The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

faoileag · 2014-06-01 Reply Admin

So you take an user interface everybody knows how to use: Web Page, hit Ctrl-F to search it.

And you break it. Completely. Fundamentally.

That with infinite scrolling you can't search the entire thread, i.e. the parts AJAX hasn't loaded yet is understood and part of the deal.

But why on f***ing earth is Discourse unloading posts upwards from the viewport from the DOM???

Just to remind you folks from Discourse: there's people with smartphones. Those usually come with a data plan.

If you unload data received earlier from the DOM by scrolling, you make peopel re-download that data again when they scroll up again.

We live in the 21st century. Content should be mobile friendly.

Discourse is not.

faoileag · 2014-06-01 Reply Admin

boomzilla:
That's apparently a mar<b>k</b>down thing. I know that in some places it's critical. You can, however, drop to html tags in this case.

Nice of you to point out a way to work around it. But let me quote from an earlier post of mine to codinghorror:

"So your reply comes across a bit like 'this is the way we do it; if the audience doesn't understand it we will explain it but won't do anything about it'.

A better response would have been 'Yup, displayed the wrong number, fixed it, shouldn't occur again'.

I don't want to read a f****ing manual on how to use Discourse; and I definitely don't want to read thru all threads to find hints like that to work around a problem.

Fix it so that it works.

And if that is too difficult because an asterisk can be markup and a valid char in the same text... it has been the Discourse developer's decision to reinvent the wheel, i.e. use asterisks of all characters to mark bold or italic text. Your design decision, your problem.

faoileag · 2014-06-01 Reply Admin

Full Ack.

When people just quote for convenience, nested quotes suck.

But if memes come into play like Monty Python's "When I was young..." nested quotes are bread and butter to the fun. You need them.

That said, your corrollary needs some correcting: [quote="Lorne_Kates, post:99, topic:436, full:true"] Corollary to Lorne's First Law: Methods of communication cannot be predicted or dictated by the software or its developers.[/quote] Faoileag's correction to Lorne's Corrollary to Lorne's First Law:
Methods of communication cannot be predicted and should not be dictated by the software or its developers.[/quote]

There. FTFY.

Edit says: Hmmm, looking at this text at the bottom end of the comment, no one will understand what exactly it was I "Full ack"-ed.

And that is another problem of Discourse - you can show the replies directly below the original post. If you do (to see if somebody else already covered what you are about to say), this tempts you (or at least me) to write as if the reply was always visible just beneath the post it is an reply to.

In allowing you to "blend in" the replies into the stream of posts, Discourse encourages bad writing style.

dkf · 2014-06-01 Reply Admin

faoileag:
And that is another problem of Discourse - you can show the replies directly below the original post. If you do (to see if somebody else already covered what you are about to say), this tempts you (or at least me) to write as if the reply was **always** visible just beneath the post it is an reply to.
In allowing you to "blend in" the replies into the stream of posts, Discourse encourages bad writing style.

Community Server was the same, as was whatever powered the comment system behind the front page. I have never seen threaded discussions on TDWTF. To grumble that the system isn't threaded now… not only has the horse bolted, but the stable never existed.

I award you ^sheesh!/₁₀ points.

Bork · 2014-06-01 Reply Admin

here.

I had to create an account to complain about discourse; but before I start complaining I need to sort something out. The account creation dialog box asked for a unique password, but I don't know what other people's passwords are and can't know that someone else isn't using the same password as me.

Just in case my password isn't unique; if anyone is using "firetrucked" as their password please let me know and I'll change mine to something else and try again. It might take a while, but eventually I'll get a unique password!

Thanks.

CS1 · 2014-06-02 Reply Admin

Oh what fresh hell is this?

sam · 2014-06-02 Reply Admin

Bork:
I don't know what other people's passwords are and can't know that someone else isn't using the same password as me.

This is easily resolved, check your email, just sent you a copy of all the email addresses and passwords on the site.

sam · 2014-06-02 Reply Admin

faoileag:
But why on f***ing earth is Discourse unloading posts upwards from the viewport from the DOM???

