Post by Azayles on Jul 14, 2015 12:56:21 GMT
As the forum grows and develops and boards are added, settings are changed and layouts/themes are altered, all updates will be logged here.
Newest updates appear at the BOTTOM
JULY 2015
14th
New Feature: Staffroom! Added a staffroom board for staff to discuss the higher level operations of the forum.
All boards have privacy settings changed so now anyone can view the boards from outside, but only members and staff can post. This hopefully curbs any attempt at anonymous spamming and general mayhem.
The exception to this is the member blog board, which is hidden from guests for privacy reasons, and the staffroom board.
16th
Forum background changed, and default avatar changed to own artwork.
Added this cream Syrian emoji, based on Millie
19th
Changed the default avatar to one drawn by our lovely member Pawlove.
Changed the site's favicon to the same image.
Created a custom location field on member profiles which will also display under member's avatars for each post.
Discovered a way to make the inbuilt location field show under member's avatars. Need to implement.
Moved this thread to the public Feedback and Commentary board, because why not?
Implemented displaying the location field under the avatar.
Set the global image max-width property to 100% so that signature and post images won't go off the edge of the screen on mobile devices.
20th
New Feature: Record of Liked posts! Apparently likes are logged? Who knew?! They certainly aren't displayed anywhere? Except now
Got likes now showing on member profiles.
21st
General tidying of code, experimenting with top level admin functionality. Looking promising!
Deleted the Moderator group, which had no members in it anyway, and renamed Global Moderator to just Moderator.
Hid some of the currently empty boards in the Pet Section in order to make the forum seem less empty. The boards are still there, just not visible. As new threads are made which can go in different categories, they can be moved into the appropriate board then un-hid.
Newest updates appear at the BOTTOM
JULY 2015
14th
New Feature: Staffroom! Added a staffroom board for staff to discuss the higher level operations of the forum.
All boards have privacy settings changed so now anyone can view the boards from outside, but only members and staff can post. This hopefully curbs any attempt at anonymous spamming and general mayhem.
The exception to this is the member blog board, which is hidden from guests for privacy reasons, and the staffroom board.
16th
Forum background changed, and default avatar changed to own artwork.
Added this cream Syrian emoji, based on Millie
19th
Changed the default avatar to one drawn by our lovely member Pawlove.
Changed the site's favicon to the same image.
Created a custom location field on member profiles which will also display under member's avatars for each post.
Discovered a way to make the inbuilt location field show under member's avatars. Need to implement.
Moved this thread to the public Feedback and Commentary board, because why not?
Implemented displaying the location field under the avatar.
Set the global image max-width property to 100% so that signature and post images won't go off the edge of the screen on mobile devices.
20th
New Feature: Record of Liked posts! Apparently likes are logged? Who knew?! They certainly aren't displayed anywhere? Except now
Got likes now showing on member profiles.
21st
General tidying of code, experimenting with top level admin functionality. Looking promising!
Deleted the Moderator group, which had no members in it anyway, and renamed Global Moderator to just Moderator.
Hid some of the currently empty boards in the Pet Section in order to make the forum seem less empty. The boards are still there, just not visible. As new threads are made which can go in different categories, they can be moved into the appropriate board then un-hid.
Made the announcement board red to make it stand out for all the news and stuff that'll go in there. Added this thread to it.
22nd
Fixed a thing. Deflumuxed the emoji handling. Instead of censoring emoji with noses into emoji without noses to make the android emoji set compatible, I simply rewrote the emjoi macros so that they all used emoji with noses by default.
I've swapped the censor rules, now censoring non-noses into noses.
Phew!
23rd
New Feature: Direct notifications link! Finally managed to provide a user-dependant dynamic link to the notifications pane on user profiles!
This has taken all morning!!
I couldn't intercept the URL handling in the navigation pane text list, because any code I typed ended up being interpreted as text and displayed, and I couldn't create a second loop to parse out only that navigation text, because it would break the forum formatting.
I've created a new member rank Advisory Team and added Whimsy and Lacrima to this, given that their real life professional roles makes these members perfectly suited for dispensing healthcare advice on the forum.
24th
Spent a large portion of today designing concept artwork for staff and member badges, to replace the stars and group/rank text that appears above avatars next to posts. Lacrima has offered to create digital copies, and when those are ready, I can upload them to the forum server then add some code to display them
I've also added some code to display the last online time for offline members, under the avatar where the "Member is Online" text is normally displayed for online members.
25th
Changed the size of the avatar in the profile to the same size as appears next to posts, and stacked the name, rank and stars up above it in the same order as appears next to posts. This is so when I implement member rank badges, I can add them to profiles as well, and simply use the same coding I used for the mini profile segment.
I managed to find a way of intercepting the navigation pane text as it's being displayed, and redirect the URLs (I was doing it wrong before, trying to change the $[navigation.menu.href] variable when I should have been intercepting and changing the "href" variable, which the other variable writes to anyway), so now we have a notifications button which is loaded within the usual navigation bar rendering, and also loads properly on mobile browsers because of this.
