Board Issues 4

[Ran]

7 hours ago, felice said:

I've been getting a lot of Cloudflare captchas trying to access the site recently, which is a bit of a nuisance. Is there anything that can be done about it on the server side?

Travelling ATM, but I will look into it when I can. Those are quite rare, and are a security thing if your ISP has had spam/bot issues, as I understand it.

[Aejohn the Conqueroo]

On 9/11/2021 at 3:07 AM, Ran said:

Travelling ATM, but I will look into it when I can. Those are quite rare, and are a security thing if your ISP has had spam/bot issues, as I understand it.

Been getting these Captchas a lot lately, logging in @werk. pretty much every time I log in, sometimes even when I open links and am already on the site.

[Ran]

6 minutes ago, Aejohn the Conqueroo said:

Been getting these Captchas a lot lately, logging in @werk. pretty much every time I log in, sometimes even when I open links and am already on the site.

Is that with your current address? I can put in an exception I think.

[Aejohn the Conqueroo]

21 minutes ago, Ran said:

Is that with your current address? I can put in an exception I think.

Yes it is.  Thanks!

[Ran]

2 minutes ago, Aejohn the Conqueroo said:

Yes it is.  Thanks!

I've tried that out, let me know how it works. That said, I think Cloudflare may be having issues because I've gotten the Captcha as well, and have never gotten it before. Their security systems may be acting up.

[Aejohn the Conqueroo]

1 minute ago, Ran said:

've tried that out, let me know how it works. That said, I think Cloudflare may be having issues because I've gotten the Captcha as well, and have never gotten it before. Their security systems may be acting up.

Thanks again.  I'll let you know if I have any more issues.

[John Suburbs]

Just FYI, the other day when I was navigating the forum and wiki Trend Micro starting flashing security warnings, most of them on something called reachms/bfmio, but also on sync/bfmio. It seems to be OK now, but I just thought you might want to know. It could be something simple like expired security tickets or something.

[felice]

On 9/30/2021 at 8:06 AM, Ran said:

I've tried that out, let me know how it works. That said, I think Cloudflare may be having issues because I've gotten the Captcha as well, and have never gotten it before. Their security systems may be acting up.

I haven't had any captchas for the last couple of days. Hopefully that's the end of the problem!

[Soylent Brown]

The way the member titles are displaying at the moment isn't great - is there an option to put it back to how it was before the 'upgrade'?

[Ran]

42 minutes ago, Soylent Brown said:

The way the member titles are displaying at the moment isn't great - is there an option to put it back to how it was before the 'upgrade'?

Yes, but requires more advance editing than we've had time to do as of yet. We will be looking into it, however.

[Kyll.Ing.]

Does this update mean that the insufferable and stupid "20 pages only per thread" rule is revoked? Once again there are no good reasons to keep it other than "that's how things are done", and it's a really hostile rule from a user experience perspective.

[Ran]

3 minutes ago, Kyll.Ing. said:

Does this update mean that the insufferable and stupid "20 pages only per thread" rule is revoked? Once again there are no good reasons to keep it other than "that's how things are done", and it's a really hostile rule from a user experience perspective.

I guess we are hostile people round these parts. Not changing anything based on your opinion vs. the evidence of years of actual practice on this forum.

You are welcome to vote with your feet, of course. Such is the freedom of the internet.

[felice]

6 hours ago, Ran said:

I guess we are hostile people round these parts. Not changing anything based on your opinion vs. the evidence of years of actual practice on this forum.

Calling it "hostile" is going overboard, but there is a psychological barrier to starting a new thread compared to replying to an existing one, which can result in conversations getting cut off prematurely. And not being able to reply to posts from earlier installments can be a nuisance. My understanding is that the rule was originally due to software limitations that no longer apply, so maybe it is worth reconsidering whether or not it still makes sense?

I'm currently seeing (or rather, failing to see) the active page number in white on a white background.

[felice]

5 hours ago, felice said:

I'm currently seeing (or rather, failing to see) the active page number in white on a white background.