The reasoning is so your browser does not choke, I just changed it so you get 50 uninterrupted screens of posts before it kicks in (up from 2)

faoileag · 2014-06-02 Reply Admin

sam:
The reasoning is so your browser does not choke, I just changed it so you get 50 uninterrupted screens of posts before it kicks in (up from 2)

Well, 50 screens with probably 2 posts per screen will cover something like this thread in one page. Good.

But do you have any metrics on the browser choking? I mean, this is a comment board, it's not as if a 100 posts together with their surrounding html should take up that much memory.

I just used google image search as a test ("how does google do it?" has become something of a "if they do, I'll do it because they can't be wrong, can they?" thing for me).

I pressed the "show me more" button but none of the earlier results were removed - even though there was a massive amount of images in the dom. And my small box felt the load - the fan kicked in and quite audibly went into extra. But the browser (firefox 29) didn't and was as responsive as ever.

So unloading the dom after 2 screens so that the browser does not choke to me sounds a bit like premature optimization.

sam · 2014-06-02 Reply Admin

faoileag:
So unloading the dom after 2 screens so that the browser does not choke to me sounds a bit like premature optimization.

We have a pile of different thresholds, on mobile you want to conserve RAM so you unload a bit earlier. I agree 2 screens seems a tad too "intense" for desktop. I think 50 or 100 screens should be fine, unless you have a monster animated image topic with youtube onebox central mixed in. Cause then at 100 screens you are totally hosed.

faoileag · 2014-06-02 Reply Admin

dkf:
faoileag:
And that is another problem of Discourse - you can show the replies directly below the original post. If you do (to see if somebody else already covered what you are about to say), this tempts you (or at least me) to write as if the reply was **always** visible just beneath the post it is an reply to.
In allowing you to "blend in" the replies into the stream of posts, Discourse encourages bad writing style.

Community Server was the same

Erm, no?

In CS your replies/quotes were always displayed at that position in the stream of posted posts where they landed once you pressed submit. Which, for an elaborate post, could be several posts away from the one replied to / quoted.

But it was easy to keep that in mind, because it was always the case and you knew that it was.

faoileag · 2014-06-02 Reply Admin

sam:
on mobile you want to conserve RAM so you unload a bit earlier.

Hm, I just did a check on post 114 - my reply to your earlier post.

That div is 1388 bytes, so roughly 1 1/3 kilobyte. Taking that as average, 100 posts give you 130 KB. Adding 20KB for general page structure and we are talking 150KB here. That definitely shouldn't choke even a mobile browser. Not even with 200 posts in the dom.

end · 2014-06-02 Reply Admin

faoileag:
If you unload data received earlier from the DOM by scrolling, you make peopel re-download that data again when they scroll up again.

Reading backwards isn't optimized for, just like Comixology app is crazy slow for me when I scroll backwards in a comic I am reading. We optimize for reading down. That said, reading up should be OK but it may never be *awesome*

Dozer:
This has the side-effect that you cannot post replies.

This is an acceptable side effect for these particular users. :kissing_closed_eyes:

HardwareGeek:
Much discourse, and most of TDWTF, is intended as fairly trivial entertainment. Trying to force this to be "civilized" is not necessarily useful or entertaining

You can still have fun and be civilized. Fun is an overt goal of Discourse. Nobody attends debate club meetings for fun, they attend parties with beer, music, and socializing. But fun does not mean racism, hate, and personal attacks..

dkf:
Community Server was the same, as was whatever powered the comment system behind the front page. I have never seen threaded discussions on TDWTF.

Ironically given the "anything goes in any topic" mantra here at TDWTF, threaded would arguably actually work better, even with all the cons, and is a much better hill to die on than pagination for this community. IMNSHO.

faoileag:
That div is 1388 bytes, so roughly 1 1/3 kilobyte.

