Architecht

On 4/27/2017 at 5:09 PM, Jordysnordy said:

Strikes

Is there a forum/place where we can see who has gotten strikes? The old forum hasn't had any posts since January.

Yeah, we haven't really been updating it lately. There are a couple of drivers for that:

1. Learning curve - Admins and mods have just been trying to get the operational ticks out of working with the new system
    
2. Alternative records - As moderators, we don't need the strike forum anymore to tack the history of violations, because the new system just does it for both the moderators and the member themselves
    
3. Violation notifications handled - the system does a better job when someone gets a strike, of telling them that they got a strike, what it was for, what post it was related too, and how long the record of the penalty will hang around - all without the extra effort of posting. Members now have to acknowledge the moderation action, so it's easier to find out what happened.
    
4. Considering options - I've been using the opportunity created by all of the above to consider changes
   1. We could leave it as it is - no more public announcement of penalties. Some people object to those anyway, as they put community focus on their posting choices and they would rather it be private.
   2. We could go back to the old system - just go back to also cross posting the strikes to a forum.
   3. We could (I think) configure the system to allow everyone to see everyone else's moderation history - but this is an all or nothing kind of thing. Meaning, private notifications, etc., would also be visible. That's something that SOME people have actually asked to have happen.

So there are some pros and cons to both more an less visibility, and their are proponents of both approaches. I'm thinking about what results in the best community interactions along the way.

The point about a suspension causing someone to not respond to buy/sell communications is a good one. I'm not actually sure what happens if you try to message someone who is currently suspended. We actually have more choices here as well. We can continue to allow access, while restricting all posting - and I don't know what that does to PMs. OR we can cut off all access, forcing the user to browse as a guest.

Right now, for lower level violations, and I think the first strike you get, we just restrict posting. As you go up the points curve, we cut off more access.

On 4/12/2009 at 11:43 AM, Architecht said:

If you'd like an easy way to see all sales threads mixed together, there are two easy ways to do it.

FIRST: Make yourself an activity stream

These are cool because they can be configured all kinds of ways, and are smart enough to recognize things like what content you have already seen, etc. Once you have made one, you can also grab an RSS feed of that specific activity stream if you prefer RSS.

NOTE the fact that you can also make that activity stream (or any activity stream) your default (It replaces "Unread Content" in the upper right if you do that.)

Below is a screen shot of one way to configure an activity stream to see all the relevant marketplace activity.

 

The second way to get a list is to use the premade RSS feed you can find under the RSS symbol in the lower right. Screen shot attached that shows you where to find it.

Happy shopping / selling / trading!

 

I updated this post to show how to do this in the new boards format.

2 hours ago, lizards2 said:

Or you could just try being a jerk!

Sorry, what is the point you are making?

I'm trying to nail down the exact behavior of the combination of search functionality and a configurable setting for the depth of the "Search index".

We currently have the "search index" set at 4 years. However, product support told me that the search index only effected the quick "all content" search. They said that if an advanced search was run with specific dates, then the search would cover the specified date range.

I did a little testing to verify this, but it doesn't seem to work as it was described. I've got an open support ticket question to them to nail down exactly how this behaves.

They would like us to constrain the index to 1 year for performance reasons. According to their support, the timeouts we were having were caused by slow queries mostly resulting from searches. They did a bunch of optimizations to make it work better given our 4 year window, but they still recommend 1 year. That doesn't seem very functional if there is then no way to search for older items.

Of course, google always works to find old stuff, but that's a little less convenient.

15 hours ago, NoMan said:

Things are falling apart over here on the "staying focused" part of comic collecting. Tips anyone?

You could try a registry set. Whether you prefer a competitive or a custom set - either way, the format itself encourages you to think about the theme of your collecting and participate in something with a goal and a focus.

1 hour ago, BlowUpTheMoon said:

Firefox with Adblock.  Adblock has never been an issue.

It's firefox specific, I think. I just loaded the page in firefox and it was slow. Chrome was fast.

14 minutes ago, BlowUpTheMoon said:

Took over 20 seconds for your thread to load.

That's weird. Even if I reset my cache, that page loads very quickly. Something is up with your internet connection or browser. Are you running any funky extensions like adblock, or a privacy guard that is doing something weird?

