Feature or Forum Requests

[The Dark Tangent]

As we get the forums back in action I am sure we will forget something, a past village or project or community forum.

If you want to see a new forum or sub forum created, or have an idea on how to better improve things please post your requests here.

[The Dark Tangent]

[Updated 2019 May 22]

If you have found a bug or some strangeness please post it here with whatever details you can to help us reproduce it.
I will continue to edit this top post and add new bugs and remove ones that have been fixed.

With a new install I am sure there will be issues, so help us squash the bugs!

Currently known:

• Tor is being tested - bumpy roads ahead and now have a clear path to implementation!
• We haven't tested photo albums fully yet - Now testing user attachments.
• Need to implement the Organizer user group for those that organize or run events so they can have more control over their sub forums
• Working to add better image support
• The working changes to the default theme needs to be incorporated into the other theme

Recently fixed:

• Posting time is still around 6-10 seconds - Fixed!

[The Dark Tangent]

[Updated June 22 2020]

We are trying to get out of beta as soon as possible. Here is what I am up to and what is still to be done:

• Optimize the TLS ciphers, CSP policy headers, and started playing around with cache-timeouts to speed page refresh.
• Optimized the header image from 400k to around 85k - Planning to optimize more
• Work on deciding how to populate village and contests, and updating some villages
• Fixed the illegible background color in the new Private Message multi-user chat system
• Trying to get most all themes to look right - Outdated mobile themes removed
• Re-establishing a way to ban spammers but still show everyone why they were moderated
• Starting to lay the foundation for bringing on all the contest and event organizers so they can manage their own pages
• Max image size set to 2048x2048 and 2megs
• Unicode seems to be working - A Russian spammer did that for us without us asking. :-)
• The smiles icons don't seem to be populating - Old smiles re-loaded and we plan to add more icons
• Not sure how the friend invites work yet - Figured it out, it's confusing, will write a post about it. Now called "subscribing" to someone.
• URLs are so long forget typing them in twitter, I'll see if there is a way to use the non SEO optimized URL scheme - Fixed
• Page cache has been increased from an hour to 12 hours.

Know problems:

• RSS feeds don't seem right. It would be cool to just subscribe to the villages or contests you want to follow
• Need to make sure the user photo albums are working as expected - After fixing the avatar issue this will be next
• Figure out how to best use the articles feature
• Decide if we will enable the "social groups" feature
• Mobile app notifications are spotty, but a future VB update should fix that known problem.

See anything I am not aware of? Please mention it here in a comment.

We are about to go out of beta as soon as we update the mobile apps!

[loopback]

Trying to Edit avatar, I first use the URL option: https://www.cablesondemand.com/image...62.5LPBFC0.jpg and the following message came up "Drag the selected portion of the image or one of its edges, to move or resize it and set how you want your avatar to appear." but there was no way to drag or resize the image, the image didn't show up at all.

I attempted to work around this by downloading the image and then uploading it using the browse feature: the following message came up "Drag the selected portion of the image or one of its edges, to move or resize it and set how you want your avatar to appear." but there was no way to drag or resize the image, the image didn't show up at all.

I'm on Windows 10 1809 running Firefox Quantum 66.0.3 (64-bit).

[number6]

Trying to Edit avatar, I first use the URL option: https://www.cablesondemand.com/image...62.5LPBFC0.jpg and the following message came up "Drag the selected portion of the image or one of its edges, to move or resize it and set how you want your avatar to appear." but there was no way to drag or resize the image, the image didn't show up at all.

I attempted to work around this by downloading the image and then uploading it using the browse feature: the following message came up "Drag the selected portion of the image or one of its edges, to move or resize it and set how you want your avatar to appear." but there was no way to drag or resize the image, the image didn't show up at all.

I'm on Windows 10 1809 running Firefox Quantum 66.0.3 (64-bit).

Asking forums to download image from the Internet is presently disabled, and will likely be removed from the list of options to install a custom avatar, leaving only upload from your device.

