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The New Forums

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I'm not a very active user, more of a lurker here. Coming back here after a while has been a surprise.

The only thing I intend to comment on, is the new requirement for javascript; I find it seriously flawed (both the requirement, and the scripting itself). I read the entire thread and at times, simply *navigating* from page to page wasn't even working properly, at best taking up to 15s just to (appear to) do anything, sometimes being nice enough to display a "working" banner. A couple time complaining about not being able to connect to the server.

This on a machine that I consider beefy, with a recent enough browser and an FTTH connection.

I don't care, or do not wish to comment, on the looks of the new forum. I have nothing to say about navigating threads etc, I simply haven't done it enough yet.

But the scripting requirement and at best low reactivity of the scripts themselves render the forum almost unusable to me.

I'll come back and check regularly. I do hope that those issues can be fixed.
 
Why cant we have the location information for each user present with their name and avatar again? This will be an ongoing issue when they post Wanted threads. Plus its just good info to know where we all come from.
 
There's something wrong with the PM feature. I received an email notice of a new PM along with the text, but the "Messages" here shows only a blank message.
 
Wanted to share a bit of fun with little practical purpose. In the case that one would want to browse using plain HTTP, I wanted to see how hard it would be to use an intermediate machine on my local network to serve everything internally via HTTP while relaying requests over HTTPS to the forum. What I came up with was a tiny php proxy that does this. It doesn't do anything about the javascript, and at this point you can't log in, but it does serve the basic site over plain HTTP within my local network. I would not recommend trying this anywhere that was not behind a firewall, but here's the details in case you want to try it.
There are two php files, proxy.php:
Code: 
<?php
header_remove("X-Powered-By");
$remote = 'https:/'.$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
$resp = file_get_contents($remote);
$my_ip = "127.0.0.1:8080";

$replace = true;
$content_type = "";
foreach ($http_response_header as $h) {
if (strpos($h, "Content-Type"))
{
$content_type = $h;
if (strpos($h, "text/html"))
{
$replace = true;
break;
}

if (strpos($h, "application/javascript"))
{
$replace = true;
break;
}
}
}

header('Content-Type: '.$content_type);

if ($replace)
{
$resp = preg_replace("/https:\/\/(.*?)\//", "http://".$my_ip."/$1/", $resp);
}

echo $resp;
?>

and redirect.php:

Code: 
<?php
// rewrite to our index file
include __DIR__ . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . 'proxy.php';
?>

put these in some directory on a machine in your network, and run
Code: 
php -S 127.0.0.1:8080 redirect.php

You may need to replace 127.0.0.1 with the local IP of that machine. Same with the $my_ip variable in proxy.php.
Then from the HTTP only machine, go to
http://<local ip>:8080/vcfed.org

and hopefully, it will load. It's not fast, I'm sure a real multithreaded server would do much better. And you can't currently log in or probably post anything. But this was a bit of fun and maybe will let you load the site on your own network over HTTP.
I did notice that the nav buttons that depend on javascript are pretty easy to find in the source, it's probably possible with a little regex'ing to add in real href links to go to actual pages in a thread. Will try that sometime later.
Again, I probably would not host this anywhere other than a local network behind appropriate port blocking. Enjoy
 
Forum not reporting file size uploads properly. Endless editing. Neat.
 
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I find it odd that all Avatars now have a white border around them. I guess it's not a big deal, but I am not a huge fan.
 
Up the top, where it says Forums Blogs Articles etc, Groups occurs twice. Each one points to different things though. Can they get unique names?
 
Random thought here.
If the Rants section has been closed now for several years, what was the point of carrying it over? This would be a good chance to mark it invisible for non-moderators/administrators since you can't exactly delete an entire subforum and expect nothing to explode but you can hide it as part of an upgrade since there's nothing we can do with it anymore anyways.
 
Erik said:
This is a thread to discuss the new forums. The Good, The Bad, The Ugly.

Please keep it civil and try to help each other find stuff that may have moved.

Thanks!
Click to expand...

Finding it hard to be civil when so much is a pain. Now found out you don't see location of poster, so it needs to be in post. Instead we get useless facebook and tweet buttons....
 
I find myself using the forum much less now as I cant find anything in the same way I used to. It just seems a jumbled mess and was not as organized as before. Shame.
 
You can see the poster's location by clicking on his name.

I assume the row of white bars above the Join Date should light up depending on the number of posts made, something like Ranks. But it doesn't work.
 
It is a little disorienting at first, but it does seem to work better with my phone. Except if I make the mistake of trying to add a photo from photo album? It takes me to the empty album screen and then holds me there forever.

I wasn't a major fan of the old forum software.. I did msg a lot from my phone and my phone could make it a challenge sometimes to post anything. I always blamed that on my phone though. I've not tried this from desktop yet but I'll give it a try shortly.

One weird thing.. I attempted to send a photo to the forum to see if size limits were any different. On the first try it informed me that the limit for photos is 2mb. When I went and found a photo just under that limit it told me the limit was 256kb.

Anyway.. appreciate the efforts of the admins nonetheless.
 
NeXT said:
Random thought here.
If the Rants section has been closed now for several years, what was the point of carrying it over? This would be a good chance to mark it invisible for non-moderators/administrators since you can't exactly delete an entire subforum and expect nothing to explode but you can hide it as part of an upgrade since there's nothing we can do with it anymore anyways.
Click to expand...
I disagree with this, as there are some useful bits of information in there.

Now, if anyone comes across any specific old post that might really be "problematic" somehow, you can still report it and the mods can still do something about that.

Sigh. If we could just get rid of those "share" and "tweet" buttons, and that "like" icon, then at least this forum might look like a place for intelligent grown-up discussion again. These SHOULD be configurable.(Yea, I can block them with a custom CSS or whatever that previous poster was using, but I care about how it looks to the world.)
 
mbbrutman said:
It's been fun watching this thread.
Click to expand...
Indeed.

It's not easy to migrate a web forum while keeping its data intact. That part has been achieved successfully.

However, the forum's new UI is modern, and therefore shitty. That is unfortunate, but livable.

The HTTPS part is needed, and I welcome it, as long as it still supports TLS 1.0 and the admins have not succumbed to the "only TLS 1.2 and higher supported here" fad. I'm on my (somewhat) modern Ubuntu 14.04 LTS laptop now, but I'd like this forum to be usable with Firefox 2.0 on my Pentium-II laptop with Debian 3.1 (haven't check that yet).

Also, please get rid of as much JavaScript as possible. I don't want code from the Internet running on my browser, thank you very much.

Lastly, cancel the Facebook and Twitter buttons. PLEASE.
 
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