Comment On Announcement: New Website Software

Great job! And fist!

keep it up... all you needed to fix was to make sure you could edit your own posts but hey

keke:

keep it up... all you needed to fix was to make sure you could edit your own posts but hey

ehm... how do I edit my post? oh god don't say you forgot that =/

Is it just me, or is this site loading a million times faster? Possibly because it is Saturday? I hope it is because of better code!

WeatherGod:

Is it just me, or is this site loading a million times faster? Possibly because it is Saturday? I hope it is because of better code!

Sob... we lost the edit feature! Also, I would like to get the avatars back.

Otherwise, nice.

At least the first article on the home page should be shown in full.

I don't think I'm the only one who rarely checks the forums and usually just checks thedailywtf.com every few days to read the latest article.

Another note: new articles aren't posted ever day, even though it's called the daily wtf.

Maybe the best sidebar wtf could get promoted to the front page on days where no articles get posted?

WeatherGod:

Is it just me, or is this site loading a million times faster? Possibly because it is Saturday? I hope it is because of better code!

Yes -- it should be faster. Community Server Forums was much more complicated and did not do output caching (by design -- it was a forum, so that wouldn't make much sense). The code I whiped together simply pulls it from the database, renders, and specifies that the request should be cached for a few minutes.

AtnNn:

Maybe the best sidebar wtf could get promoted to the front page on days where no articles get posted?

This is in the works: whenever a sidebar thread gets a high enough rating, the main site will pull it in as an article. This will "clutter up" the front page more, which is why it's been summarized.


Weathergod: Edit Feature Coming back soon (one thing at a time, heh)

Still looks like Community Server to me, or are you dogging them but keeping their UI design and CSS??

Not to sound ungrateful, by I loved the comments coming to RSS. It was often more fun than the article itself.

JK:

Not to sound ungrateful, by I loved the comments coming to RSS. It was often more fun than the article itself.

Not a problem -- I'll add that back in. Shouldn't be too hard to throw together.

A moment of silence, please, in memory of the real WTF (namely, the forum software).

fennec:

A moment of silence, please, in memory of the real WTF (namely, the forum software).

Oh, I wouldn't start popping the Champagne yet, I'm sure The Real WTF might still be alive and "well".

captcha: "hacker" - Curses! I was recognised!

Sweet, I can now log in without needing to enable JavaScript.

On the other hand, I do not like the way the articles have been shortened. I hate having to click through to read.

The home page was way too big for some people probably, but is there a page with fill-text articles for the previous several days now? Looks like the new version requires much more clicking, very unconvenient for other people like me.

danguy:

Sweet, I can now log in without needing to enable JavaScript.

On the other hand, I do not like the way the articles have been shortened. I hate having to click through to read.

I agree, although one click to a full article + comments wouldn't be bad. Currently having to do 2 clicks to reach both is very annoying. (HomePage => Full Article => N Comments || HomePage => N Comments => [expand full text] )


Still, progress and upgrades are good (I even registered an account! )

On captcha: almost broke my eyes trying to prove I'm not a robot. Gradient ends seem to be chosen at random, and sometimes center is too dark (it was blue and black in my case). I also saw them both being the same color (green), so I suppose both can be black sometimes. If possible, it is better to choose among bright colors.

Also, preview button alters colors, but not the word. Not a bug, but looks strange.

Also, it is possible to reuse captchas. Certainly a bug.

This blows. The front page is now totally fucking worthless (WHERE ARE THE FUCKING POSTS?). The comments are fugly. Please put it back how it was.

The real WTF is the mess this system makes of RSS.

Also how, on the comment page, do we reply to the article itself? All I see are reply buttons to other comments. Am I missing something?

And why does replying to the article itself not keep the article visible?

I agree - At least the first article on the home page should be shown in full.

I agree, I hate not having the full articles on the front page. Click throughs are annoying!

I have to agree that clicking through to read the newest article kinda bites. Previous articles shortened is fine, but the recent article full-size as before would be much, much preferred.

Long-time-reader:

The home page was way too big for some people probably, but is there a page with fill-text articles for the previous several days now? Looks like the new version requires much more clicking, very unconvenient for other people like me.

The RSS Feed (http://syndication.thedailywtf.com/TheDailyWtf) does have the full articles in it, and it is "web friendly" I guess. But, if that won't do ... I can take a crack at putting a "Display Full Articles" checkbox on the home page that remembers it's preference via a cookie.

Would anyone want that?

It breaks PRE code examples, otherwise http://syndication.thedailywtf.com/TheDailyWtf is much better than current http://thedailywtf.com/ . Mind if I change my bookmark?

For me cookie is fine, although separate page would do as well.

Hmm. There is something in human nature that resents change, but I would like to see some features of the old site return:

- Expand at least the latest article on the frontpage.
- Have the comments apear on the same page as the article, just as the old software did.
- Re-add the link (though not necessarily the links to the last topics) to the Side Bar WTF.

It may be a little faster (for me, at the other side of the pond, it was mostly the sidebar with the navigation and sponsors and the like that was very slow) but I need to visit more pages to see the same content now...

Paul Nieuwkamp:

- Re-add the link (though not necessarily the links to the last topics) to the Side Bar WTF.

