AtlasMod 2.0: Suggest ideas

[Virginiá]

I'd like to collect some ideas from everyone here. There is no guarantee I can do it all - sometimes even simple-sounding features can be a headache to create, so there are limitations. Try to keep it limited to ideas that would garner a decent amount of support, and ideas that are objectively useful.

Here is the list I've kept so far:

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A couple notes:

Like system - obviously there is a split on this, but the "yes" and "no" sides of it both seem passionate, so I'm keeping an open mind on this. Looking at past posts, Dave himself has expressed some interest in this, so it's a possibility. One thing I would absolutely not do no matter how much support there is is a Dislike button. I'd just as soon scrap both than do that.

#6 (restricted posters list): This is more of just an idea I had after people like EHarding. Occasionally we get users who legitimately need to be restricted or else they end up going overboard to the tune of 100+ posts a day. However I'm not sure if this needs to be "feature-ized" as it's pretty simple to get users to curtail their excessive posting if a decision is made. I dunno. Just an idea!


So, what do you think?

[Virginiá]

^ Yes I meant to add that to list. I wanted to do it this time around but it's a pain in the butt that had to wait.

How about a YouTube embed feature, like on AAD?

def

[Virginiá]

^ I think probably the way you are thinking would defeat the purpose. To just delay the messages would still allow a spammer to bang out like 30 spam posts and just send them all at once and watch them appear one at a time every 20 seconds.

Sestak - what about reduced to 15 seconds? It's not much, but the feature is for anti-spam, so Dave wouldn't want to get rid of it entirely. I made new anti-spam stuff so this 20 second delay is less useful now imo.

Also, good idea HCP

[Virginiá]

Virginia, may I ask why you're so strongly anti-dislike button?  I think that it's at least worth experimenting with.  Who knows, maybe threads will become less likely to be derailed if people express their grievances with each other through dislikes instead of verbal hostility.

Too many people won't like having their posts Disliked imo. I don't really like it either, and it bothers me when certain posters basically start spamming Dislikes on a poster's entire history, or perhaps just dislikes posts based on the user and not the post. I don't think it would have a good effect on the forum. It's not that uncommon either. I don't think youtube has it, not sure about FB.

At best I'd rather code the ability to have Dislikes, but only allow Likes/Recommended at first, and see how that fits. That way Dislikes could be enabled later on.

[Virginiá]

Virginia, could you extend the fields for poll options? 25 px is way too small.

You mean the actual length of the edit boxes for poll options? Or the amount of text allowed?

Additionally, I'd like to know if someone has posted something after I did, like on Wikipedia.

What about this?

https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?action=unreadreplies

It lists all the threads you have posted in that have new posts since you last posted.

[Virginiá]

^ Nope, unread replies is an existing feature. For whatever reason there was no explicit link to it anywhere, so I included it on the alerts page, next to delete all button.

[Virginiá]

Oh yeah: can we have a user tagging option?

I thought about it, but I decided not to so as to save time on this. I can probably add that next time around. In the meantime, the quote system can still be used in a hackish manner to give them an alert.


FYI - For feature suggestions I don't respond to directly, I'm still keeping a list. There are a lot of good ideas here. I'll probably do most of them. Keep it coming

[Virginiá]

I have tons of alerts. Spot on:

Are people getting alerts?  I haven't gotten any.

I also haven't gotten any, and I can recall multiple times I've been quoted over the past few hours.

Did you enable it on the options page?

Profile -> Atlas - Forum Options

It's right under "Edit Buddies (old way)". If you have the Ultimate Profile enabled, it's near the bottom of the page, under all the profile field stuff. If you have the standard profile, it should be on the side.

I might need to add a thing to the alerts page to tell the user if they don't have alerts enabled.

[Virginiá]

Is there any possibility of adding a feature like the one discussed here:

https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=275822.msg5888360#msg5888360

where you can look up the latest posts of select posters (maybe your buddies list, for example)?  I mean, you can already do that by clicking on their individual profile pages, but that's a bit cumbersome.