Certainly there is way more overhead here than the barest minimum of bytes of data in the div. I would estimate 10x or 20x that factoring in the dom, Ember data structures, browser internals, CSS and JS structures, etc.

skotl · 2014-06-02 Reply Admin

codinghorror:
Ironically given the "anything goes in any topic" mantra here at TDWTF, threaded would arguably actually work better, even with all the cons

Hmmm... can't remember which step was "acceptance" but we're getting there :wink:

Steve_The_Cynic · 2014-06-02 Reply Admin

Lose the cursed-seven-ways-to-Sunday fading-out UI elements! They aren't totally invisible when faded out, but they might as well be. UI elements operate on the "if I can't see it, it doesn't exist" basis, like on GMail where it is impossible to delete email from the conversation view, you know, because the delete button is only visible when at least one message is selected, so before selecting a message, I can't see the button, so it doesn't exist.

Steve_The_Cynic · 2014-06-02 Reply Admin

rad131304:
You're supposed to use the search box.

Lesson 1 of UI design: Don't impose arbitrary restrictions on how the user uses things, or at least not on a "because I can" basis. If I want to search using my browser's incremental search feature that works everywhere else, and you fix it so I can't, that means your forum software is a problem.

Or maybe you're a problem, I can't decide.

nobulate · 2014-06-02 Reply Admin

I post anonymous as I forgot my TDWTF login password. And registered with one of those disposable email addresses so have no chance of recovering my password. With this system I will also forget and need to create a new disposable account.

I can recommend sharklasers.com :)

sam · 2014-06-02 Reply Admin

The issue is mainly for image heavy topics, the algorithm could definitely be improved to compensate better. Maybe even just unpeel images and youtube embeds.

nobulate · 2014-06-02 Reply Admin

I like this new comment thing, but can we change:

style it like a bash terminal.
remove buttons in favor for vi-like navigation and shortcuts.
???
Profit!

PJH · 2014-06-02 Reply Admin

dkf:
I have never seen threaded discussions on TDWTF.

To re-paste an image I've posted twice recently (I know you've seen it - others reading this may not):

[image]

faoileag:
In CS your replies/quotes were always displayed at that position in the stream of posted posts where they landed once you pressed submit

Unless, of course, you were using threaded view...

faoileag · 2014-06-02 Reply Admin

sam:
The issue is mainly for image heavy topics ... Maybe even just unpeel images and youtube embeds.

That sounds like a very good compromise - media stuff tends to be rather large. And unless you use AJAX to also fetch the images themselves, it allows the browser to decide whether or not to fetch the image from a local cache or from the web the second time around.

faoileag · 2014-06-02 Reply Admin

codinghorror:
faoileag:
That div is 1388 bytes, so roughly 1 1/3 kilobyte.
Certainly there is way more overhead here than the barest minimum of bytes of data in the div. I would estimate 10x or 20x that factoring in the dom, Ember data structures, browser internals, CSS and JS structures, etc.

I wouldn't think so. I agree that Ember or any other JS framework adds overhead but not that much. After all, you wouldn't copy the dom but rather use references to the nodes. And the dom itself is a btree afaik, so it might actually take up less space then the html describing it. A node will be a reference so it will take up four bytes. A classic <div></div> takes up eleven.

Don't know how CSS comes into the equation but I doubt that style information is copied internally per node or even stored by reference per node. Actually since it is applied after the dom has been build, I doubt it takes up any additional space that could be freed if elements are removed from the dom.

faoileag · 2014-06-02 Reply Admin

PJH:
faoileag:
In CS your replies/quotes were always displayed at that position in the stream of posted posts where they landed once you pressed submit

Unless, of course, you were using threaded view...

Erm... might be my mistake then for not really using the forum... I usually just stick to the comment section of an article and that can't be brought into threaded view. Or maybe I haven't found the right button yet.

error · 2014-06-02 Reply Admin

sam:
The issue is mainly for image heavy topics, the algorithm could definitely be improved to compensate better. Maybe even just unpeel images and youtube embeds.

