load the updated code/settings. Not sure.
Alain the site fixer
@sharl: Thanks for the detail! To better support Twitter, I’ve got the links limit set to 7 and have for months. Perhaps when I post tomorrow, we can test and see if that limit is true – perhaps “7” effectively means “3”, in which case I’ll up the limit to 11. (This could be because the anti-spam stuff may insert stuff during processing that gets counted, to explain one potential cause for this)
sharl
@Alain the site fixer: Thanks. The thing with the tweets throwing me into moderation only happened once or twice, and I cannot remember the circumstances, though seem to recall there were a lot of hashtags in the tweets I linked. Based on the rarity of this occurrence (in my personal experience), I would make spam prevention a higher priority than this sort of thing. But I’ll leave all that to your good judgment.
Alain the site fixer
TBH, those link limit in comments settings are ancient, from long before there were effective anti-spam tools for WordPress comments. I could probably up the limit to 30 or something and have little effect on spam. On the other hand, why do that unless I need to? I’d prefer to craft a suitably-high limit. I’d so love to allow commenters to post Twitter links natively, but that would require user accounts and logins and all that fun stuff.
Until tomorrow mes amis!
J R in WV
Thanks for today’s photo shoot post… i expected it to run after the two trading posts, but I guess that color did it. It is amazing.
I wonder if the quite newer Panasonic Lumix would see the same colors the much older Nikon D70s saw? Or is an old Nikon like Kodachrome?
Ruckus
@CapnMubbers:
That was me, I’m tempted to switch to Safari but I’d have to work on my bookmarks/passwords and as it turns out, I’m getting lazy in my old age.
Roger Moore
@Alain the site fixer:
A new post just came up, and the link was there. Thanks for fixing it.
Fleeting Expletive
I have an issue, but it may be my fumbling fingers: when I click on a highlighted item to open in a new tab it often, but not always, leaves BJ and substitutes the item. I can read it and go back to BJ but it doesn’t land back at the numbered comment that I clicked away from. When I do click a highlighted item elsewhere, I try to remember what number at BJ that I left from, if that makes sense.
Thank you, Alain.
debbie
Any chance the search function could go back to the way it used to be? The results seem very selective now.
b1narys3rf
Mobile site is always a dice roll on various posts, as to whether there are comments at all or whether it displays like a different site, with alternative font and no comments. Reloading it does nothing.
Alain the site fixer
@b1narys3rf: pop me an email as I’d like to learn more about your issues. The mobile site is different than the main site and so has its own quirks…