Updates to forum (ongoing)

[Virginiá]

Great work! Will upload tomorrow

Needs white text

[Virginiá]

Updated the member registration page to use reCAPTCHA 2.0, as well as the security question. CAPTCHA had broken years ago and was never fixed, which resulted in a substantial rise of bot registrations. The other anti-spam features mostly stopped them but occasionally one gets through and keeps us up to date on the latest trends in boner pills and what not. Let's see if this stops that.

[Virginiá]

Honestly, all the complaining over this very small change has sucked the interest and fun out of it for me. I'll upload a few more from those posted so far, but that's it. If you had any in the works, my apologies.

[Virginiá]

Thanks Alex / Lourdes / Koopa - uploaded new avatars

Alex - I uploaded Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the others you did except Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia, because they are too big. I'd like to keep it less than or equal to 100px in width. Need to go back at some point and try to shrink some of the other ones as well. I tried setting a max width for the avatar image, which works, but it causes the big avatars to become a little less defined / blurry due to less-than-ideal rendering for the smaller image.

reagente - I'll upload Chad tomorrow


(just catching up on old submissions - not doing new ones)

[Virginiá]

Scott, can you reduce the width of those to no wider than 100px (they are currently 120px)?

[Virginiá]

The fact is, for as long as I've been on the forum, many users have not used avatars to actually describe where they live. In some cases, it's just a way to help them with a meme persona, or to express a culture they identify with, or some other random reason. Even I used DC as an avatar to express my perpetual disgust with Florida (I used to live in DC), and now with Russia since that is where one of my parents is from. Unless you force people to use only avatars that represent where they live, the whole thing is pointless to try and regulate.

Overall it would just be nice if everything could stop being so serious and we could all just have some fun with this. I'm not removing the historical avatars absent some sort of major consensus from the community.

[Virginiá]

Made a number of performance-related changes to the forum. Hopefully it will improve forum load times for those brief instances where it seems to seize up for various reasons.

[Virginiá]

I’m having issues where my posts aren’t going through even if I complete a post. Sometimes I have to do it twice.

Not really following. Exactly what happens before/after clicking Post?

[Virginiá]

It doesn’t load properly and takes me to a blank slate. The title, thread, and post are not written with what was there beforehand.

Not sure. I would just try and save drafts regularly if you're writing something big.

[Virginiá]

Made a number of performance-related changes to the forum. Hopefully it will improve forum load times for those brief instances where it seems to seize up for various reasons.

Do you think it will survive election day in the US?

thumbs up for all your great work!

Hopefully! It may be possible to get at least some of the hardware upgraded by then, and the number of optimizations I've made to the software even since the 2018 election is pretty significant.

If I recall correctly, we were in pretty good shape for election night in 2018, so I think we ought to be fine.

[Virginiá]

If I remember correctly 2018 was the first time in Atlas history where the forum did not crash correct? It certainly ran slower than usual, but there was no proper crash I believe?

(of course I wasn't here for any election befor 2018; nor for any election results in 2018 beyond like 9 or 10 est)

Midterm elections tend to be less active than presidential elections, both for the entire season as well as election night. 2018 was kind of unique in how much interest there was, though. I think we actually got more posts on 2018 election day than 2016's election day. But OVERALL, 2016 was just much more active on a day-to-day basis in the 30 day run-up to the final day. We had over 800 users online at the same time that night, compared to something like 570 in 2018. That is really what kills the server's performance - hundreds of users browsing at the same time, refreshing the same high-post threads, particularly registered users.

Usually the forum switches to registered members only during that time, but Dave and I have made a lot of improvements since 2016, so I'm not sure it will needed this time. I'm actually looking into a couple more changes that might solve some longstanding performance issues. It's possible we could upgrade the server hardware before election day.

Also, just to note, as usual we'll likely go into reduced functionality on election day so as to keep the forum operating smoothly. That would mean no Search functionality, since it was one of the top reasons the forum used to slow to a crawl during an election. I created an "election night mode" setting in the last major update for this reason - it'll disable a ton of things that most people don't use or care about, and will hopefully keep things running decently enough. I don't think we even ended up using it in 2018, but I'm definitely going to enable it this year.

