[Updated 2023-02-10] Migration complete

BLF Site-related Issues
383

Regarding quoting, it’s another case of weighing the advantages and the disadvantages, and the software offers an additional option:

I chose to disable that default behavior to avoid giving the impression that the new forum is buggy or is disallowing users from quoting. Posts containing entire or partial quotes of previous posts that have since been edited or removed have always been a frequent occurrence on internet forums, including with our old forum software.

With that being said, the new software is much better at showing the threading (who is replying to whom) in long discussions, plus it has the user @ping feature to indicate who you’re replying to, although that shouldn’t be abused since the pinged user will receive a notification. It also shows a preview of a post if the link is pasted on its own line:

If Hoop were to edit or delete that post then the preview would reflect that.
So I won’t enforce any new rules on quoting, but there are now more ways than before to avoid unnecessarily quoting entire long posts while still indicating who/what we’re replying to.

384

Can there be more tools in the tool bar ? I’m not fluent in markdown, BBcode or HTML, nor are many people I think.
Like for inserting image from third party host, and is it possible to resize them ? I want to edit some of my old posts because now the pictures take the full width.
How do I resize internally hosted picture ? there are numbers but changing them crop the image instead of resizing it.

385

There are some additions that I could install, but I need to make sure they’ll be viable in the long term.

Simply put the image URL on its own line. For example:

https://getwallpapers.com/wallpaper/full/b/5/f/563687.jpg

becomes

Regarding image resizing, it’s generally preferable to let the forum software deal with the image size for different screen sizes. But there might be some easy options, I’ll get back with you on that.

1 Thank
386

I noticed something that I don’t really care for.
In the blue scroll bar on the right of the thread, you can use the slider to choose what post you want to look at.
The thing is, there’s a huge difference between Feb 22 and Feb '22.
One refers to February 22nd, 2023 (the current year) and the other refers to 2022.
I think that '22 should be not be shortened and it should be extended to “2022.”
Maybe 22 should also be lengthened to “22nd” to further avoid confusion.

2 Thanks
387

It looks to me that when the scroll indicator reads something like ‘Feb 22’ that is the day of the (current or near past) month, and if the scroll indicator is referring to a date longer ago it would be something like ‘Feb 2021’, 'Feb 2017" and so on.

1 Thank
388

BLF was working differently for me earlier today. :thinking:

389

I had the same issue and found something that I used to edit some posts/threads with images and videos:

For images: url - How to resize quickly a imgur image? - Super User

You can specify the small version of the image by appending s to its base URL.
For example, the URL of your original image is https://i.stack.imgur.com/Brjd7.jpg.
By adding s this becomes https://i.stack.imgur.com/Brjd7s.jpg: […]
Some images may have an ultra-small version of the image, accessed by adding ss, thus making it https://i.stack.imgur.com/Brjd7ss.jpg, but your image does not have one.

Here is the list of all the modifiers for dimensions (not all are always available) :

s =   90×  90 = Small Square (as seen in the example above)
b =  160× 160 = Big Square 
t =  160× 160 = Small Thumbnail 
m =  320× 320 = Medium Thumbnail 
l =  640× 640 = Large Thumbnail
h = 1024×1024 = Huge Thumbnail

For videos: Youtube embed size, revisited - support - Discourse Meta

Hmmm just tested and it looks like that method still works? You just append &width=690&height=400 to the first part of the URL e.g. […]

This is what I did in older posts and it worked. From now on, I will learn how to add videos and photos into the new website in a way that they can be well organized and that I don’t need to use these codes everytime I need to add something!

I hope it helps :+1:

2 Thanks
390

Being able to see the edits mostly means two things:

  • Less forgiving
  • More accountability

On the old site, people edited and/or deleted comments quite a bit, often in ways which were really not okay. Like, they’d say something terrible, wait until it caused problems, and then delete it and pretend they did nothing wrong. Or there were people like kreisler, who would post, wait a day, then delete… pretty much every day, every post. It was a big nuisance. That’s part of why I ended up making a daemon to automatically archive every page I viewed, since it was the only way to keep a record of what happened.

