Forum Updates: Tuesday, November 8, 2011

[iacas]

As many of you know, the platform that powers this site is updated fairly often. Typically bi-weekly. Sometimes the updates don't result in noticeable things to the public face of the site - sometimes they're just admin tool updates - but oftentimes they are.

Here's news of the update that we'll see sometime mid-day on November 8th.

Reduced JavaScript Payload

We have completed the first milestone in Javascript performance improvement: removing YUI 2 Javascript library dependencies. This has two benefits. The first is an immediate decrease in JS page weight by about 440KB (uncompressed, or about 110KB if compression is enabled). This will not only reduce the payload side on the first page view on the site but also reduce the browser's Javascript engine initialization time. Second, it sets the groundwork that allows us to improve lazy-loading and to implement other client-side performance improvements across the entire UI layer.

Expanded Thread Editing Capabilities

Once a thread is created, both users and mods alike have limited ability to edit them. In this release we'll add several important new capabilities. These capabilities are accessed through an "Edit Thread" link.

First, users will be able to add and remove polls to a thread

Second, admins will be able to change the thread starter. (I don't see that being needed very often here, fwiw.)

Personal Messages - Changing Who Gets Replied to

Currently our personal messages behave like a group message - if you send a PM to multiple users, every reply is effectively a "reply all". With this release we'll be adding the ability to "fork" off a message, and reply to a subset of users, or add new users. You'll just click a "change recipients" button/link and it'll let you add or remove recipients. This will open up a new PM, with the same users as before pre-filled into the To line, with any prior content inserted as a quote. This is effectively a new PM conversation.

Edit in Place

First, and most notably, post editing will now happen in-place. Editing a post used to jump down to the reply box at the bottom of the page, which was a fairly jarring experience. In-place editing is much smoother, and also means that the user doesn't lose their context.

And if you guys don't like this one (you should), I am. I don't think y'all realize how many times we edit posts to fix quotes, embed videos that are just linked, etc. Cleanup (we never change the content unless it's to remove a spammy URL or someone's "signature" contents put in the body of a post).

Improvements to Lists in BBCode Editor

We've made a few improvements to lists in BBCode:

• We now support multiple styles of lists (see the screenshot below)
• Creating a new list pre-populates with 3 empty items, because really, who creates a list with only one item?
• Selecting multiple lines of text and hitting the list button now correctly turns each line into its own bullet point

Submit Timeouts

Finally, a subtle but important improvement - we've added timeouts to submitting posts. When a user hits When you hit the submit button in the editor, a layer covers the editor while the content is being sent to the server. However, if the submit hangs for any reason, this layer prevents you from retrieving your content so you can try again. It just spins and spins indefinitely. There is now a timeout, so that if the submit still isn't successful after 30 seconds, the user can try again.

Miscellaneous

• "Mark Forums Read" now has options for this forum/all forums
• Corrected tab ordering (switching fields using tab key) order in thread reply order
• Corrected tab ordering (switching fields using tab key) when editing signature
• Upped character limit on articles to 1M

Bugs Fixed

As always, we're always fixing as many bugs as we can. Here's what we've fixed in this release:

• Fixed problem of overlapping images and signatures in posts
• Article titles don't get mangled anymore when using preview
• Fixed "last online" time display for users
• Fixed strange white background on certain quote blocks
• Full page editor for replies are now fixed and working normally again
• Fixed several bugs with user awards
• Fixed display of timestamps on reputation vote timestamps
• Autocomplete for manually specifying list of editors of an article now works again
• When a user adds an image to a product, it does not take over the existing "primary" image for the product
• Removing primary image from a product's gallery also removes it from the main product display
• Users are now able to save a product that doesn't have any details specified
• New users will be shown the "Your profile will appear when you become more active" message instead of the generic welcome message when editing their profile

[B-Con]

Nice. A couple of those look nifty. Especially the edit-in-place, I edit half the posts I submit because my proof-reading skills suck if the text is in an editor.... :-( [quote name="iacas" url="/t/54138/forum-updates-tuesday-november-8-2011#post_658580"] [LIST] [*] Upped character limit on articles to 1M [/LIST] [/quote] Did you ask for that one personally? :-D

[iacas]

Originally Posted by B-Con

Did you ask for that one personally?

Nope. :-) We use the blog, we don't really use the articles (wiki) system very much.