Well as you said, we can already view a user's recent posts, so the issue at hand seems more like accessibility. Exactly how fast should a user be able to view their buddy list / a buddy's recent post to be considered very useful, at least in regards to this feature request? Should it be like, a button at the top of every page that says "Buddies," where you can go see a list of those users, and then click a single button next to their name for recent posts?

I planned a kind of "control center" for v2 that merges user alerts, maybe a a buddy/follow list, and a smorgasbord of other things people use frequently. Maybe this would address what you're saying.


Also FYI, I added a little icon under people's avatars in every post () that you can click on and see all that user's posts in the current thread. It's an effective way of filtering out everyone but that person, so I think that ties into what you are asking here.

[Virginiá]

Ohhh ok now actually I get it. So basically like this page:

https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?action=recent

Except only show 10 pages of recent posts by people on your buddies list?


(also wavesss excitedly at Siren)

[Virginiá]

The problem I have with that personally is that I'd prefer the ability to wipe out what could evolve to be many pages of discussion be reserved for at least more regular/long-time members. New users are unpredictable, and it would be better for more established users to start threads that generate dozens of pages of content because they would be less likely to delete it at a whim.

If anything, I'm not entirely convinced that thread deletion should be automatic for any regular users. Occasionally we have users who decide they don't want to post here anymore and usually they just leave, but some wipe their posting history too, and that includes all their threads, which sometimes can obliterate threads that actually had a lot of good discussions/analysis. I don't think even most of the threads that would get deleted under that scenario would be missed too much, but there are always some that future Google searchers might have found useful. I never would have found Atlas if some guy who wanted to leave the forum deleted all his NC/VA trends analysis threads under a vague idea that it would give them more privacy.

[Virginiá]

^ Probably not. That is not forum code, it's some 3rd party thing or something Dave coded.

Anything Dave coded, like the predictions or whatever, or 3rd party tools like the matrix test, are not things I can modify/update.

[Virginiá]

I think it might be possible to increase it some. How many extra characters were you guys thinking? Like, at a minimum. Because the forum only takes up less than half the width of the page, titles that are too long might not be the best idea.

[Virginiá]

I think it might be possible to increase it some. How many extra characters were you guys thinking? Like, at a minimum. Because the forum only takes up less than half the width of the page, titles that are too long might not be the best idea.

Why is this?

I'm not entirely sure. I think at first, since this site popped up something like 2 decades ago or so, it was so it fit smaller screens, but now it's not entirely necessary. A theme could be designed to fit the screen no matter the size, but I think the current theme isn't designed like that, so Dave keeps the width small as a compromise for small-screen devices. I know for sure he's not indifferent to it as I did try to widen it when the update was installed, but he decided to change it back.

[Virginiá]

Yea I know - it's something SMF does. If you had a character count before this update, it'd have done the same thing. It has to do with how SMF processes the bbcode/line breaks. I believe it converts some of it to HTML that is longer than the bbcode and/or line breaks, and so you end up with longer text than that of what you put in, except you can't see it yourself.

I'm just going to call this issue the cost of having the post character count doubled

[Virginiá]

If anyone ever gets a database error when trying to view your alerts page, do the following:

1. Visit this page: Atlas - Forum Options

2. Make sure the option "Hide alerts from ignored users" is unchecked.


In most cases, there should be no issue and the option should work fine, but I've noticed a few instances of it in the error log.

[Virginiá]

How do I turn off those annoying notifications about a new post has been made in a thread while you were posting? That is all too rampant during election day threads and any other big Atlas events.

https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?action=profile;sa=theme

Check Don't warn on new replies made while posting.

[Virginiá]

Hello, Virginia, could you please put the View all unread posts to threads you participated in link on top of the alerts page, cause it takes me so long to scroll down to that link?  :*

I thought I responded to your PM about that (or maybe a post somewhere). I said I would add it next time around, which won't be for, at the very least, 2-4 months. I want to get another big update in before the Fall election season starts. It's easy enough to do, but I've already split the project into v2, and I can't keep making updates to v1 at the same time, as it gets confusing and tedious to maintain parallel versions like that. Plus, Dave I think is not easily reachable again, so that's another issue.

[Virginiá]

It would also be a useful implement if we could sort poll result by the number of votes.

