Architecht

Hey all,

Just a quick note on a new feature.

I added a "kudos thread" field to the member profile. When you put a link to your kudos thread into that box, it will appears:

1. On your profile in the left hand columns
2. Under your name in the block to the left of each of your posts

This has been requested in the past on the old boards, but we didn't have a good way to do it. The new boards makes it easy. It's also helpful since the default on the new boards for new members is for signatures to be turned off, so some people don't see that link in your signature. (No, I can't change that, or I probably would. I think signatures are cool).

Added a field to the profile page that allows linking of your kudos thread. That will then appear under your name when you post.

38 minutes ago, RockMyAmadeus said:

Perhaps, instead of focusing on mild snarkiness borne out of frustration, your time would be better spent continuing to address the multiple issues with board functionality that still exist.

Just a friendly suggestion that I'm sure the customers of the Certified Collectibles Group...by whom you are contracted...would all appreciate.

12 hours ago, Jeffro. said:

Do you get royalties for every one of these types of posts? 

Should I translate this as" "Sometimes you don't need a solution, or perspective. You just need to get something off your chest." ?

1 hour ago, VintageComics said:

For example, If I want to add a graemlin I have to click on the graemlin tab and then scroll through several pages worth to find what I want.

Sometimes. But the top of the emoticon pop up is everything you've used recently. Also, try the search. It's handy. Also, try the categories. They're handy.

1 hour ago, VintageComics said:

Messages? I have to click on the envelope and THEN "Go To Inbox" to find messages that are past the top 4 in my inbox.

That pop up is scrollable. It shows the first 25 messages in your inbox. And from that pop up, if you click on the black dot, it goes right to the unread messages in that thread.

1 hour ago, VintageComics said:

I think adding an extra click (stop scrolling, click and see if you're interested) in a thread you are interested in reading anyway is much more annoying than just scrolling past something you don't want (a natural motion on a phone).

The lack of quotes within quotes already cleans up the site considerably from that standpoint. That was very annoying when unnecessary stuff kept getting quoted over and over.

There's already too much extra clicking going on in this new format IMO so I'd be against adding the plug in.

Well, we'll see how the vote turns out. If it's close, maybe we'll install it, let it run for two or three weeks, and then run another poll to see whether to remove it, or adjust the # of lines after people have had experience with it.

I think in most cases, what will happen is:

1. Most quotes will fall below the line limit, and will just show up.
2. Sometimes someone will quote something really long without breaking it up, but when you see the first 5 lines, you will remember what was quoted, you'll know what they are replying to, and you won't need to expand it.

I think the number of times you'll want to expand will be pretty limited. But we'll see.

This change has been made.

2 minutes ago, Marwood & I said:

Will quotes with pictures be affected? 

According to that screen shot above, yes.

Abbreviate quoted text - helpful or annoying extra click?

I saw this plugin today that seemed like a potentially good idea.

What is does it hide anything more than X lines of quoted text under a "more" link that can be clicked to display the rest by the reader.

Most quoted text is reasonably sized, so this plugin wouldn't affect it, as we'd choose to always display several lines by default (exact number to be determined). But in cases where someone quotes 40 lines of text, some of it would be hidden.

1 hour ago, bababooey said:

Thanks for the response Arch, any feedback as to why the navigation toolbar (categories) got deleted?  Was it just considered redundant with the 'jump to' option?
 Any chance of adding "general discussions" & "moderation" under browse?  I know the registry & journals are already there. 

This thread announced the change, which was trying to get rid of some redundant categories:

I think they're playing with bringing some kind of category or board navigation back, since it's generally acknowledged that the "jump to" function just isn't as useful as it should be given the number of clicks.

On 5/12/2017 at 10:39 AM, bababooey said:

Of course it's not the only way but you can't get to a sub-forum in the general discussion forum (ie- test sub-forum) using activity unless you click over to an active discussion and then back out of it to the sub-forum view.  In the old forum you could collapse the four main forums, cgc, ngc, general discussion & moderation to see the forum access from one screen view (like 'categories' did) - removing that tool bar while leaving the other irrelevant non-navigation friendly drop downs was a mistake.

It's counter-intuitive software design.  Here is another example where they are missing the point on ease of use.
Which pages should be accessible from your comics general view for this thread?  Below you'll see the pages you can choose from if not using the star/dot or last user.  Isn't page 159, 160 more relevant than page 4?  Isn't page one redundant to anyone who knows that clicking the thread name brings you to page one?

Actually, we trimmed that out on purpose under the theory that most people were either going to the first page, the last page, OR (most everyone) going to the last unread.

Before we did that you could see the first 5 and last 5 pages. The problem with this is that for longer thread titles it often resulted in that line wrapping, and it added lots of white space to the thread list.

Nope. No changes.

47 minutes ago, joe_collector said:

How To Disable User Avatars?

It was my favorite feature of the old boards, especially on mobile devices and tablets, but I cannot find the option anywhere!!

Can't do it, I think. You can hide signatures, but not avatars.

47 minutes ago, joe_collector said:

Oh yeah, and are the Custom Titles all gone? If so, that sucks.

