Hi everyone,
I just applied a routine update to the forum engine. In my testing so far everything seems to be working, but if you find any new issues please report them here.
I also applied @ToyKeeper’s latest tweaks to the “TK” site themes that are available here. Many thanks for that!
Thanks to everyone, have fun!
Testing from a regular user account.
I see some new features and changes already, even just looking at the front page. Like a “bulk select topics” widget, which I guess can maybe mark a bunch as read all at once?
And the “See 3 unread topics” thing which appears when a topic has been updated since the page was loaded… is now smaller, so it no longer covers the entire table header. That’s good, because that always bugged me a bit.
Not sure yet what else changed. Things so far seem pretty normal.
I’m seeing a small bug on mouseover of the buttons at the bottom of posts, there’s some kind of a vertical padding issue that causes jitter of the elements.
Fixed.
Somebody upstream did something clever with an animation on hover, to make the buttons “pop”.
It’s kind of neat TBH, but not so neat to fix. So I removed it. It already had two hover animations… it doesn’t need three.
Somewhat off-topic because I first noticed this yesterday (instead of today).
Apparently, now BLF has ads that are tougher to block.
I use uBlock Origin in my Firefox-based browser.
That extension generally blocks all ads on all websites, but not on BLF anymore.
I even briefly tried Ghostery and AdBlocker Ultimate, and they wouldn’t block the ads either.
I realize that blocking ads is a touchy subject because ads are how BLF is funded.
I’m just surprised that I couldn’t block the ads with those three highly-rated extensions. 
Nice! Applied the same tweak to the default BLF theme and updated the “TK” themes again. Thanks a ton!
Interesting. It’s not intentional or by design, but those ad banners are implemented with a non-standard snippet of very specific custom code that probably only exists on BLF, so I imagine it’s not included in any of the ad blocking filter lists. And the banner mechanism had to be re-coded basically from scratch for this Discourse release because of a switch to a new internal framework that Discourse made, which was incompatible with the old ad banner custom code. So I guess I should have mentioned:
This release is the first one to drop compatibility with the old “Handlebars” mechanism for custom components (it’s been deprecated for ~1 year), now requiring implementation via “Glimmer” components.
Yep, I migrated the ad banner code to the new mechanisms yesterday in preparation for the Discourse upgrade today.
I just remembered with uBlock Origin, I can block individual elements, which is the main reason I like that extension so much.
If I do that, I can block just about anything that I don’t want to see, though I need to block each element separately. 
EDIT:
It looks like small smileys are now 16x16 pixels instead of 20x20 pixels.
For example, this smiley is now smaller: 
I did notice a change in the way that Chrome finds the site starting today. It’s not a big deal for me but it’s worth noting.
Edit, this could have actually started yesterday or the day before and it might not be related to anything that was changed on the site.
I clear the browser once a day or so. And I just type blf. This is typically on an Android phone.
Usually the site shows up first or after an AI overview that talks about busy lamp field or a black first land first or budgetlightforum.
Now I’m having to scroll down a bit to get to the budgetlightforum and it shows up and takes me to the categories page rather than the main page.
I could just hit the microphone and say budget light forum and it will come up first.
I’m going to attach a few photos of what I have to scroll through to see it and I hope I put them in the right order.
Hi there, thanks for reporting that. I don’t think that would have anything to do with this update, it’s just one of the constant changes in Google’s results and rankings.
That did look pretty small. Not sure why they would have changed that. I bumped it up to 1.3em from 1.0em , doesn’t appear to have any negative consequences.
You are right. I did edit that I probably noticed this change a day or two ago.
Simply typing blf is what I’ve done for a lot of years. It was probably a week or two ago where the site was not showing up at all with that three letter search term. At the time I suspected the site was down for some reason. And when I tried later I guess I did use the full name.
Mobile phone viewing is a breath of fresh air!
Win7 Firefox supported no more 
I just checked, and BLF no longer works in Chrome 89 or Firefox ESR 115. I have these around for testing old browsers, to make sure anything I make will work in them… but it seems the Discourse folks don’t prioritize legacy support as much.
I still have BLF pages open in Chrome 89 from a while back, so I know the site could work in it… but they probably changed some code to require something in newer APIs. It’s unfortunate when that happens. No clue what they would have needed in a newer API though… whatever it was, the software worked totally fine for years without it.
I’ve been running into some similar issues lately in Firefox, because I’ve been trying to maintain an extension which supports older versions. It doesn’t need anything in the newer APIs, and can easily check for the version and run different code accordingly. But their store is going to start requiring manifest keys which break older versions… so the store will stop working for legacy users, and I’ll probably have to produce a separate build for old Firefox, and host it myself somewhere else.
Anyway, it frustrates me because I know how easy it is to put new-API features in a if (api.feature exists) { do the new thing } else { do the old thing } type clause to make old versions continue working. And do a smoke test once in a while in an old browser. But a lot of developers just don’t bother.
Yep, in fact they seem to be actively opposed to legacy support. You can get a sense of that here:
Yep. I can’t find it now, but I know I’ve read posts on Discourse Meta where they specifically say they don’t want to spend their time doing that or maintaining a hodgepodge of workarounds. So the onus is very much on the user to use a supported browser, which especially in the case of iPhone / iPad users can even mean obtaining a different device that supports Discourse’s required Safari engine version (due to Apple’s weird insistence on forcing even alternative browsers on those platforms to use Apple’s own internal rendering engine). So I don’t agree with the cavalier dismissal of users’ individual circumstances with “just upgrade”, but unfortunately that’s one of the few major downsides that comes along with the many unique advantages of running Discourse.
Working fine on Kubuntu Firefox, maybe it’s time…