For some reason, the dynamic redirecting won't work on the mobile site, even though the text displays correctly and there isn't any conditional statements in place in that area of code dealing with user agent type. So I've made the default, non-redirected URL lead back to the user profile.
It's a start!
Cup of tea now I reckon!
Moved the forum wrapper DIV tag to underneath the navigation bar and top banner, that way the banner and nav bar are outside the forum width settings, and can be made fluid, stretching and appropriately scaling across the entire width of the client window.
Also made the forum width 98%, up from 90%, so it fits better on the screen. This also means a side bar will fit better, which I may add later.
26th
Happy two weeks anniversary everyone!
The two weeks free trial is over, banner ads are displaying, but so far they're unobtrusive, and don't seem to effect site loading times. At least they seem to load AFTER the rest of the forum, it won't be the bottleneck when the important stuff is loading.
Today I had a play around with the shoutbox formatting, trying, and failing, to reduce the padding between messages to make the whole thing more compact. I opted instead to remove the "Shouting as" text, as guest posting is disabled anyway.
Also completely hid the shoutbox from guests, so they can't lurk and spy on what users are typing.
When did I become so paranoid?
I've been experimenting on creating tiny avatar variable tags that I can drop into code and have member avatars appearing in other places, such as the shoutbox and member list. So far so not very promising at all, really. Shall keep at it!
Made the post separator line a bit darker in colour so it stands out a bit more, and there's more of a divide between posts.
The member emails were showing by default on profile pages, viewable to all members. I could turn off guest viewing on profile pages for a bit of security, but wasn't able to change that default email setting, so I'd previously disabled email displaying entirely. Not even Level Zero admin could see, and members couldn't even see their OWN email.
Now I've found a way for staff only to view the email address if it's set, which still excludes members' own email address, but I think I have a way for members, too, to view their own email address fields on their profile.
I've created a test account to try this.
Edit: it works
I've changed the news ticker to dynamically display recent threads in the birthdays and anniversary board, instead of a static message. That way recent announcements on that board get displayed up top
28th
Fixed a thing. Posts weren't showing up properly on the stock browser on my tablet, which probably means they were borked for other people too. I traced that back to some wanky coding on the post template that was my attempt at eliminating the alternating background colours of posts. I reset that segment back to root default and settled instead for setting both alternating colours to the same white background.
Resetting the segment wiped a handy mod feature I added, so I'll have to find a way to add that back again.
I found a very easy way of hiding the like button from members on their own posts, so that people can't like themselves. Based on this I have a slightly more convoluted method of hiding the option button from members on their own post so they can't delete their own post. Actually now I take a second look at the truth table I drew up, I only need one conditional statement, so this should be easy :-P
Wonder if anyone will notice they can't like their own posts?
Edit: Nope it did indeed require the convoluted method.
I had to nest a current_user.is_member statement inside a current_user.is_staff statement, display the button for staff regardless inside that nest, then in the member nest, check whether the current user ID matched that of the post, and hide the button if that were the case, but display if for the other posts.
Then I had to deflumux the code because it doesn't always handle tab indenting properly (which now I think about it was what chowdered the mod function I added and mentioned before)
But it works, and cross browser!
New Feature: IP tags for moderator staff! Ahaha! She chooches! I fixed that accursed mod function, it was indeed craptacular handling of the tab indenting, probably as a consequence of typing everything on a tablet, which handles copypastering differently anyway. Works cross browser too.
Played around with button colours to make them flat, which looks a bit more sleek.
I'll hopefully get round to creating a colour scheme swatch to work off for the rest of the forum.
29th
New Feature: Second like button at the base of posts! Added a second like button to appear at the end of posts, so you don't have to scroll all the way back to the top of a long post to like it, then have to scroll all the way back down to use the quick reply box.
22nd
Fixed a thing. Deflumuxed the emoji handling. Instead of censoring emoji with noses into emoji without noses to make the android emoji set compatible, I simply rewrote the emjoi macros so that they all used emoji with noses by default.
I've swapped the censor rules, now censoring non-noses into noses.
Phew!
23rd
New Feature: Direct notifications link! Finally managed to provide a user-dependant dynamic link to the notifications pane on user profiles!
This has taken all morning!!
I couldn't intercept the URL handling in the navigation pane text list, because any code I typed ended up being interpreted as text and displayed, and I couldn't create a second loop to parse out only that navigation text, because it would break the forum formatting.
I've created a new member rank Advisory Team and added Whimsy and Lacrima to this, given that their real life professional roles makes these members perfectly suited for dispensing healthcare advice on the forum.
24th
Spent a large portion of today designing concept artwork for staff and member badges, to replace the stars and group/rank text that appears above avatars next to posts. Lacrima has offered to create digital copies, and when those are ready, I can upload them to the forum server then add some code to display them
I've also added some code to display the last online time for offline members, under the avatar where the "Member is Online" text is normally displayed for online members.