I will keep this in mind. I have an idea how to go about it, but I'm not entirely sure how easy it would be to implement.

I have a lot of plans for the poll option in general, including everything from new options, partisan polls (optional obviously), a new design/look, and maybe even multiple polls per thread and "mini polls" that could be embedded in posts, like Twitter's thingy. Although that may be too difficult and/or resource intensive to work.

Anyway, thanks!

[Virginiá]

These are all fantastic ideas.
But the main thing is that the calculation for multiple-choice polls gets fixed.

What exactly is wrong with it? I looked at the most recent Opinion of user poll and it showed the percentages correctly.

[Virginiá]

Sooooo after doing some unrelated research on IPv6, it led me to look at SMF's own support for that, and I'm pretty sure that no matter what, Dave is going to have to update the forum to SMF 2.1 (their newest that is coming out in like 6-12 months) around 2020 or 2021. Like, there is no getting around it. Since IPv4 addresses have essentially run out, by 2020 or 2021, there will be a decent chunk of people who only have IPv6 addresses, and if the forum doesn't support it, they won't be able to view the site.

That does kind of suck for me too since SMF 2.1 has a lot of the features I spent countless hours coding for this forum (including tons of others, such as a Like system, mobile friendly, drafts, etc). I'd have to re-code a lot of what it doesn't have to work with SMF 2.1 as well.

I think with that in mind, after I finish AtlasMod 2.0, I'm going to ask Dave if I can start working on a new theme for the latest version, and prepare everything for 2020-2021.

[Virginiá]

Make it so that the forum doesn't crash on big election days? I know this is likely server related, but I figured it's worth getting out there.

I actually already created a feature for that for the next update. I made it so create a list of dates that would be designated as election days, and the forum would operate in a sort of reduced functionality mode, where certain features that suck up large amounts of processing power would be disabled temporarily.

[Virginiá]

What kind of features are those?

Features that are temporarily disabled in some way are configurable, but they are limited to resource-heavy operations such as determining what topics you have unread posts in, or what the last post you read in a certain topic is, or whether you've participated in a certain topic. These are all things that you may not even really notice. For instance, when you click on a thread that has the new thing next to the subject on a board listing, it brings you to the last post you read instead of the end of the thread. This takes a lot of resources to determine sometimes because the database table that has it can contain millions of records on a forum this big.

Other ones I added are the Recent Posts page, which is arguably the single most resource-intense feature on the forum, due to all the information it has to collect in one page view.

Edit: Also, the Search function, which can lag the server during high-activity times. But that's already not working anymore..

[Virginiá]

I could also see the utility of this on days with a major national or international event. Does such a feature need to be scheduled or can it be triggered by a defined level of activity?

SMF 2.0+ has a load balancing feature that operates by CPU load (or something else), but unfortunately I don't have such a thing for this. I suppose I could do it, and I thought about it before, but I don't know what that sweet spot for CPU usage % is where turning off certain functions would be useful. I'd have to play around with it while on a high-activity night, and I can't do that. The best way, given our circumstances as proverbial digital latchkey kids in the House of Leip is to just provide a list of dates months ahead of time where the feature auto-activates/deactivates on its own. Although I did include a permission setting for the feature, so Dave could give us control of the ENM feature if he wanted.

But as I posted some time ago, the years-long shift from IPv4 to IPv6 will force Dave to upgrade to SMF 2.1 probably sometime in the year 2020, at the latest. Then perhaps the ENM feature could be mingled with the load balancing thing.

[Virginiá]

Why don't we have any Icelandic avatars?  

Missing far more than just Iceland . A couple users made some extra avatars and I sent them to Dave as part of the last update, but for whatever reason, he never uploaded them. And that is after I reminded him several times, so as far as I am concerned, there is probably no point in pursuing this further.

Could you possibly make it so that you can add code to your signature without it going against your character limit? It doesn't appear in the final version so I don't see why it would need to be limited.

The easiest solution for this would probably be to increase the number of characters allowed in signatures. Without getting to into the technical stuff, ignoring bbcode in terms of character count would not by any means be straight forward, since not all bbcode is predictable. Some, like [b][/b] is, but stuff like quote tags, images and urls aren't.