That page is 2.6s for me on my home cable internet connection, even with the browser cache disabled. To get it to 12.8s, I had to turn off the browser cache and throttle the load speed down to mobile 4G speeds.

What device and connection are you on that it's taking 20seconds? There is 6meg of images / content there, so if your connection is slow, there's no getting around that it will take a while to load.

11 minutes ago, edowens71 said:

Seriously...take a look at this thread: 

Many of those broken links in the EC section (for example) were active yesterday, now they are sporadically broken. What's more, different links appear/are broken depending on which browser I use...Chrome vs. Explorer results in different images appearing, and different links broken. What the hell?

TL;DR version - hold down control and hit F5 to reload the page and reset your browser cache. OR, just wait it out and it should fix itself.

Long version:

This is  because those images get cached (a copy of them is saved) at multiple levels in the chain. Each one of those cache spots has what's called a "time to live" - a certain amount of time before the base resource is re-checked for a new version. Here are the places that image lives:

1. Photobucket
2. A cached copy retrieved by the boards so it can be served encrypted to prevent browser warnings
3. A cached copy stored on servers spread around the globe so anyone who asks to see the image can fetch it from a nearby server
4. Your browser - so that if you load that page more than once, the subsequent page loads will be super fast because you don't have to get the image from the server again

If you use something like Chrome to look at the images while they're broken, then Chrome will cache the broken copy, and until that cache expires, it will keep looking broken. Then, if you load it in explorer at a different point in time, maybe some of the images have started to work, and it caches those.

If you hold down control-F5 you can reload the page and reset your browser cache. That won't help you if there are still broken versions stored at steps 2 and 3 above, but it will fix your local copy in the browser.

Some progress here, guys. It does turn out that photobucket blocked our server. I'm still trying to find out precisely what events precipitated that outcome.

The current status should be that you CAN now embed photobucket images again.

The OLD photobucket images that were cached by the boards server are still broken. I THINK that with the server block lifted, that over the next few days, those cached images will refresh and start working again with no user actions - but I'm seeking to verify that.

13 hours ago, Sqeggs said:

14 hours ago, BlowUpTheMoon said:

Did the PM layout change or is it just me?

It seemed to change for me ... but then it changed back. 

Changed how? I don't think we did anything to it. It will display differently depending on your resolution.

SO, if you shrink your browser window on your screen, you will hit a snap point where the PM box flips over to the mobile view.

15 hours ago, newshane said:

If we can't view old photobucket links, I really do quit.

We'll get it sorted out.

15 hours ago, Zolnerowich said:

Interesting idea, though this would presumably have the same effect on the NGC boards (unless there's way fewer PB photo posts on NGC compared to CGC...)

Yeah, I don't think it would, because the volume is much lower, and the cache expiration is set higher - so far fewer requests. I have a request in at photobucket to ask if this is a thing, but they haven't responded yet.

This wouldn't have been a problem on the old board, because we didn't proxy the images - we didn't need to because we weren't serving via https.

In truth, we don't need to for photobucket either since they allow https links, BUT the proxy isn't smart enough to check that before deciding to cache and proxy the image.

Even when the boards don't cache the image (i.e. I turn off that feature) the boards still check to make sure the link is a valid image - even that basic check is failing for photobucket right now, but ONLY for the CGC boards. This is what makes me suspect that the problem is that photobucket is rejecting this specific server's requests for some reason.

I can't prove that myself because I don't control the server, and Invision support isn't confirming it, but I'm working on it.

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!

Does anyone know if photobucket will block an IP address that requests too many images? Maybe the proxy is being blocked for heavy access since it basically loads all of the images for every user.

I can't find anything in their knowledge base about this.

Just now, tabcom said:

With respects to, 'This has to get fixed at the server', are you referring to the Photobucket server, or the CGC Board server?

The board server. Since this works on the NGC boards, it seems clear that it is a boards issue specific to the CGC instance.

30 minutes ago, tabcom said:

Attempted PB html converted to BBCode, using http://www.seabreezecomputers.com/html2bbcode/

Same results.