[Virginiá]

I thought about making a new shade of the previous icon, but to be honest, I just hated that. It wasn't clear what it even meant unless you read the legend at the bottom of the forum index page, and the basic style wasn't intuitive at all. Ideally, that kind of thing shouldn't need a legend. You should understand just by looking at it.

These are actually more informative than before in that there is a new icon that describes exactly what is "new." Before, it would be green if there were new posts on the main board or a sub-board, and dark gray if there was no new posts at all.

Now, it shows a faded pair of blank paper for no new posts, a regular, non-faded pair of papers for "new posts on sub board but NOT main board," and a regular pair of papers with scribbling (for text) to indicate new posts on the main board.

[Virginiá]

Well, just to clarify, there are 3 different images, and only one of them means no new posts at all - the faded one. The other two mean new posts, but which icon is shown depends on whether the new posts are on the main board or a child board.

I think TF is right, and that adding a 3rd icon probably makes it more confusing, but only because it's telling you more than the previous green/gray icon did. To make it simpler, just think of it like this: The faded icon of blank paper ( ) = no new posts at all, anything else means the main board or at least a sub-board has new posts since you last viewed it.

[Virginiá]

*raises hand in the classroom sheepishly*

Will there ever be a way to see a ranking of posts by number of recommendations?

per thread or forum-wide?

[Virginiá]

Do you mean the mock election on uselectionatlas.org? Because that would be Dave's purview, not mine.

[Virginiá]

I suppose you could create a thread here:

https://talkelections.org/FORUM/index.php?board=110.0

Use a subject line that will get Dave's attention.

[Virginiá]

As Dave pointed out in another thread, the hardware was upgraded and structural changes to the database were made to improve performance. There might be a bit of a breaking-in period because the changes require a lot of data caching. Ideally, the 1st time certain data is fetched should be slower, then the next times it will be much faster.

But over the next couple weeks, if the forum continues to stall out for minutes at a time at random points throughout the day, can you let me know? Preferrably what time it happened, and what pages you were viewing / actions you were performing when it happened.

Thank you much!

[Virginiá]

I don't know how much of a load they impose, but it has to be something.

Perhaps on expected periods of high traffic, signatures and avatars could be dropped?

Signature images generally tend to be hosted on other servers, and for avatar and signature images hosted on this web server, they are quickly cached by the browser and not re-sent again for week(s), as directed by the server.

In terms of serving up static content, there are other options to speed it up. Content accelerators such as Varnish do a good job caching images/other static files in RAM and then serving it up from there so Apache doesn't have to read it from the disk. There are downsides to that though, and I'm not sure this site needs it. I suppose we'll see on the next debate nights, assuming they generate as much activity.

[Virginiá]

I noticed that there was a comments feature in some of the older posters profiles, what happened to that?

Nothing did. It's not available for every user - only those who enabled the "Ultimate Profile" option, which expands the details of your profile. And on top of that, users can disable comments on their profile page.

https://talkelections.org/FORUM/index.php?action=profile;sa=customized

[Virginiá]

Frankly all of the city avatars so far have been stupid and largely unrecognizable.

What I think would be the most useful addition to the current forum would be the addition of a button to the editor for embedding youtube videos like the one embedding tweets.

There is a button, but it's only on the advanced editor. The old editor is more or less a deprecated feature and is only still around to give people a choice.

[Virginiá]

The advanced post editor is a 3rd party plugin which the new smf 3.0 uses, and I ported it from that. I only edited it to make the emoticons use css sprites instead of individual images, along with a few new bbcodes back in 2018.

If there are problems with it, which seem to be fairly marginal (thankfully, since the project's github page seems to be abandoned), then it is what it is, unfortunately. I don't have the time to go through the source code to figure it out. I did try a long time ago, but hundreds of lines of someone else's string parsing javascript code is incredibly annoying to dig around in. If anyone wants to propose a solution with the relevant code changes, I'd be happy to implement it if it's in working order, but otherwise the current functionality is pretty much locked-in.

[Virginiá]

I edited the link, but it's actually the image that is stretching the page out.

[Virginiá]

Post count group update

In addition to the "Atlas Prophet" addition at 100,000 posts a few weeks ago, "Concerned Citizen" (5k - 9,999k) has been renamed "Junior Chimp"