new forums discussion

[Deviant Ollam]

i'm posting this here because i can't reply to the thread announcing the new forums.

i am having a few problems with the new forums, actually.

let's start with the reply. that announcements thread doesn't seem to be locked, and there's even a "reply" button (tried to attach an image of this, but that's essentially impossible due to the very small file size limit for attachments) and if i mouse over it the cursor changes to a pointer indicating that it's supposed to be a link. clicking does nothing.

also, from a functionality standpoint... having a "reply" button only way up at the top of a page is kind of frustrating. the old forums used to have reply link/button down at the bottom of each page, not to mention in each post. (EDIT: seems this thread here does have a reply button at the bottom. so maybe the announcements thread IS actually locked to non-mods? and the Reply button at the top is just a relic that shouldn't be there? FURTHER EDIT: it seems the "top" reply button is part of some floating element that scrolls down the page as you read, so it's always there. still does nothing when I click, though)


themes - the dark theme is very difficult to read (very stark bright text hurts eyes over the black... and many menus and other elements are dark and thus unreadable over the black background) and the cool blue theme is totally brash and bright. i know that themes will be worked out in the future, though. fingers crossed.


useful links - my bookmark for the DEFCON forum used to be https://forum.defcon.org/search.php?do=getnew so that i would instantly see any new posts or threads after logging in. that appears to not work anymore.


i'm sure that there will be more feedback, but those are the first things i'm seeing. also, all page loads and general interactions seem much slower than before, but this must be wrong since the whole major downtime was due to a big upgrade, no?

i'm already on the record as a guy who generally hates change. so some of that is coming out, i'm sure. but, yeah, this is not making me all smiley inside.

[Zorlac]

I agree with the black text on a dark grey background, its impossible to read, as is light text on a light background (the cancel/preview/post reply buttons at the bottom). Slow page loads are a pain, but can be worked on. A "show new" or "get new" link would be really useful to get working again.

Am off to see if there are other themes that work better, or at least make my eyes bleed less :)

[Zorlac]

The "cool blue" theme makes things readable, but I miss a decent dark theme.

[TheCotMan]

i'm posting this here because i can't reply to the thread announcing the new forums.

Wow, that sucks. Added to my list of things to fix. Sorry about that.

let's start with the reply. that announcements thread doesn't seem to be locked, and there's even a "reply" button (tried to attach an image of this, but that's essentially impossible due to the very small file size limit for attachments) and if i mouse over it the cursor changes to a pointer indicating that it's supposed to be a link. clicking does nothing.

Click on the "quote" icon, and your browser should copy/paste that post to the bottom text-field to reply to that post. This is not the same way it was. I can investigate adding a "reply" option instead, or change "quote" to read "reply". Which would be best from you point of view?

also, from a functionality standpoint... having a "reply" button only way up at the top of a page is kind of frustrating. the old forums used to have reply link/button down at the bottom of each page, not to mention in each post. (EDIT: seems this thread here does have a reply button at the bottom. so maybe the announcements thread IS actually locked to non-mods? and the Reply button at the top is just a relic that shouldn't be there? FURTHER EDIT: it seems the "top" reply button is part of some floating element that scrolls down the page as you read, so it's always there. still does nothing when I click, though)

I am betting there is a change to the security/permissions for forums as part of the upgrade. I'll look to re-open that thread to give users access to reply -- something we want in the announcement threads.

themes - the dark theme is very difficult to read (very stark bright text hurts eyes over the black... and many menus and other elements are dark and thus unreadable over the black background) and the cool blue theme is totally brash and bright. i know that themes will be worked out in the future, though. fingers crossed.

The upgrade was unable to automatically upgrade the styles/themes that I have manually kludged together, and upgraded for 10 years. The end result? I am working on building themes/styles from scratch, trying to emulate some of the look and feel from past themes. This system is troublesome, as there are variables with misleading names that suggest they are for "text edit background color" or color for text, but they are not used for any editors. The edits to control colors in the editor are in a CSS table dynamically generated. Some variable are totally useless to their name. Dealing with styles/themes under the new software is consuming a lot of time finding out which features work and which features do not.

Wait until you get to "PM" or "blog" and se how the dark color theme/style looks there.