There was a YouTube thread fairly recently. I hit play, and was listening as I scrolled down and continued to read... and a few moments later, the video was unpeeled and abruptly stopped.

I was not amused.

Filed under: I'm finding it difficult to believe that the browsing, reading, and conversational habits here are so unique and bizarre that no outsider shares them.

Lorne_Kates · 2014-06-02 Reply Admin

Steve_The_Cynic:
I can't see the button, so it doesn't exist.

phaw all what that is is hundreds of millions of years of biology and evolution hardcoded into your very genetic makeup. This is DISCOURSE. You're using your humanity wrong.

error · 2014-06-02 Reply Admin

faoileag:
Certainly there is way more overhead here than the barest minimum of bytes of data in the div. I would estimate 10x or 20x that factoring in the dom, Ember data structures, browser internals, CSS and JS structures, etc.
I wouldn't think so. I agree that Ember or any other JS framework adds overhead but not that much. After all, you wouldn't copy the dom but rather use references to the nodes. And the dom itself is a btree afaik, so it might actually take up less space then the html describing it. A node will be a reference so it will take up four bytes. A classic <div></div> takes up eleven.

Don't know how CSS comes into the equation but I doubt that style information is copied internally per node or even stored by reference per node. Actually since it is applied after the dom has been build, I doubt it takes up any additional space that could be freed if elements are removed from the dom.

Erm, I think you misunderestimate the amount of cruft in the DOM.

Lorne_Kates · 2014-06-02 Reply Admin

error:
There was a YouTube thread fairly recently. I hit play, and was listening as I scrolled down and continued to read... and a few moments later, the video was unpeeled and abruptly stopped.
I was not amused.

Videos are for watching, not listening! Stop consuming content presented by Discourse wrong. You're doing it wrong! STOP IT I DON'T LIKE IT! When you click play you sit there with your hands off the mouse and keyboard (lol just kidding no one uses a PC-- you put your phone down) and you just watch it until it is done. Then it is appropriate to keep reading. This is how you are supposed to use a browser, stop using it differently!

dkf · 2014-06-02 Reply Admin

PJH:
Unless, of course, you were using threaded view...

Which (as I'd pointed out in another thread that I can't be bothered to look up) isn't the default and isn't exactly discoverable.

Oh well. Does the underlying information model of Discourse have enough in it that someone could (theoretically) construct a threaded view from it? If so, we're just talking about the default implementation of the client and that's not a big deal. It's entirely reasonable that @sam hasn't got the time to make a threaded view work as well as a linear view; let someone else contribute the code to do it if they care so much. (I don't care enough.)

PJH:
[image]

I don't like that threading view very much either. But that's a whole 'nother story.

Lorne_Kates · 2014-06-02 Reply Admin

dkf:
let someone else contribute the code to do it if they care so much. (I don't care enough.)

Even if there was someone who cared:

It impossible to make a plugin, because there are no tutorials
Even if you manage to make one, the API will change and break the plugin in less than a month (plugins less than a year old don't work RIGHT NOW)
Even if you could make a custom version of Discourse that did that, it wouldn't be used because (rightfully so), who wants to run a custom version that won't receive updates (to a massively buggy core)
Even if all of the above works itself out, the minute @codinghorror finds it "ugly and atrocious", he'll roll it back and shame you in public for your efforts.

I have no desire to use the shitty search, but all of those above might just as well come with a footnote to a forum post by @codinghorror and @sam . All right from the horses' mouths.

dkf · 2014-06-02 Reply Admin

Meta/markdown point:

Enumerate items with: 1. Foo bar 2. Bar foo
Instead of: 1) Foo bar 2) Bar foo
And be amazed at the powers of True Lists™ that get unleashed!

PJH · 2014-06-02 Reply Admin

faoileag:
I usually just stick to the comment section of an article

Ah - different system. That didn't have threaded view; it was just the message board.