Custom titles are not gone, however, on the last upgrade of the boards to a new minor point release, it appears that some custom titles got removed. I think it had something to do with the fact that the custom titles on the old board could be longer than the database field on the new boards, and also sometimes contained html.

We can put them back if yours is missing, but it's fastest if you tell us what it was.

 Maybe I'll make a "fix my custom title" request board.

That was true on the old boards too, except for the strike records area.

The reason is because we don't want to dilute SEO results with content that isn't really relevant to why people should come to join the community. In the case of strike records, that used to be public because when people were suspended, the only way they could access the boards and see what happened was as a guest. In the new boards, we can just restrict their posting, so we don't have that problem. Thus, we restricted that area to logged in users only as well.

17 hours ago, Chazgee said:

I would also like to know how to do this. The previous boards had an "All" button that would load all pages of a thread into one continuos page. Much easier to navigate. 

Can we please add this back?

 

That isn't possible in the new boards. No way to add it, and can be a performance problem if we did, so we are not currently planning to adjust this. There are a ton of features that make browsing faster and easier on the new boards to offset that change though. Please explore the options!

10 hours ago, MBFan said:

Still doesn't work for me. When attempting to bring up the main forum site page, my bookmarked Gold/Silver/Bronze page in the Forum Selling Area or any other pages at the site, the result is always the same: Chrome freezes for about 40 seconds, and then the screen shows the ERROR 500 verbiage. 

Try clearing your cookies and cache and logging in again.

https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95647?co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid&hl=en

I think you ran into a temporary sitewide error caused by a configuration change. The site was producing 500 errors for about 45m.

My guess is that it works fine on your device, but let me know if that is not the case.

1 hour ago, MBFan said:

Can't Get CGC Forum on Android Smart Phone

No wonder posters are griping that their sales threads here aren't getting as much attention as they used to. I cannot get the CGC Forum site on my Android smart phone anymore, and I bet I'm not alone. All I get is "This page isn't working. www.cgccomics.com is currently unable to handle this request. HTTP ERROR 500"

We've tested on quite a few android devices and not had that problem. I use one myself personally (the Nexus 6).

Can you tell me what device / android version you are using?

On 4/25/2017 at 1:40 PM, Architecht said:

I added some pretty VITAL information to the block about search. Please see the red text to help you find things when searching:

SEARCH
Hover over the magnifying glass at the top on the right for a quick search box you can click in, without having to use the whole search form. Click it to get a more advanced search. NOTE: a general search will only search the most recent number of years of content - if you need to find older content, go to an advanced search and specify a date range!

After personally testing this, the above turns out to not be true. Updated in the parent post.

On 5/1/2017 at 10:18 AM, Jeffro. said:

Thanks. Looks like google it is then. 

Why design a board where even the company who owns it suggests restricting users to only one year?  (That's a rhetorical question but still a relevant one for Invision)

I have confirmation that once the search index is set there are no exceptions to it. So all board searches are currently limited to 4 years.

As for the reason on the limits, it is all in scalability. Most customers don't have as many posts as we do. Those that do may not be on a cloud plan.  And many message boards just don't have the kind of posts that have long lived value like we do. Most of them just don't have a reason to dredge up content that is 8 years old.

So we have the magic but rare combination: large scale and valuable old stuff.

I am considering options on how best to address this.

14 hours ago, cheta42 said:

Moderation!?

I found this message on my sales thread today.

Is the thread closed or just altered by the mods!?

Is the thread still active?

I sent a PM to Arch but have not received a response.

This is what was stated....

Price drop on Star Wars #1 35 cent price variant ASM#39 9.2 White

Topic was moved to forum Your Posts Removed by Moderators

What does topic moved to forum mean and where is it?

BY THE WAY! This is a great opportunity to mention that I created a new kind of board in the moderation area specifically to post questions / issues with a moderation decision that you would like to directly speak to moderation about. It's a private board, in that only you and the staff can see your posts, but it makes it easier to have a team look at the issue rather than funneling it through me - which , I'll be honest, is going to be hit or miss on timing, and delayed on response if I don't know anything about the action in question.

That board is here:

https://www.cgccomics.com/boards/forum/92-moderation-review-request/

Looks like it was due to the thread disruption. I think, properly, the disruption should have been cleaned out and the original thread left in place.

Which board was it in originally?

16 minutes ago, BlowUpTheMoon said:

I wish I could Arch, but I can't remember who it was.

Ok. I'll just keep an eye out for recurrences.

14 hours ago, cheta42 said:

Moderation!?

I found this message on my sales thread today.

Is the thread closed or just altered by the mods!?

Is the thread still active?

I sent a PM to Arch but have not received a response.

This is what was stated....

Price drop on Star Wars #1 35 cent price variant ASM#39 9.2 White

Topic was moved to forum Your Posts Removed by Moderators

What does topic moved to forum mean and where is it?

I have to look into this to see why since I didn't do it. I got your pm but you didn't link the thread or provide the thread title, so I couldn't find it easily.

19 hours ago, BlowUpTheMoon said:

If you can pm the sig that this error occurred on, I can try to troubleshoot.

1 hour ago, lizards2 said:

Aren't you the one that gave me my custom title....,

 how could I miss that.