Alicornutopia

Haven't posted patch notes in a while so honestly most of the stuff's been pushed piecemeal, it is not New per se, but hey.

Updates!
- 82.75% coverage
- I finally spun up background workers, because I will need them to precompute flat view. Emails now live there. This is VERY EXCITING and was weirdly a lot of work and also costs money, so do let me encourage you to contribute if you've been considering it xD
- Alicorn has been reporting that the unread link is jumping her too far; I fussed slightly with the unread anchor to see if it helped.
- Fixed a bug where removing a gallery from a character did not actually reset the order of the other galleries, which probably broke future reordering.
- Search results now link to the reply when clicking on the post title.
- Clicking Preview no longer disables any buttons, since it creates nothing in the database.
- The site now redirects you to glowfic.com if you attempt to use the weird Heroku icon. It should not interact weirdly with users halfway through using it (it will not redirect except on a get request, so it won't break if you're trying to post something; it will preserve your full url after redirecting; etc etc) but do let me know if it does something weird please.

Updates from Throne!
- Messages now prompt for a recipient rather than defaulting.
- Post/reply editor setup code has been consolidated and posts have some additional validations.
- You can see a user's continuities from their profile.
- CSS fixes for blockquotes and emails.

EDIT: I make poor choices and decided to release precomputing tonight. It's still processing existing posts, please don't panic if you see an empty page on flat view for the next hour or so, but it should be done. Flat view should now be stupid fast and much less memory intensive. I will now be watching my error logs in terror to make sure I did this right, please hold.

Should we try flat view a few times.

Go for it :) there's updated/generated timestamps at the top which will warn you if the version's out of date. I'll give it a day or two and then disable paginating with more than 500 at a time, because flat view is now actually a reasonable option.

Would it be possible to add the Permalink and Mark Unread Here buttons on replies to Flat View? I'd like to use it to binge-read threads I haven't started yet but right now there's no way to mark my place without keeping the tab open until I've read the whole thing.

+1

While I'm making suggestions: it would also be nice to have a way to see specifically new/recently created threads, i.e. the equivalent of Recent Threads (the /posts page) but sorted by the thread creation time. Currently I get this by skimming the Unread Threads page (/posts/unread) occasionally but this is getting increasingly unwieldy as the number of active threads increases.

Actually, based on the last thing I wrote, another request: we can change the default paging (# of replies per page) in Account Settings. But the number of threads shown per page (e.g. in /posts, /posts/unread, or in Sandboxes) is currently locked to 25; it would be nice to be able to change that as well.

And yet one more: I can favorite and unfavorite both authors and threads. I would like a way to remove a thread from my favorites page even when it's by an author I've favorited and hence the page includes it by default. Currently:
-such a thread is not marked as favorited when one of its authors has been favorited,
-and even favoriting and then unfavoriting a thread manually doesn't remove it from the favorites page.

I am fine with the first behavior (actually, I think I prefer it) but would prefer that unfavoriting a thread always prevent its inclusion on the favorites page.

+1

It would be handy to be able to see a list of every setting a particular author has written in. (Currently, even skimming their list of threads isn't very helpful, since worlds aren't listed on the threads page.)

(It's possible this is best put off until settings in general have been poked at a bit, since they're currently not very systematic and I think various potential fixes have been tossed about.)

I'd also find it handy if "favorite" threads were marked as such when you're looking at various lists of threads (e.g., the Unread page), possibly with a star/heart.

(<333 Marri)

Exceptions from favorites have already been requested. I'm reasonably confident the "per page" setting of lists of posts has been fixed at 25 for a particular reason – I recall asking about it before? – but I'm not sure what it was and so have put that on the list as a proposal too.

I think flat pages were originally designed for archive use, and so would not include permalinks or "mark unread here" links because those wouldn't work in the case the Constellation goes down. Maybe they should be added but there should be an easy way to remove them, e.g. by a javascript button.

The rest of these issues have been added to the tracker. (I should get better about doing this so we don't accidentally lose any suggestions.)