My highest priority after the upgrade, and then the last-night upgrade to php is to get the themes/styles functional, so that text can be read and the reply-field contrast is usable. Once we can actually read all the text, and there is no slight difference in shading/contrast to make it hard or impossible to read, then I will be working on things like "too bright on too dark" issues, and then working on color themes. Yellow on black is different from blue on black in the classic theme. Previously we had 2 or 3 "dark" themes (classic, default, high-contrast-dark) and each had different colors for links (blue, yellow, red). Once we get one functional "dark" theme, we can explore changing link colors.

useful links - my bookmark for the DEFCON forum used to be https://forum.defcon.org/search.php?do=getnew so that i would instantly see any new posts or threads after logging in. that appears to not work anymore.

Nope. I already have 2 reports on that. At least one website used it for their DCG page to pass on forum activity. A forum mod also expressed dissatisfaction with this gone. Additionally, the "new" tab options for new activity does not show new activity, and the public version of this fails to work, saying "you must be logged in" -- Yeah, I know about this too, and it is part of the functionality things I want to fix, but it is after making the forums read-able, and something people can reply to.

Please continue to post complaints and constructive criticism about the new software, so I can build of list of things to do, and prioritize them. If you or others disagree with the priorities, please provide an argument to support a different priority list.

i'm sure that there will be more feedback, but those are the first things i'm seeing. also, all page loads and general interactions seem much slower than before, but this must be wrong since the whole major downtime was due to a big upgrade, no?

Page load is slower. the new software does more on page load. I don't know what can be done to speed it up. I am guessing a large part of the slower load is the new forum software does more in the way of dynamic page generation than the old forum software, with many more elements added to each page.

i'm already on the record as a guy who generally hates change. so some of that is coming out, i'm sure. but, yeah, this is not making me all smiley inside.

You are not alone. Others feel this way too, which is why I kept the "classic" theme style around, or upgraded to emulate it for major forums software upgrades, year after year for 10 years. The new forum software make that impossible. I will work to try to make something that shares some of its colors, but the new layout and panels makes emulating the classic theme impossible. :-/

[TheCotMan]

The "cool blue" theme makes things readable, but I miss a decent dark theme.

I kept that theme to give an alternate theme that might be usable. Of all the available themes, it was the least disagreeable.

Because of Deviant's comment about being unable to reply to the "announcements forum thread" I deleted an old tweet asking for feedback there, and tweeted a new one, asking for people to reply here.


In making a "dark" theme with the forms software, the most common advice I've read? "don't do it" and I can see why. However, they said that before with previous upgrades, and we made it work. We'll keep working on it.

[Deviant Ollam]

There is something important that I omitted from my post last night...

I (and all of the other members of the community) deeply value and appreciate all the hard work that goes into keeping the forums running and I know the upgades this time were a massive effort that wasn't easy. I wouldn't want the mods and the admins (especially Cot) to think that our feelings were 100% negative. While the initial experience has been bumpy, I know it will be fixed... and in a faster and more attentive way than many other services.

I recall a time -- what was it... a year ago maybe? -- when Yahoo did something to its webmail system and all of the lonely housewives and AARP members who still use Yahoo somehow got all up in arms about it. And Yahoo, if you read articles about this or saw lots of angry tweets, did essentially fuck all. They ignored everyone's complaints, knowing full well that folk had nowhere else they would really rather go.

The DEFCON forums could take that route... knowing there is no other place for us to build this community, they could be re-tooled however folk wanted and we would have no choice but to suck it up. But that's not the case. The admins and mods always make us feel heard, even when we're grousing. And I appreciate that.

Thanks for working hard to keep things going. I know all will be for the best in the end, because of your efforts.

Well, maybe not the Facebook login. ;-D

https://twitter.com/spacerog/status/558611196069560320

Wait, Defcon forums is going to support Facebook logins? Wow, hacker culture is dead.

[TheCotMan]

There is something important that I omitted from my post last night...

I (and all of the other members of the community) deeply value and appreciate all the hard work that goes into keeping the forums running and I know the upgades this time were a massive effort that wasn't easy. I wouldn't want the mods and the admins (especially Cot) to think that our feelings were 100% negative. While the initial experience has been bumpy, I know it will be fixed... and in a faster and more attentive way than many other services.

Thanks for the thoughtful comments. I would rather see complaints get posted than for people to choose to not complain and never be informed of troubles.

It is information that hackers crave, and without it, the minds of hackers starve. Feedback is information.

