Forum Feedback & Issues

[Alex Amorianos]

39 minutes ago, Brant Marshall said:

The default theme is still there if you use the theme picker down at the bottom left of the page. If you select it when you're on your computer or a device where the current theme works, it'll show as your default theme on mobile. If you would prefer, I can set your theme for you? 🙂 

There is no theme picker at the bottom left of the page or I cannot see it.🤓

[Zach Biesse-Fitton]

Look at the very bottom of the page. Bottom left.

🙂

[Andreas Fuchs]

For regular users it is not available, the bottom of the page looks like this:

[Zach Biesse-Fitton]

Refresh your page now @Andreas Fuchs.

I have set your theme back to the original design @Callum McLoughlin.

[Frank Grivel]

There are now two posts in the screenshot section with links to files. Out of an abundance of caution, are these spam/troll accounts or am I being paranoid? 

[Andrew Ogden]

4 minutes ago, Frank Grivel said:

There are now two posts in the screenshot section with links to files. Out of an abundance of caution, are these spam/troll accounts or am I being paranoid? 

@Frank Grivel There doesn't appear to be a Judith Johnson in stats, so I'm inclined to believe that's spam. I'd caution it. The second one with the mega link is a real member who posted a real VATSPY screenshot. 

Hope that helps.

[Frank Grivel]

1 minute ago, Andrew Ogden said:

@Frank Grivel There doesn't appear to be a Judith Johnson in stats, so I'm inclined to believe that's spam. I'd caution it. The second one with the mega link is a real member who posted a real VATSPY screenshot. 

Hope that helps.

Thanks! Is the new forum system somehow more prone to these types of accounts or do I just not log on enough to see them regularly? 

[Andrew Ogden]

I'm not sure it's any more prone than the last one was, although you'll have to ask the forum team about that. 

I suspect spam filters have yet to be implemented though, and I imagine that'll happen in the near future.

Happy to help 😀

[Brant Marshall]

@Andrew Ogden @Frank Grivel Account generation outside of Connect is disabled, so they would have to go through the SSO Process with a vatsim account in order to register and make posts here.

[Nick Marinov]

It seems like when uploading a file the forum changes the file name adding a new, rather interesting file extension. The file im uploading is deffo a .pdf file.

[Brant Marshall]

@Nick Marinovaware, we're looking into it 🙂

[Zach Biesse-Fitton]

Hi everyone,

We believe that the safari/iOS issue has been resolved.

Thanks for your patience over the last few hours whilst we fiddled with things.

[Alex Amorianos]

3 hours ago, Zach Biesse-Fitton said:

Hi everyone,

We belive that the safari/iOS issue has been resolved.

Thanks for your patience over the last few hours whilst we fiddled with things.

Thank you Zach.

[Tobias Dammers]

My $0.02: The new layout looks very cluttered, bordering on unusable.

The "timeline" style view is silly, and doesn't add any value over just listing the posts.

Adding arbitrary bits of copy from post bodies to message lists isn't very useful but takes up valuable screen space.

"Recommended post" at the top of a thread is an antifeature, I cannot imagine a single situation where I would want this. I generally want to either read the entire thread, skim it, or jump straight to the first unread post.

The "frameless" design is a huge step back; it is now more difficult to visually distinguish individual posts, and the dark headers don't really work either because the same style is also used for things inside posts (e.g. quotes).

WYSIWYG editing is, IMO, an antifeature, and there doesn't even seem to be a way to switch back to source editing.

I don't particularly enjoy the "reaction emoji" thing either, though that's more a matter of myself disliking the hyping effect of this kind of social-mediaism.

It would be great if there was a way to disable icons; I have a rather textual brain, and icons are mostly useless clutter to me. Icons without text are even worse, those tend to make it almost impossible to figure things out.

TL;DR: can I please please please get the old forums back?

