PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

[DaKahuna]

Re: PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

damn, I did not see that .. Thanks. email has been resent tot he correct defconforums account ;)

[TheCotMan]

Re: PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

Um, hoping that you've already noticed it, but just in case. The bit from google about checking for typos? It's "defconforums" (Cot transposed letters there, just to fool you).

damn, I did not see that .. Thanks. email has been resent tot he correct defconforums account ;)

Whoops! Sorry about that.

It appears as though my hands have a personality all their own.

"Hey, hands! Stop that! Don't touch me there." ;-)

Thanks for sending them. I've got them. I'll investigate too.

[TheCotMan]

Re: PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

Maintenance at 12:30pm pacific time. Maybe 30 minutes or so.

[TheCotMan]

Re: PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

Maintenance at 12:30pm pacific time. Maybe 30 minutes or so.

Just finishing up on the validation/verification steps. (Maybe 15 minutes from the time of this post before the forums are open again.)

If you notice anything is broken, please post a reply here. Thanks!

[DJ Jackalope]

Re: PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

i'm now seeing some sort of "visitor messages" feature which is super-annoying and aggravating in how it seems to behave.

I do have a couple of questions:
1st: I was on random person A-B-C's profile and discovered I could EDIT someone's visitor messages even if they had been deleted. It might be cuz I am a moderator for the B/W thread but...ummmm? Edit someone's visitor msgs esp after it says they have been deleted?

EDIT: Looks like its cuz I am a mod....

and!

Are we going all "myspacey?" I was playing with my friends/contacts list and clicked on some clickys and it hit submit and it came up with a "friend requested" request thingy. I'm sure this is probably a feature I might have missed on here in this thread before, but I just saw it now :) I just have people selected as friends so they could look at my blog if anyone ever wanted to.

[TheCotMan]

Re: PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

I do have a couple of questions:
1st: I was on random person A-B-C's profile and discovered I could EDIT someone's visitor messages even if they had been deleted. It might be cuz I am a moderator for the B/W thread but...ummmm? Edit someone's visitor msgs esp after it says they have been deleted?

EDIT: Looks like its cuz I am a mod....

I think you are a leader/organizer on forums, but I don't think you are a mod on forums. However, leader/organizer privs may have given those controls. I'm going be disabling the visitor comments item, based on the results of the poll and feedback from some members.

and!

Are we going all "myspacey?" I was playing with my friends/contacts list and clicked on some clickys and it hit submit and it came up with a "friend requested" request thingy. I'm sure this is probably a feature I might have missed on here in this thread before, but I just saw it now :) I just have people selected as friends so they could look at my blog if anyone ever wanted to.

*sigh*
Not by choice. Really, the features you see are often results of upgrades which are being tested for usefulness. The Blog feature and the Project feature were actually plugins purchased by DT for the forums and were added by choice. Everything else, including visitor comments, are side-effects of upgrades, and new features that have defaulted to enabled.

There is a feature that allows users to list buddies and then lets you see them in the "who's online" list with a + next to their name. This has been around for a long time. People with a * next to their name are invisible.


If there are features that suck, or will cause problems, I'd like to hear about them so we can address them, put on a stamp, and send them away.

[Deviant Ollam]

Re: PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

what on earth seems to have happened to the forums now??!?

i'm guessing this was just part of another update package... but now we have two more annoyances (at least, they are annoyances for me... let's see what others say)

1. increasing myspace-ness of the forums - do not worry, lopey, render, and others... i chose not to friend you because i hate that sort of a feature, not because of anything you did to upset or annoy me (i mean, other than sending the friend request to begin with... but we'll chalk that up to mere accident and not look back) good lord, is this something we really need as part of the forums code?

2. the "go to first new post" link - what appears when doing a "get new posts" function is now a full text link instead of a simple, easily clicked icon. i loved the little "square with an arrow" gif image. now i've got a long-ass text link that makes it harder to see where to click and causes more line wrap. my bookmark for the forums is actually the search.php?do=getnew function. i authenticate with a password and there i have a list of threads. i used to love just going right down the column, middle-clicking all of them so they'd pop into separate tabs. now i have to scroll more slowly and click more deliberately in order to get the same effect. ugh.

maybe i'm alone in all this. maybe i'm the lone curmudgeon who wishes stuff would stop changing. if i'm not, i welcome your comments here next to mine.

[TheCotMan]

Re: PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

what on earth seems to have happened to the forums now??!?