No need to worry about hurting my feelings with these themes, styles and changes in features; my first comment about seeing them before they went live? "Terrible." I worked on them for about 12 hours to give a minimum level of function. As of now, ignoring the "whites are too bright, and darks are too dark" everything on forum front page and sub-forums is usable except for:
1) Top, just under "Navbar" there are links that read:
Home > Forum > General Area > Community Talk
But the font color is too dark, making them almost unreadable. That appears to be controlled by a CSS "file" edit, not a variable, but attempts to change this anger the firewall, and put me in a penalty box, slowing my progress. I have other source IP address I can use, and I may have resort to a SQL "update" to DB table rows to get what I want, but it is a slow process, as variables that should be used for things are not.
2) Near the bottom, as you can see in threads with many replies is a "thread navigation" rectangular space that is all white, with navigation boxes for which page of posts in the thread that you want to see. now the boxes are readable, without the weird pastel blue colors, but the larger rectangle that contains them is all white, and will give me a sunburn.

Some questions for you and all of the users:
What do you think of yellow as the color for links or link-like items? Would you prefer blue like the old forum "classic" style?

Presently, I am running with most backgrounds from #000000 to #444444. I am running with most font colors at #CCCCCC to #FFFFFF.
We do need slight variations in background colors and font colors to identify one region as different from another.

What range of "black" should we have for backgrounds?
What range of "white" should we have for font colors?
Should these be linked? (If the range for background is #111111 to #333333, and the range for white is #CCCCCC to #EEEEEE, should we pair the range of background #111111 with the font color of #CCCCCC and #222222 wth #DDDDDD and #333333 with #EEEEEE so as to avoid huge deltas in contrast in any one space?

I know "Blog" and "PM" are pretty much unusable withthe present "Dark" theme. I am going to work on those once I finish with these last two functional issues on the main forum and subforums.

Once "Blog" and "PM" are functional, the above questions on contrast thresholds will be addressed int he forum/sub-forum space, so feedback is requested.

Once it is all functional, and we are working towards aesthetics, I can create multiple copies of a theme with different suggestions, and we can vote on them

As we work on aesthetics, I will be looking into ways to duplicate often used features:
* Show me recent activity
(What else?)

Last, I will be investigating what is needed to support mobile styles (working DEF CON staff/goons) and yes, support for FaceBook as mentioned on twitter.

I recall a time -- what was it... a year ago maybe? -- when Yahoo did something to its webmail system and all of the lonely housewives and AARP members who still use Yahoo somehow got all up in arms about it. And Yahoo, if you read articles about this or saw lots of angry tweets, did essentially fuck all. They ignored everyone's complaints, knowing full well that folk had nowhere else they would really rather go.

There is no profit for yahoo to support old retired people, who mostly live of fixed incomes. They are not a primary demographic, and their mail service is not a revenue generator. Almost all DEF CON stuff is run by volunteers -- the same people that use the services that they support. In effect, "we eat our own dog food," This is why Microsoft's Visual C++ was often better supported and maintained than their other products -- their developers used it.

The DEFCON forums could take that route... knowing there is no other place for us to build this community, they could be re-tooled however folk wanted and we would have no choice but to suck it up. But that's not the case. The admins and mods always make us feel heard, even when we're grousing. And I appreciate that.

Here, i would disagree with you. Hackers would build an alternative to no forums if they wanted it and there were no forums. Consider the DC-Stuff mailing list, which continues to be run outside of the defcon.org namespace, by volunteers. http://dc-stuff.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dc-stuff .

Thanks for working hard to keep things going. I know all will be for the best in the end, because of your efforts.

Thanks for the recognition, but I can't take all credit; we are a team of volunteers, all contributing to make DEF CON a better experience for ourselves and others that want to join us. :-)

Well, maybe not the Facebook login. ;-D

https://twitter.com/spacerog/status/558611196069560320

Yes, yes. The Facebook Login. I went to sleep last night, and when I woke, I found tons of notifications about that.

Some background:
1) The activity on the forums has been in decline for years, as facebook, G+, and twitter have become social networks where people can organically build their own sources of information to subscribe to.
2) The forums are like USENET : a hierarchical system of topics that well-intended admins, mods, leaders and organizers attempt to create and populate with various topics.

In "1" , users have total control over what they want to read, and what they do not. There is no "ban" imposed by some dick of a dictator (me and Chris if he wants this as a title) or volunteers helping to keep a feed clean (mods and admins) for general public consumption. Instead, users choose "like"/"favorite" or not, and follow, or un-follow to change the sources of information. This control is *very* *very* enticing to all sorts of people, including hackers.

In "2" users have fewer controls. User must rely on mods/admins to weed our "junk" but what one user views as junk, another users views as useful. Every action taken by mods/admins to restrict content, or enforce rules polarizes contributors.