[Andrew Ogden]

@Tobias Dammers Many of the features (or anti-features, as you referred to some) come bundled in with this forum software, which is, from a technological standpoint, a needed upgrade to keep the forums maintainable. Features like the 'timeline' view are stock with the software and I don't think it is possible to remove it (I could be wrong though).

I am interested in why you dislike these features? Particularly your comment about WYSIWYG editing, I cannot understand why you label that as an anti-feature. I know for me, WYSIWYG editing is far more tolerable than source editing, what pulls you away from it? 

Cheers,

[Trevor Hannant]

2 hours ago, Tobias Dammers said:

My $0.02: The new layout looks very cluttered, bordering on unusable.

The "timeline" style view is silly, and doesn't add any value over just listing the posts.

Adding arbitrary bits of copy from post bodies to message lists isn't very useful but takes up valuable screen space.

 

- Click on 'Unread Content'
- Click on 'Condensed'

The stream will now only show topic titles and not text from the post.   You can also change what you see in the Unread Content list using the filters above then save this as your own 'stream' which will show when clicking on Unread Content in future.

 

[Tobias Dammers]

4 hours ago, Andrew Ogden said:

@Tobias Dammers Many of the features (or anti-features, as you referred to some) come bundled in with this forum software, which is, from a technological standpoint, a needed upgrade to keep the forums maintainable. Features like the 'timeline' view are stock with the software and I don't think it is possible to remove it (I could be wrong though).

I am interested in why you dislike these features? Particularly your comment about WYSIWYG editing, I cannot understand why you label that as an anti-feature. I know for me, WYSIWYG editing is far more tolerable than source editing, what pulls you away from it? 

Cheers,

For the "timeline" view: once switched to "condensed" mode, it is similar to the old "unread posts" view, but with a few differences:

- there are additional icons and a bar on the left, which seem to be purely decorative and introduce only visual clutter; they don't seem to have any function

- the pager is gone, and has been replaced with a "load more content" button that doesn't tell you how much more content there is

- the old version allowed jumping directly to the unread post; the link for doing that has disappeared, and what looks like it should do that doesn't work

(in fact, it seems that linking to individual posts is brittle in general, despite the fact that this has been a core feature of plain old HTML for decades).

Re WYSIWYG: I dislike WYSIWYG interfaces in general, exactly because what you see is "what you get" rather than "what it is". This has usability consequences:

- A keyboard-only editing workflow isn't possible anymore; in order to access any of the markup features, I have to reach for the mouse and click one of the icons in the top row.

- Likewise, the browser plugin that allows me to edit textareas with my favorite text editor is useless, and I have to put up with whatever editor is provided and learn its quirks. This may not seem like a big deal, but when you interact with a dozen or so different forum editors and even more chat applications, unifying the workflow is a *huge* improvement.

- Copy-pasting doesn't work as smoothly as it does with a source editor.

- Some types of edits are now impossible; e.g., I cannot split block quotes in half in order to react to address parts of them individually (something I would normally have done for this very post, but I can't figure out how to do it).

- Some types of markup are difficult to achieve/control, such as nested lists. Quick, how do you move a list item one level up in this WYSIWYG editor? It's trivial in markdown. It's trivial in BBCode. The syntax is self-explanatory in both. But in this thing here? I guess you have to un-list-item the item and then make it a list item again.

It's worse when the WYSIWYG isn't feature-complete and bug-free, and most aren't. Fortunately, most provide the option to switch to source editing, which allows you to work around their shortcomings and fix things when the WYSIWYG messes up.

[Robert Shearman Jr]

6 minutes ago, Tobias Dammers said:

- Some types of edits are now impossible; e.g., I cannot split block quotes in half in order to react to address parts of them individually (something I would normally have done for this very post, but I can't figure out how to do it).

Amen to that.  Un-nesting nested conversations is difficult too.  I find these conversations increasingly difficult to read when everyone who responds quotes the entire chain before them, and this new format seems to encourage that even more.