Lorne_Kates · 2014-06-02 Reply Admin

dkf:
Meta/markdown point:
Enumerate items with:1. Foo bar2. Bar fooInstead of:1) Foo bar2) Bar fooAnd be amazed at the powers of True Lists™ that get unleashed!

Lists are broken in quotes anyways b) this is how I make lists. Either Discourse picks up my formatting, or it can ignore it. Either way, I don't care. FILE_NOT_FOUND) I'm not learning another markup language for a shitty piece of forum software. I already barely remember BBCode and wiki. And besides, it's 2014. I mean, one of these days someone will invent a WYSIWYG editor, right?

Also, I am going to press enter once at the end of this sentence. I pressed enter, and now I will press REPLY to find out what today's Discourse behaviour is for linebreaks.

Whaddya know. It actually works for once. I wonder what two things will break in its place.

zzo38 · 2014-06-02 Reply Admin

Discourse seems no good but this one is working.

Steve_The_Cynic · 2014-06-02 Reply Admin

Everything about the X of Y floatie is terrifyingly bad.

I can still break it by, for example, hitting End, so it sometimes, depending on, er, stuff, says 138 of 126.

And hitting End doesn't take me to the end. It takes me to shortly before the end.

And hitting Home doesn't take me to post 1. Just look, the floatie says 2 of 126. And yet I am at the very top, looking at the current post 1.

For information, I'm using Firefox 24 ESR, on 64-bit FreeBSD 9.2.

EDIT: I just double-clicked on the down arrow inside the floatie. That was weird. It said 127 of 127 before I clicked and 139 of 127 afterwards. All the bullshit about visible and non-visible posts is just that, bullshit. Once the post is deleted by an admin, either it is truly gone, or at the very least all visible references to its existence (aside from quotes, duh) must behave as if it is. The floatie in its current state is like wearing your pants(*) outside your trousers. We don't want to see that.

(*) I'm British. "Pants" is short for "underpants", i.e. underwear. I prefer people's underwear to be on the inside, thanks. (There's a limited exception for curvy females and certain types of female undergarments, but that's a separate thing altogether, if you don't mind.)

boomzilla · 2014-06-02 Reply Admin

Steve_The_Cynic:
I prefer people's underwear to be on the inside,

[image]

Lorne_Kates · 2014-06-02 Reply Admin

Steve_The_Cynic:
Everything about the X of Y floatie is terrifyingly bad.

Edit: Holy fucking fuck, either Onebox doesn't work, or it randomly drops image tags. DISCOURSE! Go to the last post on a page:

[image] [image]

PJH · 2014-06-02 Reply Admin

Lorne_Kates:
[image] [twice]

I was expecting the second image to be (for step 2) "reply to topic" and (for step 3) "finally reach end of topic."

Nagesh · 2014-06-02 Reply Admin

HaximusPrime:
I will say, though, I was just saying the other day that I wish I could like people's comments.
So at least there's that...

Maybe you should start fixing Comedy Server.

rad131304 · 2014-06-02 Reply Admin

Sorry, my sarcasm tags weren't working very well .... It's hard to do from Firefox Mobile because they don't bother testing on it so a bunch of crap is broken when you try and use it.

chubertdev · 2014-06-02 Reply Admin

codinghorror:
The actual post numbers are absolute and can't change -- e.g. if you link me to "post 5 in this topic" and after you do that, Alex merrily deletes posts 1 and 2.. does clicking that link take me to a new, different post 5?
It takes you to post 5, which is now visible post 3.

The bug might be that after new post insertion, it's not counting visible posts the way it should be.

Yep: confirmed on try.discourse.org -- just delete a bunch of initial posts, and compose a reply. Note that progress bar includes deleted posts after posting, even for users those posts would not be visible to. So @sam if you want things to fix, that's one of them. New post insertion is not counting visible posts correctly when it updates the progress bar.