For "1" there are apps on phones, and mobile devices for people to read content and update status as they sit on a toilet. There is one login for them. These social networks are "sticky" and user time is limited, so if they must only login to one thing, they will choose what is best for them, usually the place with most of their friends; the place that is most active.

For "2" there is a mobile theme (before upgrade) which was clunky, and difficult to use. (Now we have upgraded, and plan to upgrade mobile themes even more as mentioned by DT.) But even with this, we are "yet another forum site" that users stop visiting.

The value of the forums is directly related to use, and they are being used less and less by users.

Observations from tech world?
Young people tend to use tables, phones, and may go so far as a "SurfacePro" but laptops/notebooks? Mostly held by gray-haired people or developers/network-engineers that need massive memory/CPU/Disk for VM or serial port support as part of work.
If younger people are using tablets and phones for most of their Internet time, and dedicated apps on these instead of full web browsers are the choice of these people, and we do nothing to support these, then we will become something like USENIX -- a collection of gray-beards whining about, "back in my day $ID_Label didn't $thing." Screw that.
There are no "good old days." Stuff required more work back in the "olden days." When was the last time you had to deal with an IRQ conflict? IO port conflct? When was the last time you had to manually set any switches on a DIP chip to configure a new piece of hardware for your computer? Many things are easier now than they once were.

Unless something is done to make the forums relevant and used, I suspect their value will decline, and the reason for maintaining them well be lost. Enabling support for FB users is one thing we can try.

Jeff has already asked me to disable the "forced lurking period" as another change to see if lowering the bar to participate will encourage more use. This will almost certainly mean more spam, but if we block spam at the cost of blocking would-be contributors, and we are in decline, what future is there for the forums?

The "forced lurking" is kind of disabled right now. After a new account is created, the next check of users is supposed to promot them to "L3" for full access. I need to do the more time-consuming thing, and edit permissions to allow L1, L2 the same access to forums as L3.

[Deviant Ollam]

Ah, i was going ask about the forced lurking... and ask about how it would work with a Facebook login. Personally, I know that you folk will always do a good job of keeping spam down and so forth... but the Facebook login just feels "dirty" to me. It really just sullies the culture in some sort of way and is a bit of a middle finger (or more like a blowing of a raspberry?) to the core element of the community, many of whom purposefully do not have Facebook.

[TheCotMan]

Ah, i was going ask about the forced lurking... and ask about how it would work with a Facebook login. Personally, I know that you folk will always do a good job of keeping spam down and so forth... but the Facebook login just feels "dirty" to me. It really just sullies the culture in some sort of way and is a bit of a middle finger (or more like a blowing of a raspberry?) to the core element of the community, many of whom purposefully do not have Facebook.

Yeah, I do not have a Facebook account and do not want one.

I'm not saying the following is the choice, but let's play what-if:

What if the decline in the use of the forums will continue as it has, until the forums are only used by less than 1% of attendees. Would the forums continue? What threshold of use will result in the forums being closed? At what point will DT evaluate use (or lack of use) and decide resources spent on forums could be better spent on other projects? (These forums are his, not mine or anyone else's. Best description of my role is a caretaker.)

We've been around a long time. A metaphor for consideration:
What if the forums are like gopher:// while twitter is like http:// ?

We have a difficult dilemma:
Fail to adapt and risk stagnation and "death", or adapt too fast and alienate the people that have advanced past evolutionary steps making our conference what are are today?

Suggestions welcome to make forums a used resource.

DT's idea is really needed at this point -- we have little to lose in removing the forced lurking period.

It is possible that FaceBook auth to access forums will be to the DEF CON Forums what AOL and Eternal September (that never ended) was to USENET. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

I'd rather try new things, to see what works and what does not than not try at all.

"But Marge, trying is the first step to failure." -Homer Simpson :-)

[TheCotMan]

Ok. All of the glaring functional problems with "Dark" that I know about, which make reading/posting/replying on the forums have been addressed. If you know of any others that make use very difficult (background nearly same color as font, or other masking) please let us know by posting what is broken where.

Next step: brightness/contrast and color selections for links: stick with yellow? move to blue? something else? What ranges of levels for white for text should we use with which ranges of background for black?

[TheCotMan]

In an attempt to get a style closer to the old forum "classic" I have created "Dark-Blue". It should be user-selectable (bottom left corner.)

Feedback is welcome.

Too bright? Too dark? Functional issues with blue? What about the white-on-black text? Should text be dimmer?

[TheCotMan]

Without making a fully integrated "recent posts" section, I've made a light-weight page that performs this function. It is super-low frill, and uses no CSS. It will even work in links and lynx:

https://forum.defcon.org/custom/recent.php

If this meets the desired result as information goes, I can convert it to a module and make it look like it belongs to the forums.