I really need to echo nearly everything Tobias says -- while I do understand the need to use modern software, and I try not to be the "I hate change" guy just on principle, I do hope that new things are an improvement on the old.  A quick, simple, uncluttered interface far surpasses a "new" one in my eyes.

[Brant Marshall]

3 hours ago, Tobias Dammers said:

For the "timeline" view: once switched to "condensed" mode, it is similar to the old "unread posts" view, but with a few differences:

- there are additional icons and a bar on the left, which seem to be purely decorative and introduce only visual clutter; they don't seem to have any function

- the pager is gone, and has been replaced with a "load more content" button that doesn't tell you how much more content there is

- the old version allowed jumping directly to the unread post; the link for doing that has disappeared, and what looks like it should do that doesn't work

(in fact, it seems that linking to individual posts is brittle in general, despite the fact that this has been a core feature of plain old HTML for decades).

Re WYSIWYG: I dislike WYSIWYG interfaces in general, exactly because what you see is "what you get" rather than "what it is". This has usability consequences:

- A keyboard-only editing workflow isn't possible anymore; in order to access any of the markup features, I have to reach for the mouse and click one of the icons in the top row.

- Likewise, the browser plugin that allows me to edit textareas with my favorite text editor is useless, and I have to put up with whatever editor is provided and learn its quirks. This may not seem like a big deal, but when you interact with a dozen or so different forum editors and even more chat applications, unifying the workflow is a *huge* improvement.

- Copy-pasting doesn't work as smoothly as it does with a source editor.

- Some types of edits are now impossible; e.g., I cannot split block quotes in half in order to react to address parts of them individually (something I would normally have done for this very post, but I can't figure out how to do it).

- Some types of markup are difficult to achieve/control, such as nested lists. Quick, how do you move a list item one level up in this WYSIWYG editor? It's trivial in markdown. It's trivial in BBCode. The syntax is self-explanatory in both. But in this thing here? I guess you have to un-list-item the item and then make it a list item again.

It's worse when the WYSIWYG isn't feature-complete and bug-free, and most aren't. Fortunately, most provide the option to switch to source editing, which allows you to work around their shortcomings and fix things when the WYSIWYG messes up.

Hey,
I can appreciate the concerns that you have. I know that the old forums were around for a very very long time but I do hope you'll give this one a chance. I know we keep saying "this change was necessary!" and we're not really explaining why but the tl:dr version is that the old forum software needed very badly to be upgraded to make sure no old security exploits were there. The upgrade from the old forum version to the new forum version of the old software would quite probably break a lot, so we determined that during this upgrade, we wanted to convert the old forum database to this software which is quite a bit more modern, has a full time support team, and also receives regular updates. While I can't say that ALL of the old forum features exist now, I can say that there are some that are just located in different places to be less intrusive, such as the going to the last unread post and also linking to a specific post;

If you click the "Posted x Hours Ago" next to your username:  

this will allow you to link to a specific post. When clicking into a forum thread, it should (usually) jump you to the first unread post, so if you have never read the specific topic in question, you would be brought to the start of the topic.

Do you have a preferred Text Editor? We have the ability to add additional editors, it's not something that I've done before but I'd be happy to looking into how viable it is to add it to this forum software while also keeping the WYSIWYG editor enabled for the others that like it.

The current text editor tries its best to keep formatting the same from wherever you copy it from. You can remove text formatting once it's posted or you can right click --> paste as plain text if this is the issue you're referring to.

I understand that there are growing pains with this new forum software, but we really do thing it was for the best and I hope that you'll continue to give it a chance while we work through issues that are brought to our attention.

Thanks!

[Andreas Fuchs]

There seems to be a possibility to post while not being logged on to the forums.

e.g.

 

[Brant Marshall]

6 hours ago, Andreas Fuchs said:

There seems to be a possibility to post while not being logged on to the forums.

e.g.

