Blog/Forum Issues

[ashvin]

So here are some of the issues people seem to be having with the blog right now, and specifically the forum:

1) When they follow an article/commentary link from the front page and attempt to post a comment underneath, it won’t let them. They are told the captcha was entered incorrectly, but there is no captcha.

2) They are having trouble deciphering the captcha.

3) User profiles cannot be edited.

3) The Lifeboat pages were returning 404 errors (now that should be resolved).

Please post any other issues you may be having at this time under this topic, so we will have them all in one place.

Note that the general Forum can be accessed two ways – 1) From the Wibiya bar that appears at the bottom, 2) By following an article link from the front page, scrolling to the bottom and clicking on “posts in discussion”.

[Bosuncookie]

Only thing unresolved for me at this point is profile editing.

[Glennjeff]

Avatars are not being displayed.:woohoo:

[Happysurfer]

On the main page it would be nice to have a login box so it can be done in one place early on when reading website

[Glennjeff]

There is no facility to delete an erroneous comment. I accidentally started a thread “Antigravity” when I was trying to comment on an article and can find no way to delete that thread, although I guess it could be a fun thread.

[ashvin]

Glennjeff post=84 wrote: There is no facility to delete an erroneous comment. I accidentally started a thread “Antigravity” when I was trying to comment on an article and can find no way to delete that thread, although I guess it could be a fun thread.

Users cannot delete their own posts once someone has replied to it, which I guess includes user him/herself. I deleted it for you.

[ashvin]

Happysurfer post=83 wrote: On the main page it would be nice to have a login box so it can be done in one place early on when reading website

For now, a link to the login/register page has been added to the bar at the bottom, which is always accessible.

[Glennjeff]

Getting a 404 on the “wybia” bar entry to forum link at moment.

[bluebird]

Over at the old site, it has a link pointing to this new site front-page, but the link is getting 404 error

edit to add that in the Lifeboat section, the folders are missing for Education and Security.

[ashvin]

Thanks,

The link from the old site should work now, and hopefully the wibiya bar link will be fixed soon too.

[jal]

The “read more” has nothing more to read. It just flips to a different layout.

How do I include the smileys into the text?

What is “bbCode help – Tip: bbCode can be used on selected text”?

[ashvin]

jal,

the “read more” link on the front page should take you to the article’s own page with the full text.

the smileys can be entered by typing the “boardcode” for it, i.e. whatever it says to type when you hold your mouse over the icon

i just figured out what BBCode is myself – a way to format text similar to HTML code, except you use [] instead of <>, and some tags are different

[jal]

Why don’t I have a Karma + or – like you?

[jal]

I just “clicked” on the pages 1,2,3, of the comments and they are the same.

My Karma question does not show up.

It shows up now as I type this as (last post first).

https://theautomaticearth.org/components/com_kunena/template/default/images/emoticons/cool.png

Attached files

[jal]

clicking on “last post” only brings me to ashvin answer on bbcode.

This post should increase the counter on “answer”

[hombre]

I don’t want to be hasty in response to the new format, but so far I miss being on the same “thread” as the other folks. Perhaps it is my ineptness in navigating the site, so will hang in there to see how things progress.

Just a note on the topic of joblessness–a nearby plant is being established to build small engines for Progress Rail. On the first day for applications and interviews 3000+ people showed up! This in a town of about 60k. Do people want a job? Yes!
–hombre

[ashvin]

jal,

All posts should be showing now.

As for karma, that has something to do with # of posts, and you don’t get credit for Blogger. Sorry!

Very nice computer btw.

Kid’s not bad looking, either.

[Glennjeff]

Jal,

You cannot alter your own karma in this virtual universe. Can’t do a lot about it in the relatively real universe either.

[Glennjeff]

hombre,

I had that same “not everones here together” feeling at first.

I find that going into the forum and then clicking on “Recent Topics” gives the feel of a one homogenous blog, but just with several conversations more focussed on a given topic.

The “Recent Topics” list orders the commented threads chronologically, most recently commented thread being on top, so it sort of gives you a “what topic is hot” report as well.