Comments?

[Deviant Ollam]

In an attempt to get a style closer to the old forum "classic" I have created "Dark-Blue". It should be user-selectable (bottom left corner.)

Feedback is welcome.

Too bright? Too dark? Functional issues with blue? What about the white-on-black text? Should text be dimmer?

i like the yellow/beige tint of things in the plain "Dark" theme at the moment more than the "Dark Blue"

the bigger help will be, as you point out, making the text dimmer. right now it looks like it's almost at #FFFFFF but i think it would be great at #CCCCCC or even something a bit softer with a hue like #CEC798 (or #CCCC99 if you want to stick with standard web colors)

[Deviant Ollam]

https://forum.defcon.org/custom/recent.php

If this meets the desired result as information goes, I can convert it to a module and make it look like it belongs to the forums.

Comments?

well, we're not discussing the aesthetics of it (just imagine"blinded by the light" playing) heh, but as a feature it appears to be viable.

i do notice, however, that the forums "Search" feature supports a "since last visit" function. I tried only checking that box an nothing else, but the Forums yelled at me about "too broad, enter some search terms" etc etc.

so maybe this functionality is in there somewhere, somehow?


another note... in this "compose" box, i can't right-click and get a conventional menu (like right-clicking on a misspelled word to choose the correct one from my browser's popup menu)

instead, the only options are cut, copy, paste, and add table.


another note: it seems some posts are being mis-dated in the database, and while I presume that will smooth itself out over time, right now they appear as "new" when they are actually old (like Zorlac's post about the zombie targets)


still glad to be seeing the progress.

[TheCotMan]

well, we're not discussing the aesthetics of it (just imagine"blinded by the light" playing) heh, but as a feature it appears to be viable.

Thanks! It may becomes the base for a new module for the forums. Oh, how I hate to build code for the forums, when it just becomes a risky item for being obsolete on next upgrade. :-/

i do notice, however, that the forums "Search" feature supports a "since last visit" function. I tried only checking that box an nothing else, but the Forums yelled at me about "too broad, enter some search terms" etc etc.

so maybe this functionality is in there somewhere, somehow?

Earlier, I tested making a guest feature "Today's Posts" available to guests like logged-in users, but it requires that we enable fhe forum search engine be available to non-logged-in users, but thishas been a long-time no-no for this software, as searches are resource intensive. The example link I provided, uses a feature that is supposed to make a request as needed if last was more than a minute ago, otherwise, the last results are cached, and referenced, making it much lower over-head. This cache-time can be changed, too, to say 10 minutes if needed. The present search used for faily posts and other links uses the search engine each time.

Yes, it is hard to believe the devs did not make a guest-available options that does not use the search engine. :-/

So, the short answer? Relying on the forum search engine is a non-starter as a way to show recent posts, as guests won't get to use it.

another note... in this "compose" box, i can't right-click and get a conventional menu (like right-clicking on a misspelled word to choose the correct one from my browser's popup menu)

instead, the only options are cut, copy, paste, and add table.

Interesting. I'll have to look into that more. This is a new editor, and I found I had to edit files to get control of color-codes for it in CSS. Thanks for this new report!

another note: it seems some posts are being mis-dated in the database, and while I presume that will smooth itself out over time, right now they appear as "new" when they are actually old (like Zorlac's post about the zombie targets)

Yeah, I've seen some strange date-stuff, like posts being 1 hour in the future. I've not had time to investigate those issues, and have plans to, but want to get the functional read/writing things resolved first.

Once the functional stuff is done, my next tasks will be getting Neil access to work on custom mobile styles, and support to integrate with android and iOS for other forum apps. Also? Work with (not sure if they are supposed to be named) to see what is needed to get FaceBook users access to post. (This is expected to be a FEATURE -- something you can use, or not, but not meant to force people to have FB account to post on the forums.)

still glad to be seeing the progress.

Thanks man. In about 1 hour, I expect to be finished with the suggested brightness alterations for FG/BG, using #101010 - #1E1E1E for "dark" and #c0c0c0 - #cecece for "light" and see if this mix of contrast makes them usable. I'll probably have to expand these ranges so that backgrounds for quoted posts embedded in other posts have sufficient contrast to make "what is quoted" obviously separate from "this post." I understand this is a risk, and is part of the process. First order is "address excessive contrast / blinding brightness." Next will be refine/expand deltas in darks or whites as needs, and then aesthetics -- color choices for links, etc.