I've seen systems where they just leave a "This comment has been removed." placeholder, and it seems to work fine. Something you have to deal with since the IDs are $threadid$commentid instead of a forum-global $commentid.

end · 2014-06-03 Reply Admin

I moved 21 posts to a new topic: How do we format code?

end · 2014-06-03 Reply Admin

Steve_The_Cynic:
And hitting Home doesn't take me to post 1. Just look, the floatie says 2 of 126. And yet I am at the very top, looking at the current post 1.

The progress bar is based on the *bottom* of the viewport, not the top. (The URL in the address bar is actually based on the top.)

faoileag:
That would sure help, as the scrollbars in the editor and preview are not synched.

Yeah @sam we need to remember to implement @blakeyrat's simple workaround here for hitting bottom of editor, move preview to bottom.

Steve_The_Cynic:
I just double-clicked on the down arrow inside the floatie.

I'm curious, where on the web do you need to double-click things... ever? (Cue @Lorne_Kates to complain that we're demanding people give up the human nature of double-clicking!)

PJH · 2014-06-03 Reply Admin

codinghorror:
I'm curious, where on the web do you need to double-click things... ever?

I dunno - to select a whole word quickly, or more if you drag the cursor?

Could maybe even use triple click to select a paragraph maybe?

Nah - never catch on.... The triple click doesn't work on the final paragraph of a post properly on Discourse (in Chrome anyway) - the Quote Reply popup erm, doesn't.

Zecc · 2014-06-03 Reply Admin

codinghorror:
I'm curious, where on the web do you need to double-click things... ever?

I used to double-click on text inputs to bring out FF's autofill prompt.

Now it seems a single click works. A second click will close the autofill dropdown (why? stupid!). Except a single click won't both focus and open the autofill dropdown, just focus. But two clicks in fast succession on an unfocussed input will focus and open the autofill.

So in short:

Input focussed Input not focussed Single click Autofill open No autofill Double click No autofill Autofill open

(still wish I could make tables).

The end result is that I end up frustratingly clicking a random number of times until I get it right. It's great fun.

Steve_The_Cynic · 2014-06-03 Reply Admin

codinghorror:
Steve_The_Cynic:
I just double-clicked on the down arrow inside the floatie.
I'm curious, where on the web do you need to double-click things... ever? (Cue @Lorne_Kates to complain that we're demanding people give up the human nature of double-clicking!)

Um, I've been double-clicking to do stuff on computers for 25 years. Why would I stop now?

And for plain text, most graphical browsers do select-word on double-click...

Steve_The_Cynic · 2014-06-03 Reply Admin

codinghorror:
The progress bar is based on the *bottom* of the viewport, not the top. (The URL in the address bar is actually based on the top.)

That's terrifyingly stupid. How on earth do you justify that? (No, "laziness" is not an acceptable answer. Nor is "it's too hard".) And that doesn't explain the behaviour I saw early on, where there were three and a half posts visible, and the floatie said "5 of N". (Yes, I know the reason for that. That reason is terrifyingly stupid as well.)

Steve_The_Cynic · 2014-06-03 Reply Admin

Steve_The_Cynic:
That's terrifyingly stupid. How on earth do you justify that? (No, "laziness" is not an acceptable answer. Nor is "it's too hard".) And that doesn't explain the behaviour I saw early on, where there were three and a half posts visible, and the floatie said "5 of N". (Yes, I know the reason for that. That reason is terrifyingly stupid as well.)

Not only is "the progress bar is based on the bottom of the viewport" terrifyingly stupid, but it isn't even an accurate assessment of what happens. I just tried again, and what I saw was that the floatie went from "2 of" to "3 of" with only half of post **two** showing, and **none** of post three.

So the floatie implementation is terrifyingly stupider than just mere terrifying stupidity.

Oh, and the red popup floatie that lectures me on posting style can fuck off.

HardwareGeek · 2014-06-03 Reply Admin

Steve_The_Cynic:
the floatie went from "2 of" to "3 of" with only half of post two showing, and none of post three.

Previously reported... somewhere, probably in the Really Useful thropic, but I'm too lazy to go find it and link to it.

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