That's displaying correctly now!

[A True Kaniggit]

[spoiler] This should be a spoiler. [/spoiler]

 

Is something wrong?

Am I doing something wrong?

 

Or is it that the little eye button is now the way to go? No more typing it out? That's fine, just want to confirm it.

Edited November 10, 2021 by A True Kaniggit

[Ran]

@A True Kaniggit

Yes, BBcode was depreciated with this upgrade. The eye icon is the way to put in spoiler boxes.

[Kyll.Ing.]

On 11/8/2021 at 10:47 PM, Ran said:

I guess we are hostile people round these parts. Not changing anything based on your opinion vs. the evidence of years of actual practice on this forum.

You are welcome to vote with your feet, of course. Such is the freedom of the internet.

Increasingly, I am. I spend less and less time here. Shame, because it's a good community. There are good discussions to be had. But the moderating policies are like a handful of gravel in the cake of the forum, so to speak. It really sours the fun in the long run, as it's a hassle to stay subscribed to relevant topics (particularly with the other policy of auto-locking threads after a year), the padlocking really kills the discussion, and threads with interesting content are buried in the depths of the forum with no good way to retrieve and revive them.

Anyway, the term I was looking for was "hostile design", but it seems I didn't manage to word it properly.  The policy in question is one that hampers the user experience for no real benefit, apparently kept in place more out of stubbornness than because it makes any sort of sense to have it there.

You refer to "evidence" based on years of practice, but what kind of evidence are you seeing from this? What is the feedback? Do many people bring up "I really like that threads are closed after 20 pages for no real reason?" or is the feedback more of an "aw balls the old thread was locked so here's another writeup of the opening post, please subscribe to this thread and try to remember what we were talking about" type of thing? I don't have any concrete examples right off the bat, but I seem to remember a lot more of the latter and none of the former. It's a feature people might tolerate and respect, but not like. I think there is a pretty good reason why I have never even heard of any other forums with this type of policy anywhere on the Internet. It can't just be "my opinion" that it is a silly policy, because then it'd be a lot more widespread. Instead, if you go to literally any forum without this policy and suggest it be implemented, you'd be the laughing stock of the board within minutes.

Or let me put it this way: Why was not this very thread locked on page 20, to be replaced with "Board Issues 5"? Heck, we'd be close to Board Issues 9 by now if the policy was applied consistently, yet here we are in a 77-page thread and the server hasn't melted down yet. Could I postulate that the old thread is kept because it's a hassle to remember to lock it, write up a new opening paragraph, and get all the moderators to subscribe to the new thread every time the treshold is reached? Case in point.

Edited November 10, 2021 by Kyll.Ing.

[felice]

On 11/11/2021 at 7:11 AM, Kyll.Ing. said:

I think there is a pretty good reason why I have never even heard of any other forums with this type of policy anywhere on the Internet. It can't just be "my opinion" that it is a silly policy, because then it'd be a lot more widespread.

It used to be more widespread - I know of other forums that had the same policy in the past. On some forums the moderator who closed a thread for length would create the next installment at the same time.

[Kyll.Ing.]

4 hours ago, felice said:

It used to be more widespread - I know of other forums that had the same policy in the past. On some forums the moderator who closed a thread for length would create the next installment at the same time.

But this was back when forums were coded on potatoes and running on server hardware that would be put to shame by a modern wristwatch, wasn't it? I could see it being a somewhat sensible choice when long threads caused lag for users, but now that's no longer a problem. I've seen forum threads longer than 10,000 pages filled to the brim with pictures, running like clockwork.

Back in the days, such policies were required to prevent lags caused by limitations in computing power, to benefit the user experience.

Currently, this forum is running on near limitless computing power, but policies are causing conversations to lag and hamper the user experience.

We've somehow gone full circle but ended up in a reverse direction along the way.

[felice]

1 hour ago, Kyll.Ing. said:

But this was back when forums were coded on potatoes and running on server hardware that would be put to shame by a modern wristwatch, wasn't it?

No, just a few years ago.