Gossamer Forum
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Forum Bug?
I noticed that when I edit a post, the markups (including url, smilies, and pre) do not hold. For example, when I post a URL with the url codes and then edit the post, the URL is displayed in HTML, like the following:

Example:

<a href="http://www.mydomain.com/" target="new">http://www.mydomain.com</a>

Just thought I'd let you know...

Regards,

Eliot Lee
Anthro TECH, L.L.C
Web: http://www.anthrotech.com/
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Re: Forum Bug? In reply to
Yes, AnthroRules,

I second that! Itīs very frustrating when you have made a beautiful Wink formatting of a long post, and when you edit it all looks well in the preview, but in the forum the edited posting is displayed with the converted markup codes.

I also miss the (code) (/code) tag !



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Re: Forum Bug? In reply to
Click the FAQ link at the top. There is a list of codes you can use, and the <PRE> tag is one of them.

Code:
It will
allow you
to format
the text
the way
you want
And the advantage is the :D 's don't become smileys <G>, and in MSIE the text doesn't become 2 point size.

As for the conversion in the "edited" posts... I think that is something Alex can fix in the config file. There is a whole list of regex's and it's really difficult to try to figure out how to make them all work the way you expect.






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Re: Forum Bug? In reply to
Is this on new posts, or only editing old imported UBB posts? I can't seem to replicate this. I posted a message with some tags, clicked on edit, and then saved it and all the tags where preserved, never saw any html.

Cheers,

Alex

--
Gossamer Threads Inc.
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Re: Forum Bug? In reply to
I've been able to duplicate it.

Actually, I didn't know what they were talking about until I tried to edit my post above.

When I edited it, then saved it back, the message was saved but with < and > rather than [ and ].

Even when I manually edited the edited post and changed the < to [ and > to ] the message was stored with the < and > tags. I ended up deleting it, and re-entering it.

If you'd like, I'll edit the message again, and let you see the result, but you should look at the formatting first, so you see what happens.

I had this problem (similar) with WWWThreads. My url tags were not being translated properly. I had to hack away at the regexes for a while to make it work, and I'm still not sure they do. Why? I don't know. I made a few upgrades to the system (the advanced smileys) but that shouldn't have changed the tag parsing.

But, this problem seems to be how EDITED messages are handled by the parsing algorithms, and not the new messages. It's specific to the edited messages.




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Re: Forum Bug? In reply to
In Reply To:
Is this on new posts, or only editing old imported UBB posts?
Both...and the most annoying tags that change are the URL and pre tags.

Regards,

Eliot Lee
Anthro TECH, L.L.C
Web: http://www.anthrotech.com/
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Re: Forum Bug? In reply to
Has anyone else noticed that when you copy code from forum posts, IE5 interprets it as being all one line? I haven't checked if Netscape does the same thing. With the user login feature, you can't use the old UBB trick of going to the edit screen to view unformatted source...

A very nice thing would be splitting up the messages in individual tables so that one long line doesn't force all of the messages to scroll horizontally, especially with the zero margins putting text right up against the edge. I know this is possible with UBB, but I'm not sure about WWWThreads.

Dan

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Re: Forum Bug? In reply to
Dan,

Good observation...it is NOT only IE 5.0, but IE 4.0. And I did check it through Netscape and found that there was a lot of horizontal scrolling going on.

Alex, would it be possible to re-write the table widths to be 100% of the screen for the main tables and nested tables rather than using pixils???

Also, the <b>Check Spelling</b> is horrendous! When you click the button, there are no buttons on the next page and when you click on the <b>Back</b> button in the web browser, the Reply disappears...very frustrating.

I apologize for being critical about this new forum...but there are definitely usability issues that I think need to be noted and resolved at your earliest convenience.

Regards,

Eliot Lee
Anthro TECH, L.L.C
Web: http://www.anthrotech.com/
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Re: Forum Bug? In reply to
Pixels vs 100% for what? I just moved the size of my browerser window around, and everything got smaller and larger as if it was running on a %. Where do you see it hard coded?

The only thing that didn't was the main forum header/logo, but that's understandable. And it is readable down to about 500 pixels.



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Re: Forum Bug? In reply to
In Reply To:
Pixels vs 100% for what? I just moved the size of my browerser window around, and everything got smaller and larger as if it was running on a %. Where do you see it hard coded?
So, that people using 640X480 screen resolutions like me can see all the content without having to horizontally scroll to get pertinent data. Percentages are MUCH better than pixils. Pixils are fixed and do not allow flexible viewing between different monitor sizes and screen resolutions.

The td width attribute, which expands the 100% viewing, can be found in all the forum pages....

Look in the Source Code:

Code:
<td width="658">
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="658" bgcolor="#000000">
You will see that nested tables are set to fixed pixil widths, which forces people with 640x480 screen resolutions to horizontally scroll to see content in the forum pages!

Do you see what I am talking about now??? I hope so.

Wink

Regards,

Eliot Lee
Anthro TECH, L.L.C
Web: http://www.anthrotech.com/
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Re: Forum Bug? In reply to
What I'm saying, is that I've resized the screen to less than that. And the forum follows.

If there are long lines in 'pre' tags, just like UBB, it won't fit on the screen.

But, if you take this forum thread, for instance, and resize it horizontally, everything collapses down to about 500+ pixels (less than have of my 1024 screen size).