You can also start your own thread on any given topic( within reason ).

In general, the more I use it the better it looks. Well done TAE team.

[Glennda]

I’m slowly getting the hang of this new way to comment. But… I still miss having it all on one thread in some ways. I really liked the way people would post links to current events that I could explore. I really value this blog’s community especially for its independence and unique perspectives. I hope I can get the feel of that again.

How about a general comments or current events segment for some of the great off topic comments, and referrals to interesting posts on the web?

[ashvin]

All of the links under TAE Pages on the bottom wibiya bar should be functional now, including forum and login.

Glennda,

I don’t see anyone reason why people can’t continue making whatever comments they like under feature/commentary threads, off topic or otherwise. They can also create their own topics in the forum for specific issues they want to bring up.

I guess the main difference is that you may need to switch threads more often to keep up with the latest discussions, since more content is posted.

[jal]

ashvin …
you must have done something.
The last post,yours, is not showing up … again

[TAE Summary]

Even working perfectly a bunch of comment threads on specific topics is less attractive to me than the old comment threads. The obvious reason for me is that it is impossible to summarize a bunch of concurrent threads. That difficulty aside I still prefer a single thread. The old site felt like a community because I could go there and easily see all the comments. I might skip some I was less interested in but overall it was like going to Cheers; We were all in it together, there was a great cast of characters and everybody knew my name. Where does one now go to see what El G or Greenpa or Gravity has to say today possibly related to none of the current articles? Breaking things up by topic is great for information retrival but that is not the primary reason I went to TAE. If I just wanted the info I would go to Wikipedia, CNN and ZeroHedge. But if I wanted thoughtful analysis with community I went to TAE (BTW, try reading the ZH comments some time. Heaven forbid TAE comments should devolve to that brawl).

My suggestion is that the forums be turned into a Wiki where people don’t comment but rather contribute so that over time meaningful articles on things like water storage develop (This seems more useful to me than a comment thread about water storage anyway). This would develop a truly valuable resource and given the expertise of the board would probably be of high quality. For comments I suggest that TAE return to a single, easily accessible comment thread for feature articles and maybe none for commentary articles. This would recapture the sense of community that I enjoy and more importantly, this would support my addiction to compulsive summarization.

Thanks.

[Viscount St. Albans]

@ TAE Summary

Well summarized as usual.

Simple is beautiful.
Complexity doesn’t equal depth.

There’s irony at work here.

[ben]

I agree with TAE Summary. having just a single comment thread is of paramount importance IMO. fragmentation bad, claustrophobic family spats good. technically, navigating between several threads, particularly on a phone, doesn’t compare to just refreshing the page. the thread doesn’t even need to be attached to the feature articles and commentary; those could just be announced with a comment in the unified comment section, and the thread rolled over every, say, 200 comments. lifeboat comments could be copied by the author to the main thread as a courtesy, or summarized if they are too long.

thanks for all the hard work 🙂

[Glennjeff]

ben,

“fragmentation bad, claustrophobic family spats good”

For some strange reason I am laughing.

[Mcintel]

Is there a way to get an email for a new commentary or feature? This would save unnecessary visits.

Maybe server limitations on the number of emails that can be sent out prevent this being possible, but it would be a nice feature.

The page numbering feature for the forums is not working properly for me at least. Safari Mac 10.6.8.

Smilies not working for me.

[ashvin]

Mcintel,

You should be able to sign up for email alerts from the right hand column, below Stoneleigh Occupies and Follow Us. You can also subscribe to forum posts to be alerted of new comments.

The page numbering on forum threads is definitely messed up, not sure why.

Smilies working for me, though :unsure:
(you have to type in the actual characters)

[Happysurfer]

Ash

Thanks for hard work – its not easy setting up these blogs

2 questions

1. it is still not possible to edit – User Profile
2. How do you revert the page format to the “original” once you have the “read more” format.

[Happysurfer]

Ash

The Paging Boxes at the bottom are still not really working.