On the other hand, there’s something to be said for the “right to be forgotten”. Data privacy is a huge and complex topic, and there are lots of situations where information really should be deleted instead of just being tucked away in the edit history.

On the other other hand, almost nothing on the internet is ever truly deleted. There’s usually an archived copy somewhere, especially in places like this which are published for the entire internet to read. People need to understand the difference between a private conversation and a public post, and be careful about what they publish.

The common case of editing a post to fix typos, update old info, or add extra info… isn’t really affected much by this. It’s pretty much fine either way, just normal edits. The main factors in determining which policy to use are the more difficult cases, like when someone acts with ill intent or has an atypical situation.

I really could go either way on this… because instead of having a clear solution which always works, there are tradeoffs. However, I think I lean slightly toward visible edit history. It helps reduce some of the abuse patterns the old site had, and special situations can still be handled by asking an admin for help. Like, contact @sb56637 and say “Hey, I got really drunk and s##tposted last night and I feel terrible about it… could you delete the 7 posts linked below?”.

Or perhaps there are other solutions; I don’t know exactly what features Discourse has for this, or what other communities have found to work best.

1 Thank
391

Very helpful, thank you sir!

392

Oh Flying Spaghetti Monster, the self deleting squirrel :chipmunk:
I don’t miss him.

394

I agree, this is a pretty complicated topic.
I remember when i had asked for being able to edit posts right way on the old forum as i tend to make many spelling mistakes, i felt bad that SB had to pay someone to add that functionality though :frowning:

This post shows another bug i have been finding, sometimes when you choose a smiley it puts it at the beginning of the post even when the cursor is in the place i want the smiley. And it glitched the quoting which i am leaving as is for analysis.

395

Yep.

I would say that this isn’t really an issue unique to Discourse or caused by Discourse, the post revision history was simply the default option and I didn’t really think much about it until others brought it up. So now it’s disabled and the current behavior is similar to how the old forum worked, with the notable exception that notification emails with links to posts that were subsequently deleted will no longer take you to a 404 error page, but instead to the deleted stub of the user’s post.

396

Fixed it for you. That is a small bug with threads that have titles like this one with [brackets], I still need to report it but I’m sure they’ll fix it soon.

Ah, no, I don’t remember you asking but I’m sure the add-on functionality was via a free module maintained by Drupal community.

1 Thank
397

Thanks.
We have collectively found a fair number of bugs in Discourse, is BLF the biggest forum on the internet to use it?

398

I don’t think so, but we’re definitely the most unique with the most keen-eyed and active users. :wink:
Discourse is becoming a very popular forum option is several genres / subjects, and there are some really huge instances with very high traffic.

1 Thank
399

Weird because its us finding all the bugs :smiley:

1 Thank
400

It was long ago, iirc you could not post within a minute of a previous post to stop spammers but you also could not edit posts until that minute was up.

401

Probably just because we’re mostly all new and approaching it with fresh eyes. New users are usually the best at finding bugs, because they haven’t yet learned where all the bumpy parts are and how not to stub their toes on them. So they bumble around and trip over every little thing.

Speaking of which, I found a bug just now. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Load the front page. Click a username in the topic list. It goes to a 404 page, /users/foo, when it should instead go to /u/foo. It should probably either be changed to link to the right prefix, or the site should redirect /users/(.*) to /u/$1 before giving up and returning an error.

402

True enough but many of these are basic bugs that other forums should have found long ago, which is why i asked if we are the biggest to use it because many of them are simplistic circumstances.
Many seem to be amateur mistakes.

On the other hand some of the forum features are very well thought out.

403

Huh, weird, it’s not doing that for me. For example when clicking on your username or avatar it takes me to /u/toykeeper/summary .