I've not added any new features, honest!

I've performed several upgrades to fix various problems with known vulnerabilities to XSS and risk for abuse to passed data that could be tainted, but other than the Blog and Projects which were added last year, no new plugins have been added to the forums.

i'm guessing this was just part of another update package... but now we have two more annoyances (at least, they are annoyances for me... let's see what others say)

1. increasing myspace-ness of the forums - do not worry, lopey, render, and others... i chose not to friend you because i hate that sort of a feature, not because of anything you did to upset or annoy me (i mean, other than sending the friend request to begin with... but we'll chalk that up to mere accident and not look back) good lord, is this something we really need as part of the forums code?

Yeah. That is silly. Before, a user could specify friends to add to their list, but that list was totally useless. Right now, it looks like they have expanded this friends thing to make it easier to use and add people to, but now it requires the person to respond or something.

I can look to get this disabled too-- no need to vote on that.

I just need time to explore these features and remove the ones we don't want.

2. the "go to first new post" link - what appears when doing a "get new posts" function is now a full text link instead of a simple, easily clicked icon. i loved the little "square with an arrow" gif image. now i've got a long-ass text link that makes it harder to see where to click and causes more line wrap. my bookmark for the forums is actually the search.php?do=getnew function. i authenticate with a password and there i have a list of threads. i used to love just going right down the column, middle-clicking all of them so they'd pop into separate tabs. now i have to scroll more slowly and click more deliberately in order to get the same effect. ugh.

I don't see that. Could you push some examples to pics.defcon.org or embed them as images here?

maybe i'm alone in all this. maybe i'm the lone curmudgeon who wishes stuff would stop changing. if i'm not, i welcome your comments here next to mine.

You are probably not alone. What? They say every letter to a company is like 100 ties as many that week the same way?

Feedback like this is good. List your gripes so that when I have time I can look into fixing or disabling the ones we don't want.

Thanks man.

[Deviant Ollam]

Re: PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

I don't see that. [the "go to first new post" text link] Could you push some examples to pics.defcon.org or embed them as images here?

it's not doing it now for me. my only guess is, somehow the web page transmission was interrupted or stopped early, and firefox hadn't pulled the GIF images yet. instead, the browser looked to the HTML source and saw the image's ALT tag (or, rather... i guess it's their TITLE tag) and used that to formulate the link.

Thanks, man, always and forever for the tireless work you do keeping the forums awesome. You rule.

[theprez98]

Re: PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

You probably already know this, but SSL access to the forums is not working.

[Thorn]

Re: PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

You probably already know this, but SSL access to the forums is not working.

I posted a thread in the Mod/Admin area about this yesterday. So far, no responses. CotMan must have taken the weekend off.

[The Dark Tangent]

Re: PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

All fixored now.

[TheCotMan]

Re: PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

I posted a thread in the Mod/Admin area about this yesterday. So far, no responses. CotMan must have taken the weekend off.

You probably already know this, but SSL access to the forums is not working.

Naw. I was here early enough to report the problem by SMS Saturday morning at 8:45am , but then I was gone all day Saturday (without Internet) until around 1:00am. This morning, I reported it again around 2:00am by email, and then again, by SMS around 10:00am this morning.

The forums box was fine. Something else was preventing all https traffic to all 3 web servers (pics.defcon.org, forum.defcon.org, and www.defcon.org) from being passed while the pain-text http was working just fine. The services were still running. Actually, the same web server that serves you the http content also serves you the content that you get with https for pics and forums. Both have been running continuously, without interruption since Jun 23, 2008.

I generally do not log in to post anything unless I have an https session available. I could have setup an ssh tunnel to use and log in through that, but I knew this was a problem outside the forums, pics and www box and the people that needed to be notified notified.

I did try to provide comments about the progress of this to other people through an online instant messaging system that some of us have used in the past. The first comment on Saturday was asking if other people saw the same failure (nobody had reported it yet.) Then I provided a few updates, and now it is working again.

Thanks DT.

[TheCotMan]

Re: PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

Visitor comment, and friends and one or two other new features in the User Profiles have been disabled.
(See comments and discussion from Deviant Ollam and Jackalope for the history of these.)

[TheCotMan]

Re: PUBLIC-NOTICES: Forum Changes/Fixes. Any Questions?

Merged Mixitup and Dallas to Dallas.
Posts now assigned to Dallas.