For those who would like to change between page views the only way I can find is to do the following

e.g.

https://theautomaticearth.org/Finance/98-Why-So-Angry.html

https://theautomaticearth.org/Finance/why-so-angry.html

The two views differ in the last section of the url just delete the “number and hyphen” and reload page. It takes the number of the topmost comment and inserts that as the view.

In the above example – { 98- } is to be deleted

[ashvin]

Happysurfer post=261 wrote:
1. it is still not possible to edit – User Profile
2. How do you revert the page format to the “original” once you have the “read more” format.

1) No, but working on getting that fixed
2) If you mean go back to the article’s own page, I would just hit browser back button or keep this forum open in a separate window.

[jal]

Since the page numbering is not working properly for this topic, then the only way I can get to see the last posts is to load “reply to topic”

I found an instruction page on bbCode that should maybe be linked to when clicking on the yellow box above.

https://www.bbcode.org/reference.php

From their instructions I will try to put up some examples

The following bbcode:
I would like to emphasize this
Yields this:
I would like to emphasize this
—
The instructions for an image are

Image

So that should work for a smiley

https://theautomaticearth.org/components/com_kunena/template/default/images/emoticons/shocked.png

So lets try it

Image

[DIYer]

When I click on the “Karma -/+” or the “Thank You” button, the screen jumps to the top of the page.

And, I find that the articles have 2 page formats. When I click on “read more” on the “nice looking” page format, it sends me to the same article formatted as a forum post. So I wait for that to load but there isn’t any more infomation, just a different layout.

As for BBcode, I don’t care for it. I’ve seen it used in forums before, and I suppose you have to choose between that and trying to filter any strange html. (because users will post really crazy stuff if you don’t)

Attached files

[ashvin]

DIYer,

Karma and Thank you buttons are working for me, as you can see. Maybe it’s something with your browser. If anyone else has that problem, let us know.

[DIYer]

The thank you button works, but after I click it I must scroll down to find the post I was clicking on. It looks like the whole page is reloading after clicking ‘thank you’.

I don’t know how it they do it, but over on ZH, if you click one of the up/down arrows, the page does not move.

[hombre]

There has been a lot of hard work put into this new format, for which I must say it should be noted and applauded, however…

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
–Leonardo da Vinci

[jal]

This thread is still not working properly.

The only way I can get to see the last posts is to load “reply to topic”

I tried to post an answer to the front page and got warned that ” I tried to post spam’ and the post did not show up.

What did I do that was rejected.

[snuffy]

I am having all above problems.

snuffy

[el gallinazo]

Jal – regarding refreshing the comments, why not just click the refresh icon on your browser tool bar. Or maybe I don’t understand the problem properly. There are comment pages that don’t give one a full standard browser page with upper tool bar. But there is usually a directory scheme with links somewhere on that type of page, and one can refresh by clicking the last level directory.

Re BBCode – Wikipedia has a useful article under that heading. However, I regard not having the emoticon bar not functioning on an automatic click insert after selection as ridiculous if Joomla designed it that way. That is what computers are for. Hopefully something is not “turned on.” Same goes for the attachments. I consider them “broken” as they are with a somewhat tedious workaround.

The Open Comments box in the main forum has been reduced to only permitting one thread in hopes that this will replace the old Blogger style comment format for the nostalgic 🙂 I would suggest that everyone comment against features very much on topic, and use The Official Thread for Open Comments for everything else. The cats must herd themselves to some degree to make the comment sections work.

Reconstructing the site is a huge project and will take time to improve, so patience is warranted. And Ash is doing a yeoman’s job, trouble shooting and currently writing the majority of features with Ilargi and Nicole in OZ. I think having absolutely all the comments on one thread like with the old format would be a mistake as TAE gets more commenters. It would really become a mess if it grows to say 500 comments a day. But shedding your old skin is painful – ask your neighborhood snake.

[el gallinazo]

Also – re the Glennjeff delete comment.

Yes, not having a proper delete function is a pain. But there is an edit function. My suggestion as a workaround is if you make a comment you wish to retract, then edit it down to nothing.

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