If you mean the message text boxes, you can adjust that size. 80 columns extends to about 640 pixels + screen borders, etc.

I'm not seeing the hard-coded sizes, even when I set my screen to 640x480 or 800x600.


The navigation bars wrap, but nothing extends past the right margin.


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Re: Forum Bug? In reply to
I also get horizontal scrolling under about 700 pixels wide (eyeballed). However, more and more, I think people are settling on 800x600 as the resolution of choice to design for...

One thing that might help is left aligning the reply button instead of right aligned as it is now. With a page that wraps off the screen, you have to "search" around to figure out how to reply.

Still, the single biggeset thing I see that would fix a lot of these problems is to break up the messages into individual tables.

Dan

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Re: Forum Bug? In reply to
Dan,

The reason for the 700 pixel width is the use of PRE tags about 5 messages up that force the width of the table to be wider than the screen.

Nothing will change that....



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Re: Forum Bug? In reply to
I have to disagree. It requires horizontal scrolling at the exact same place with two other pages I just looked at, neither of which has any apparent formatting tags such as 'pre.'

Dan

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Re: Forum Bug? In reply to
I think people are settling on 800x600 as the resolution of choice to design for...

Yes, for sure... that's my number, actually 720 is where I go to start with, sometimes 700, but not more than 720.

Regards,

>>Muhammad
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Re: Forum Bug? In reply to
Dan,

I'm able to look at the forum threads in a window that's about 4 icons wide at the top of MSIE.

So, either MSIE is ignoring the "hard" formatting, or something else is going on. I _know_ I can hard format, since if you look at my wwwthreads forum, it is set at about 620 pixels. (my main logo is 606 pixels wide --- don't ask <G>)

http://www.postcards.com/forums/wwwthreads.pl



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Re: Forum Bug? In reply to
I think I've tracked this one down, it should be safe to edit posts again. =)

Cheers,

Alex

--
Gossamer Threads Inc.
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Re: Forum Bug? In reply to
In Reply To:
I think people are settling on 800x600 as the resolution of choice to design for...
Yes...but it is important to keep in mind that there are still a large number of users who have their screen resolutions set smaller. And also keep in mind that text readers for adaptive populations use 640x480 resolutions to enlarge screens.

And with the new FCC - ADA regulations....it is important to make good faith efforts to accomodate adaptive population needs.

Regards,

Eliot Lee
Anthro TECH, L.L.C
Web: http://www.anthrotech.com/
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Re: Forum Edit Bug? In reply to
Thanks Alex!

Edit of postings works fine now. I've just re-edited two postings with a good result!

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Re: Forum Bug? In reply to
In Reply To:
And with the new FCC - ADA regulations....it is important to make good faith efforts to accomodate adaptive population needs.
Last I checked, GT was in Vancouver, BC. When did the FCC invade?

BTW... there is nothing that PREVENTS people under ADA from viewing the forum. Scrolling the screen a little is NOT a roadblock to access.

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Re: Forum Bug? In reply to
I fail to see why it is necessary to include your company name or URL in the messages. This information is available by viewing profiles and just wastes space in the threads.

Just my humble opinion but signatures have contributed to alot of scrolling when unnecessary and seem to be used more for self promotion.

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Re: Forum Bug? In reply to
In Reply To:
I also miss the (code) (/code) tag !
They now work just like before. You can also use
Code:
tags as well.

Cheers,

Alex

--
Gossamer Threads Inc.
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Re: Forum Bug? In reply to
Hi Dan,

In Reply To:
Has anyone else noticed that when you copy code from forum posts, IE5 interprets it as being all one line?
Yes, I've seen this, it's a pain. =) I'm not sure of an easy away around it, but would love to fix that up.

In Reply To:
A very nice thing would be splitting up the messages in individual tables so that one long line doesn't force all of the messages to scroll horizontally
I'll look into this, but am not sure how easy it will be to do. Your text shouldn't be left aligned as the main content table is width 95% and center aligned, so while the header and footer should be flush left, the content should have an indent. Of course, in design world, should is the operative word here. Wink

Cheers,

Alex

--
Gossamer Threads Inc.
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Re: Forum Bug? In reply to
Hi Alex,

I figured the all-in-one-line problem wouldn't be an easy fix. Just wanted to make sure it wasn't my imagination!
In Reply To:
Your text shouldn't be left aligned as the main content table is width 95% and center aligned, so while the header and footer should be flush left, the content should have an indent. Of course, in design world, should is the operative word here.
We all know how little connection there is between the design world and the real world. Smile I believe what is happening is that when a long line (pre tag) forces horizontal scrolling, the browser attempts to adjust by ignoring the 95% constraint and uses the left edge. I suppose 95% of the screen width is meaningless when it's already off the screen... Probably the best way to ensure that the left margin always remains, short of splitting the messages into individual tables, is to have a a blank table cell/column over there with a hard coded space or something and a width of about 5 pixels.

Dan

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Re: Forum Bug? In reply to
Thank you, Alex for squashing the bugs...I really appreciate it. The edit function works relatively good now.

One other problem I noticed is that the ASP tags sometimes have weird characters in them after editing them.

Example:

Code:
<%build...>
But all in all, the edit function works much better now!

Thanks.

Smile

Regards,

Eliot Lee