25th
Changed the size of the avatar in the profile to the same size as appears next to posts, and stacked the name, rank and stars up above it in the same order as appears next to posts. This is so when I implement member rank badges, I can add them to profiles as well, and simply use the same coding I used for the mini profile segment.
I managed to find a way of intercepting the navigation pane text as it's being displayed, and redirect the URLs (I was doing it wrong before, trying to change the $[navigation.menu.href] variable when I should have been intercepting and changing the "href" variable, which the other variable writes to anyway), so now we have a notifications button which is loaded within the usual navigation bar rendering, and also loads properly on mobile browsers because of this.
For some reason, the dynamic redirecting won't work on the mobile site, even though the text displays correctly and there isn't any conditional statements in place in that area of code dealing with user agent type. So I've made the default, non-redirected URL lead back to the user profile.
It's a start!
Cup of tea now I reckon!
Moved the forum wrapper DIV tag to underneath the navigation bar and top banner, that way the banner and nav bar are outside the forum width settings, and can be made fluid, stretching and appropriately scaling across the entire width of the client window.
Also made the forum width 98%, up from 90%, so it fits better on the screen. This also means a side bar will fit better, which I may add later.
26th
Happy two weeks anniversary everyone!
The two weeks free trial is over, banner ads are displaying, but so far they're unobtrusive, and don't seem to effect site loading times. At least they seem to load AFTER the rest of the forum, it won't be the bottleneck when the important stuff is loading.
Today I had a play around with the shoutbox formatting, trying, and failing, to reduce the padding between messages to make the whole thing more compact. I opted instead to remove the "Shouting as" text, as guest posting is disabled anyway.
Also completely hid the shoutbox from guests, so they can't lurk and spy on what users are typing.
When did I become so paranoid?
I've been experimenting on creating tiny avatar variable tags that I can drop into code and have member avatars appearing in other places, such as the shoutbox and member list. So far so not very promising at all, really. Shall keep at it!
Made the post separator line a bit darker in colour so it stands out a bit more, and there's more of a divide between posts.
The member emails were showing by default on profile pages, viewable to all members. I could turn off guest viewing on profile pages for a bit of security, but wasn't able to change that default email setting, so I'd previously disabled email displaying entirely. Not even Level Zero admin could see, and members couldn't even see their OWN email.
Now I've found a way for staff only to view the email address if it's set, which still excludes members' own email address, but I think I have a way for members, too, to view their own email address fields on their profile.
I've created a test account to try this.
Edit: it works
I've changed the news ticker to dynamically display recent threads in the birthdays and anniversary board, instead of a static message. That way recent announcements on that board get displayed up top
28th
Fixed a thing. Posts weren't showing up properly on the stock browser on my tablet, which probably means they were borked for other people too. I traced that back to some wanky coding on the post template that was my attempt at eliminating the alternating background colours of posts. I reset that segment back to root default and settled instead for setting both alternating colours to the same white background.
Resetting the segment wiped a handy mod feature I added, so I'll have to find a way to add that back again.
I found a very easy way of hiding the like button from members on their own posts, so that people can't like themselves. Based on this I have a slightly more convoluted method of hiding the option button from members on their own post so they can't delete their own post. Actually now I take a second look at the truth table I drew up, I only need one conditional statement, so this should be easy :-P
Wonder if anyone will notice they can't like their own posts?
Edit: Nope it did indeed require the convoluted method.
I had to nest a current_user.is_member statement inside a current_user.is_staff statement, display the button for staff regardless inside that nest, then in the member nest, check whether the current user ID matched that of the post, and hide the button if that were the case, but display if for the other posts.
Then I had to deflumux the code because it doesn't always handle tab indenting properly (which now I think about it was what chowdered the mod function I added and mentioned before)
But it works, and cross browser!
New Feature: IP tags for moderator staff! Ahaha! She chooches! I fixed that accursed mod function, it was indeed craptacular handling of the tab indenting, probably as a consequence of typing everything on a tablet, which handles copypastering differently anyway. Works cross browser too.
Played around with button colours to make them flat, which looks a bit more sleek.
I'll hopefully get round to creating a colour scheme swatch to work off for the rest of the forum.
29th
New Feature: Second like button at the base of posts! Added a second like button to appear at the end of posts, so you don't have to scroll all the way back to the top of a long post to like it, then have to scroll all the way back down to use the quick reply box.
The activated colour of the buttons don't always match up, but the like is properly logged regardless of which button is pressed. The colours will always match once the page is refreshed. And no, clicking both buttons will not yield two likes
30th
Made the "No posts have been made on this board" italic for slight emphasis. This is probably the last changelog update this month
30th
Made the "No posts have been made on this board" italic for slight emphasis. This is probably the last changelog update this month