Nice amount of progress youāve made. The spam thing and even an offensive button can be as troublesome as they are helpful. I see a fairly equal lists of pros and cons. The previous spam button asked you to verify so it seems it was hard to mark someone as a spammer unintentionally. I hit it by accident several times but always hit cancel when it asked me to verify and I assume that made it like it never happened. People using it intentionally for the wrong reason creates unnecessary work for you. Iāll throw in my two bits anyway but know that Iām comfortable with whatever you decide.
What about a simple report button followed by a category selection?
My ideal report button would follow with choices like this:
Offensive (this one is tricky because what offends people varies greatly)
Spam
Wrong Forum category
I hit the button by accident
Just a few thoughts. I know the offensive one can create a lot of material to review. Should profanity have its own selection or just lump it in with offensive? Iāve had threads I started where someone posted something that included profanity. Since it was a thread I started I simply sent the user a PM saying I appreciated their enthusiasm but would they mind removing the profanity. Worked out fine. My 10 year old likes to read over my shoulder sometimes and I want to feel safe with him doing so. Anyway I just wanted to add my thoughts. I donāt object to a helpful button either. If it ends up a contest to see who can be the most helpful well I guess Iām just ok with that.
Edit: if anything like a helpful button were initiated I like what TK said about it being limited to say the last 100 posts or so or maybe the slate gets wiped clean every six months or something. Whatever you do just donāt add a ātoo long-windedā selection or Iām toast!
Hope with favor my words youāll anoint
Without bending your nose out of joint
All Iām trying to say
I wish there was a way
To possess an unbiased viewpoint
Iāll say it againā the most important next feature should be a āJackās Limericksā page. Make it obligatory reading for all new users before they can post.
We should have a collection page of the important posts, probably starting with CRXās page but covering things like beginning in flashlightism and so on, in an easy to find dedicated place
Thanks SBā¦and youāre welcome.
Speaking of my being too long winded hereās a situation that created a bit of grief (for me) a few nights ago. I was up too late bouncing between tabs, drafting two separate PM messages to BLF friends. After spending an hour or so typing these novels my laptop battery died. I foolishly had the power settings tuned as such that I had only a few seconds warning before it shut down. Restoring my internet session did not restore my words. Here is where an auto-save function would have saved me a lot of time rewriting. The same has happened to me when posting in a thread. On occasion, due to some little glitch or another a page of carefully crafted words are eaten by the cyberboogieman.
Is an auto-save function feasible? Too problematic? Too much server space eaten up by drafts of unsent messages and posts? I try to craft my lengthier work in Word or some other format when I think about it in order to avoid these losses but since we have this thread going I figure Iāll throw it out there. If itās not possible with this software or simply too problematic on your end Iāll just try to be more careful. Let me know your thoughts.
I assume this was with the Advanced Post Editor? Because in my testing on Firefox with the Simple Post Editor it does autosave text when I kill the browser and re-open it. The Advanced Post Editor doesnāt have it yet, but it does appear to be possible to configure.
Profanity is an interesting issue. For some, simply using a word is offensive regardless of context. For others, itās just another word and not worth noticing. Iāve probably used the wrong words by accident a few times because for me itās like trying to remember not to say avocado, so if someone points it out Iāll gladly change or remove it.
Iām not really worried about those kinds of cases though, since theyāre easy to resolve already.
Instead, Iām more concerned about other types of cases. Someone recently made a comment which intentionally escalated some drama using insults and challenges, and I sent a private message asking them to stop adding fuel to a fireā¦ and I wasnāt the only one who asked. They told me the fuel makes the fire prettier, and added another line worth of drama to the original comment. I was a bit surprised by this reaction so I looked up the personās other comments with the handy new āMy Postsā feature, and found they had a fairly consistent history of borderline trolling.
Itād be nice to have something built in to help deal with that. Most people wonāt go far enough to PM an administrator about these things, but theyāre often willing to click some sort of ādislikeā button.
Dislike buttons have quite a few problems, which have already been brought up, really it feels like more negatives than positives. Except for this:
I have to agree, I think many people donāt want to pm the admin even if they feel there is a problem. For that reason I lean towards it being useful. And maybe needed.
Ha! Yesā¦ Iām the one. :P Not being a programmer but a simple āIT guyā I never dove into Linux and avoid Mac like the plague. ;) I certainly see the appeal (of Linux), I just donāt have the time. Lots of respect for those that do though
Not really a Linux thingā¦ Other browsers generally have better crash recovery.
Incomplete posts are generally not even sent to the server yet, so thereās nothing the server can do to recover those after a crash. However, the browser can do quite a bit to avoid losing half-written messages. Itās likely easiest to address lost-data concerns by switching to a more robust browser, like Chrome or Firefox.
A variety of server-side solutions are at least possible, but theyāre rather tricky.
:) I actually happen to maintain a little spin of Linux that I put together to help new users migrate more smoothly. But thatās a topic for another conversation. O:)
Meanwhile is there any way to convince you to run Firefox or Chrome on Windows? I think youāll have a better time with crash recovery and autosaving. As I said, itās already natively working with the Simple Post Editor in Firefox, and it looks like I can probably get it working for the Advanced Post Editor as well.
As somebody else mentioned, the autosaving is usually not server-side. Most implementations these days take advantage of an HTML5 feature for local browser storage. Hereās a list of supported browsers. Not sure why IE11 failed you, since itās also on the list.
I use Compuserve, and my momās AOL as backup, for my dial up 56k connection. Iām using all my extra CDās as coasters because Iāve got 260000+ free hours (oh the days when internet access was measured in timeā¦)
I hope this isnāt off topic by the time it has been uploaded
BTW, thanks for all your hard work SB, I love this forum and I spend an inordinate amount of time here every day. Iād be remiss for sure if you werenāt at the helm.
If you have a moment, you can quickly click the [ Preview ] button. I used to spend a lot of extra time copying my replies & pasting them into Notepad ājust in caseā. The Preview function gets it into the browser quicker and easier.