Upload custom avatar and resize is a problem on Firefox and Chrome too. It was working before. Best guess? This is likely a CSP restriction for javascript. The incorrectly working feature should work like this:
You upload an image from your device which does not exceed maximum size.
Once the image is uploaded, your full-sized image should be displayed with an overlayed "wire-frame" like box with an "X" in it.
The default size of the box shows you the resolution which can be imported.
You can move the wire box, or resize the wire-frame box to choose how you want to clip edges of the uploaded image, and then when satisfied, choose to accept/submit the site.
If the resolution exceeds maximum size for avatar, then the forum software will reduce the size of the image to try to make it fit, losing some pixels in the resize, and then your avatar is ready for use.

This is not happening; no preview image is presented in the browser, and no wire-frame box with an "X" is presented. Thanks for submitting this bug report; we'll see what security restriction request is preventing your browser from executing the required code.

A work-around until this is fixed? If you download or create an image, and resize it to 64 pixels x 64 pixels, then after you upload the 64x64 pixel image, you choose to save it when you are directed to resize the image, the image import should work as desired, and become your new avatar. If you choose to save the image, and it is larger than 64x64, then you get an image that uses 64x64 pixels from your image, starting at the top-left corner.

A ticket has been created for us to identify the cause, possible fixes, and decide on best course of action.

Thanks!

[The Dark Tangent]

Hey loopback thanks for reporting the avatar issue, I think I just squished it. It was a Content Security Policy rule issue that took a bit of trial and error. I'll update the head post.

[loopback]

Dark Tangent , confirmed the avatar issue has been fixed. Thank you.

[loopback]

After modifying my avatar, then coming here and posting, I went back to my profile back and the avatar was default blank again. Additionally the small avatar at the top right of the forum is showing the default blank. I will see what shows up next to this post.

[loopback]

Disregard or Delete above post, I think it was a local caching issue. After posting it appears to have refreshed everywhere and appears to be as expected.

[number6]

Disregard or Delete above post, I think it was a local caching issue. After posting it appears to have refreshed everywhere and appears to be as expected.

Insert bad punny-not-so-funny Joke: "Cache is the root of all evil."
(For non-English speakers, it is a parody of phrase, "cash is the root of all evil" where "cache" and "cash" sound the same in English.)

Has anyone found any other issues when using the forums? Please report them so they can be investigated and addressed.

[The Dark Tangent]

Testing DEF CON icons on a dark and light background:

White Icons


Black Icons

[Tangential]

Android App: Links within post titles don't appear to work. See most DC Groups posts with multiple links. Clicking the link takes the user to the thread. Was expecting a long press or similar interaction to make the links available. Example: What appears to be a link in the post title for DC503 in the Inactive Groups forum just takes the Android App to the empty thread.

[number6]

Links within post titles don't appear to work. see most DC Groups posts with multiple links. cocking the link takes the user to the thread. Was expecting a long press or similar interesting to make the links available. What appears to be a link for DC503 in the Inactive Groups forum does not work on Android

At one point, they had a website where html like
<a href="http://www.dc503.org/phpBB/index.php"><i>DC503 -- Portland, OR</i></a>
would allow us to redirect users from the DEF CON forums to their forums.
Since the URL they provided no longer works, I have removed the redirect to that no longer valid URL.
The container should now act like a DEF CON forum and allow you to post topics/threads and replies/posts.

[Tangential]

more concerned about all the other titles with links that I can't get to through the app. the DC Group forum is just the most obvious example.

[Tangential]

#2-If I have not yet allowed the phone to access photos and storage, I found that navigating to my User Profile page by clicking my pic in a thread crashes the Android App. Submitted a bug report through the Android crash handler in case you have access to/are looking at those. It does not crash when I click on someone else's Profile Pic on THEIR User Profile page. It also does not crash if I go into User Profile through the hamburger menu and click the pic. Once I've given the app permission in the User Profile page (click the pic, Confirm on permissions modal, Allow on two system permissions modals), it sometimes still crashes when I click my pic in a thread and then click it again in the User Profile page that launches. It doesn't crash if I've recently loaded the User Profile page from the hamburger menu. Perhaps the reference to the permissions modal is not instantiated properly unless I go in through the hamburger menu? (the lack of a carriage return in the default keyboard is also an issue; I keep accidentally submitting instead of making a new line; maybe change the default keyboard to allow carriage returns?)