The Glowfic Constellation

[Moriwen]

Thirded; and also on "sort by unread."

[Timepoof]

Maybe a layout/account option?

[Moriwen]

I sometimes want to see all of the threads I'm "tracking" (haven't hidden from unread), without regard for whether they actually have any unread posts in them currently. Is this easily possible?

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Relatedly, with as many threads as are happening now, the way I use "unread" isn't really consonant with the design. I'm only keeping a small fraction of threads on there, but all threads are auto-added. I often find myself wanting to see "all not-hidden-from-unread threads, sorted by latest post," but I can only (easily) see ones that actually have unread posts in them. And so on.

So at least for me, I'm trying to use it as a "tracked" feature, but the interface is still set up as an "unread" feaure where it assumes I'll be reading most or all of the threads posted. This is suboptimal, but I don't know how much other people's use styles coincide with mine, nor how hard it would be to adapt.

My ideal interface would have a way to view (1) all threads, sorted by last post time; (2) all of my tracked threads, sorted by last post time; (3) all of my tracked threads with unread posts in them; and (4) all "new" threads (threads in which I have not yet read any of the posts).

I'd use (2) as my default page (much as I use "unread" now), and visit (4) occasionally to see if there are any new threads I want to start tracking. I don't have any particular need to get emails about my tracked threads, or anything like that. (3) comes in handy when I find myself thinking "wait, what was happening in that one thread I was reading" but it hasn't updated recently and I don't want to fish through five pages of threads I'm not keeping up with to find it. (1) is obviously useful for just seeing what's happening lately even in threads I'm not following, figuring out what thread everyone's talking about, or deciding to catch up on a thread I read a little of but haven't been tracking.

I'm not particularly asking to see any of this implemented, but it seemed like it might be useful feedback to have.


And as usual: our programming crew continues to be awesome, I continue to be fussy. <3 <3 <3

[Throne3d]

(Unrelated to the previous post.)

There was in fact a brief issue with the Constellation! The layout went weird, and I'm not super clear on what happened – it says the CDN that the layout things were on couldn't be resolved? – but it got fixed after a restart (just now) so it should have only been a brief issue.

[Marri]

That was me. Don't deploy your CDN before Amazon finishes calculating it, kids. I'll turn it back on later once Amazon gets its act together.

Also I did a quick hacky thing so you can at least filter the Unread page to "things I've started reading". A proper Tracked Threads thing is coming later.

EDIT: Amazon is done, put the thing back, it looks to be actually working this time.

[Moriwen]

All of the buttons for bold/italics/etc. on the rich text post field (yes I speak computer good) are showing up as unhelpful rectangles for me. (Mac, Firefox, haven't made any changes to default fonts or anything.)

http://imgur.com/a/4u1dQ

[pedromvilar]

As per comments yesterday on IRC they seem to be showing that for everyone.

[DanielH]

Looking at the contents of those rectangles, it’s asking for characters that don’t exist. This isn’t you lacking fonts you should have, this is the site asking the fonts to display things they shouldn’t.

[Throne3d]

It in fact is! TinyMCE is terrible (well, not that terrible, but 'terrible' because this is bad practice) and uses certain custom fonts to have characters display as "B", "I", "U" and so on when they aren't the standard Unicode code points for such things (I'm not sure there are any standard Unicode code points for those…).

The new CDN thing hasn't yet been set up to allow cross-domain requests for fonts, so when the browser is told to download the font from an external location it ends up being told that it's not allowed to do that for security reasons, leaving them to be rendered in whatever fallback font you have. In Chrome, for me, they display like this: https://i.gyazo.com/295370d1e287ce48c55 ... f524d3.png

Code: Select all

    |   |     |  

Edit: … I am told this looks like Tengwar. I have no idea why TinyMCE would use Tengwar or why these code-points would look like Tengwar in whatever font I have that apparently displays them.

Edit 2: They appear to be from the font "Code2000" and they're in the 'private use area', so they're not standard Unicode for Tengwar or anything, they're just… displayed weirdly because apparently I have a font that renders Tengwar in that area.

[Moriwen]

Your mystery characters are much more entertaining than mine.