I should have logged in, now I have to relpy to this to "edit" :P

I found the sidebar: It is outside my viewport. I hadn't seen the horizontal scrolbar yet, and there was just a row one pixel wide visible. My main hint was the uppermost gray bar that seemed to be too wide. Turns out, the entire page is too wide. As I'm still on Firefox 1.0.7 maybe upgrading my browser will fix it.

Oh, and for this post I have the same captcha as for my previous one. Don't know if this is coincidence though :)

WeatherGod:

Sob... we lost the edit feature! Also, I would like to get the avatars back.

Otherwise, nice.

I like that it loads faster. I think it looks better too. I also like the hint that perhaps comment threading might be implemented sometime too.

But I would like avatars back. I miss my smiley pink balloon with a cupcake on its head.

I think it would be a good idea. Should it be a cookie, or should you tie it to usernames for those of us who have bothered to register?

Omnifarious:

But I would like avatars back. I miss my smiley pink balloon with a cupcake on its head.

Avatars should return soon. They'll be much smaller though to fit in the comment title. Wonder how it will look considering the Forums avatars (where it'd be pulled from) are like 75x75 ...

Erzengel:

Should it be a cookie, or should you tie it to usernames for those of us who have bothered to register?

Ideally both, but right now there's no mechanism to store user prefs like this for the "Main" site (Users are pulled as a View out of the forums db), so it'll be a cookie for the interim.

When you switched software, Outlook's RSS reader decided that your month field was your day field and vice versa.

So all posts from January just showed up as being from:

1 March (01/03/07)
1 April (1/4/07)
1 May
1 July (1/7/07)

Whatever you did to the date formatting, please, think of the children.

Great stuff. Loads up super fast here in Lorain.

captcha: paste

Holy crap, the site itself is no longer a WTF! Now we will have to imagine how terrible it can get instead of experiencing it for ourselves.

I do not keep cookies, so it would not help me.

If you made it a cookie+query string parameter, I could bookmark it, and that would be perfect.

Ok, need to add edit back in. I forgot to quote the above "would anyone want that"...

New Software is good, but now I cannot scroll the page using my Page Up/Down/Arrow Keys or Spacebar! Start with this page: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Announcement_0x3a__New_Website_Software.aspx

I assumed most of the readers here use their mouse and click on the scroll bar to scroll? FYI, I'm using IE 6 & 7.

Nice work on the new forum software. A poll asking readers to rate new features/fixes might be a good idea.

It is looking great. You did a good job.



Now all i need is a way of rating comments á la digg and Slashdot and I will be verryyyyyy happy.


The irony and wit displayed by this forum is magnificent, the only thing that is keeping it down is the fact that you have to read a mass of comments to get to the good ones.

Thank you, it seems to have fixed one annoying CSS bug where all text in italics/bold etc was overlapping nearby text.

Oh my, much better. Thank you, Alex, clearly you worked hard on getting this stuff right.

Though count me in for the group that preferred article and comments to be combined directly. The multiple click-thrus are annoying.

why not have the main page display less Posts. but full Posts.

First of all, great work. Looks nicer and loads much faster.

Few things
- As others mentioned, first article expanded would be nice
- There is a "Prev" button on the first page of comments :)
- Anyhow, I can't use that nor the "Next" button.

I use Firefox with JScript and coockies disabled, so it figures.

Yet-Another-Daily-Readr:

- There is a "Prev" button on the first page of comments :)
- Anyhow, I can't use that nor the "Next" button.

Sorry, didn't realize there wasn't a second page of comments. make that:
- Bothe "Prev" and "Next" buttons are visible :P

Captcha: STFU. When the time comes...

Some

    Code in BBCode CODE

[pre]Some
Code in BBCode PRE[/pre]
<pre>Some
Code in HTML PRE</pre>
<code>Some
Code in HTML CODE</code>

Hm... how to format code now? I don't get a Javascript-y editor any more and even though it says "BBCode okay", it does not work. All I tried failed. Need to fake a user agent again?

Well, the first thing I'm missing is my moderator superpower in the comment section. ;-)
Then, in the "45 comments" page, there is no possibility to add a new comment which is not a reply to an existing comment. This is, IMO, a missing feature; for example, if I see something odd in the original article, I want to browse through the comments to see if someone else has already said that; if not, I want to write a new comment (with no relation to any of the existing comments).

Looks like the "AddComment.aspx" reply page is crippled (or undocumented, maybe Alex can tell us how to format comments here?) and the forum itself is using CommunityServer with the known bugs and workarounds...

so... can you please document somewhere which tags YOUR comment system understands? And while you are at it, can you also document what CommunityServer supports? Both claim BBCode and both don't accept BBCode.

I read the site in a feed aggregator, which shows the article only. When I click on the title to launch a web browser with the article, it's because I want to see *more* - the full article and all the comments. With this change I have to wait for the article to load, then click "Comments", wait for the comments to load, and finally click "Expand full text". That's 10-20 seconds extra overhead; a big step backwards for my use case.

Next time, do a post outlining the changes you plan to make *before* you set out implementing them, okay?! Without that you only hear from the people who want to change things, and not the people who like things the way they are.

Not only the first but today's articles. I check almost daily.

Perhaps a different url, dwtf.com/today/

lookin' good, and no more richtext control! hooray! and working previews!

...are the features+syntax of this BBCode described everywhere?

PS: A minor point: In the UK, "sign on" is generally taken to mean "sign on for the dole". Jus' sayin'...