 

All of the posts in there appear to be owned by a member, but I'll double check permissions.

Thanks Andreas!

[Tobias Dammers]

On 4/14/2020 at 8:14 PM, Brant Marshall said:

Hey,
I can appreciate the concerns that you have. I know that the old forums were around for a very very long time but I do hope you'll give this one a chance. I know we keep saying "this change was necessary!" and we're not really explaining why but the tl:dr version is that the old forum software needed very badly to be upgraded to make sure no old security exploits were there. The upgrade from the old forum version to the new forum version of the old software would quite probably break a lot, so we determined that during this upgrade, we wanted to convert the old forum database to this software which is quite a bit more modern, has a full time support team, and also receives regular updates. While I can't say that ALL of the old forum features exist now, I can say that there are some that are just located in different places to be less intrusive, such as the going to the last unread post and also linking to a specific post;

If you click the "Posted x Hours Ago" next to your username:  

this will allow you to link to a specific post. When clicking into a forum thread, it should (usually) jump you to the first unread post, so if you have never read the specific topic in question, you would be brought to the start of the topic.

Do you have a preferred Text Editor? We have the ability to add additional editors, it's not something that I've done before but I'd be happy to looking into how viable it is to add it to this forum software while also keeping the WYSIWYG editor enabled for the others that like it.

The current text editor tries its best to keep formatting the same from wherever you copy it from. You can remove text formatting once it's posted or you can right click --> paste as plain text if this is the issue you're referring to.

I understand that there are growing pains with this new forum software, but we really do thing it was for the best and I hope that you'll continue to give it a chance while we work through issues that are brought to our attention.

Thanks!

Thanks for taking the time for this serious and well-rounded response.

Being an IT person myself, I totally understand the motivation for the upgrade.

Re "jumping to first unread": I understand that the forum is supposed to take you to the first unread post, but this doesn't always seem to work. It could be that this is just a matter of not having imported the relevant metadata (who visited what when) from the old forum, so I hope this will sort itself out over time.

Re "preferred text editor": Yes, I do; I like to use `vim` whenever possible, and I have configured my browser to allow me to edit any textarea in an external vim process when I press Shift + Alt + Z. This, however, will only work when it's an actual plain textarea - a fancy WYSIWYG editor cannot be used with such a generic integration mechanism. Most forums provide a "source edit" mode, where this still works, so that would be the best solution. I'm definitely not asking you to provide a vim clone as part of the forum software, that would be absolute madness.

Thanks again for your time.

[William Teale]

13 hours ago, Tobias Dammers said:

Re "preferred text editor": Yes, I do; I like to use `vim` whenever possible, and I have configured my browser to allow me to edit any textarea in an external vim process when I press Shift + Alt + Z. This, however, will only work when it's an actual plain textarea - a fancy WYSIWYG editor cannot be used with such a generic integration mechanism. Most forums provide a "source edit" mode, where this still works, so that would be the best solution. I'm definitely not asking you to provide a vim clone as part of the forum software, that would be absolute madness.

But, it would be a heck of a selling point.

Would you mind sharing how you configured your browser to use vim that way? I hadn't even realised that was an option.

[Tobias Dammers]

9 hours ago, William Teale said:

But, it would be a heck of a selling point.

Would you mind sharing how you configured your browser to use vim that way? I hadn't even realised that was an option.

There's a Firefox addon called Textern: https://github.com/jlebon/textern

It requires a small helper service on the host, but other than that, it is very unobtrusive. You can configure it to launch any editor you like, including vim. To use actual text-mode vim in a terminal, I wrote a small wrapper script (because just starting vim does of course not spawn a terminal emulator, and gvim looks kind of fake).

[Andreas Fuchs]

Maybe something useful for discussions on the forums: is it possible for users to share their software used, e.g. what radar client(s), FS-version(s), pilot-client(s). This information would listed below the member information in each post.