The Glowfic Constellation

[DanielH]

I think I heard the number 90 days for Amazon carts, but I expect that isn’t as reliable as I’d want an unread page to be.

There shouldn’t be a user-side issue with theme support for logged-out users; that is not nearly as important if it gets lost, and is probably easier to implement. I do agree that it is low priority though.

I have not created an account primarily because the site is in development. I can see if something—like showing the first post—is broken for logged out users. I have gotten accounts at all three of those sites, although with DW it was so I could post on the Talk To Effulgence Characters thread.

Actually, I’m not certain I don’t have a Constellation account. I might have logged in on my desktop before that died, but I never logged in on my phone. This was before email was working on the site, so I can’t check that way. Does the Glowficcers page show all accounts or only those with posts? When I do want an account I would rather not create a new one if I already have one.

[DanielH]

Bug report: on the mobile layout at least, the Last navigation link is still a link when you are on the last page. The others all turn to text as appropriate. This didn’t happen yesterday, so it probably has something to do with the page numbers.

[Alicorn]

I would actually like it if Last were always a link because sometimes I read on my phone and it's days or weeks between instances and I want to skip to the end from what was the last page the last time I was on my phone.

[DanielH]

It is still a link to a page number; Last goes to what was the last page when you loaded the webpage, not what is the last page now. If that were changed then yeah it would be useful to have it always be a link.

[Marri]

I don't have links available to it in the UI anywhere but page=last is an available thing if you ever desire to type it in somewhere. Feel weird about having First gray out and not Last so for now I just fixed the bug.

Full text search is now a thing! It was incredibly painful you don't even know, why is Postgres such an almighty PITA about indexing. But it's up and it's properly indexed. (Important because: searches now take ~0.1 seconds instead of ~8.4 seconds. INDEXES, MAN.) However. Search comes with caveats!

• It only does keyword search right now. It does not do exact search. This means you can search for [morning] but not ["morning start"]. It also means if you search for something like "suddenly" you'll also match lexemes like "sudden", "atrocity" matches "atrocities", etc. I'm looking into exact matches as an option.
• The UI uses a fancy Rails thing called excerpt() to try and display the spot in each reply where your search matched. Tragically, Rails does do exact matching, so if you search "suddenly" and it finds a match on "sudden", excerpt() won't find it. I'm looking into ways to get the database to tell me the lexeme match; until then, the UI just says "(exact string not found)".
• The UI can only be very charitably said to exist. I apologize, you have been warned. Have I mentioned I don't do design?
• The excerpts do not contain HTML markup, because of the very high odds that the excerpt would contain unmatched tags.
• All other search filters continue to apply to the entire post as a whole. If you are searching for something Gem said, and you type in the text and filter on Gem as a character, it will find all characters who used those words in threads in which Gem appears, not all times Gem used those words. I plan to eventually split search into "find threads matching these criteria" and "find specific posts/replies matching these criteria"; till then, I apologize.

I thiiiiink that's all the caveats for now? If anyone has suggestions on how to easily explain the conceptual search difference between the use cases "I want to find new threads to read" and "I want to find a specific post/reply with this character/author/text/whatever" let me know? Thinking maybe "Explore" vs "Search" but not sure that quite covers it, explore sounds a little too undirected. "Scan" and "Filter" vs "Find" have also been suggested.

[Throne3d]

<3 Marri

(You should be able to sanitize the fragment it shows, which should solve issues like that, but it's reasonable to strip them too.)

[Kappa]

Filter vs Find seems like it gets at the thing. Also <33333333333333

[Unbitwise]

So I just made an account. My first bit of feedback is: The places where it looks like I can have an icon but don't currently should lead me to how to add one. In particular, one or more of /users/<N> and /users/<N>/edit could contain text like "To set an avatar, go to an icon from your galleries." I figured it out, but for a bit I was looking for a user-level place to pick an icon, not to pick an icon and then say to use it as avatar.

[DanielH]

I see that I do have an account. I am trying to recover it, for use on my phone (I’ll still be not-logged-in on my computer). My comments so far:

1. Why do I need both an email address and a username? Shouldn’t each of those columns be unique?
2. I do not remember which email address, if any (I might have signed up before email addresses were collected or something), I used for signing up; is there any way to find that out via the site? I do not have any email from the site that I can find.
3. Assuming the account recovery can’t be fixed on the site so that 1 and/or 2 become nonissues, can you please send me an email at whatever address is associated with my account to let me recover it?

Also, I don’t know how easy this is, but I always like it when sites let me sign in via oauth2 (all the places that let you log in with Google/Twitter/GitHub/whatever-that-isn’t-Facebook-which-I-think-uses-something-different). I know that with the only web framework I know a non-negligible amount about, it’s easy to do that, but you are not using that.

[Marri]

@Unbitwise good feedback, thank you, I have made a To Do for it.

@DanielH You did sign up before email addresses were required, so I'll message you a password reset link on this forum. Emails are never displayed publicly; they're used for notifications and used for (and required for) password resets, so I don't have to do this manually for people in general, but otherwise ignored. Your username is what is publicly used all over the site to identify you. There is not a way to find out your email address from the site; that sort of defeats the whole "I do not inform people what your email address is" thing. I put a To Do to investigate OAuth2.