This has to get fixed at the server. When you request a Photobucket image with the wrong headers, you get back an html page instead of the image. They are fetching those images with a proxy on the server to make sure they are encrypted when delivered. Something about the proxy if fetching them (I am guessing) in a way that gets the html page instead of the image, and that breaks the display.

Could be wrong, but that's my guess. It was working though, so this should just be a bug they can track down, I hope.

23 hours ago, Sqeggs said:

Yeah, the boards aren't accepting my PB links either.

@Architecht any thoughts?

Posted elsewhere - but repeating here. I've seen / replicated the issue. This is being investigated. As of now I'm expecting / speculating that a code fix will just bring all the images back without any user action, but we'll see what responses I get.

I have this as an issue filed with Invision to fix. I've confirmed that photobucket is working on the NGC instance, and we know it was working here as well.

I think it's related to the fact that we now have to proxy any embedded images to make them display as https. Something about the board proxy fetching the images is not getting along with photobucket.

I will SPECULATE that this will be a reasonable fix and that once fixed (and the cache expires) the images will just come flooding back. We'll see what response I get to the ticket.

On 4/17/2017 at 0:35 PM, rob_react said:

The fuzzy logo is caused by the logo not being output as art that sits on a pure transparent background. It's a 32 bit PNG, but the way it is created it's working like an old school transparent gif (complete with dithering that includes the background color.)  I'm not sure why it's rendering differently in Edge and Firefox. The fix would be to generate a better quality version of the image (a 32 bit PNG that properly leverages the alpha channel.)

 

I take it back. It's weirder. The image (in Edge and Firefox) is ACTUALLY a really nice looking PNG image. In Chrome, it's a crummy looking image encoded as WEBP, an image format only supported by Chrome. The solution is to just use the really nice PNG for all browsers OR to make sure the WEBP image is produced well.

Personally I would just use SVG.

If not and someone had a thing for WEBP I would suggest using the <picture> element versus whatever CDN magic they're using to inject the webp binary instead of  the requested png from the server.  The markup pattern is way clearer and would be portable no matter what CDN technology they decided to use. 

Fixed that. Weird that the webp was such low quality.

Thanks for spotting this, guys.

I've tried this with a couple of URLs that look broken. Some don't load even going directly to Photobucket, and some redirect to an html page instead of a direct image load.

Not sure what has changed yet, Photobucket or the boards, but we are tracking it down.

On 4/23/2017 at 11:05 AM, greggy said:

Nope, one changes screws up other items.

I tried the board image uploading and it works well if all you want to do is to post it once but it doesn't work well trying to post the same items in another post.  You have to upload it again.  Boo

You don't. You can just use the "insert other media" drop down and choose insert existing attachment. It's kind of interesting to scroll through your history of attachments.

There was a problem on the server that generates the image. We have fixed that, but the boards have cached the broken image, and may hold on to it for up to 3 days.

It SHOULD fix itself as your cached broken image expires and it goes and fetches a good copy.

If it doesn't for whatever reason, you should be able to go grab the UBB code, delete the image that's in your signature, past the UBB code in again, and save it - that should work... or you can just wait it out.

5 minutes ago, HemiGTX said:

Notifications

Arch -

My notification settings are not working.  I have been trying for over a week to change them.  I am getting (bell) notifications from some members I follow, every time they post something, and I can't shut it off.  Can you help?

So you have two choices - you can unfollow those people you don't want notifications about, or you can stop getting notifications about people you follow.

Unfollow people

Go to Settings --> Manage Follow Content

That brings you here: https://www.cgccomics.com/boards/followed/

Scroll down, and on the left menu under "other" you can find "members"

On that screen, you can use the "change preferences" to unfollow people, OR you can use the select check box to do that to a bunch of people at once.

Stop notifications about people I follow

Go to settings --> Notifications settings

That brings you to here: https://www.cgccomics.com/boards/notifications/options/

Then scroll down, and find the "someone I am following makes a post" and turn it off.

12 hours ago, BlowUpTheMoon said:

13 hours ago, thirdgreenham said:

I wonder if architect doesn't want you posting these.  

He's never mentioned anything.

I don't mind either way. It isn't new information, though, so if you want to save yourself the headache, you can. We're using a service called site24x7 that monitors the site, so I've been able to match up the screen shots with the monitor's outage reports reliably.

The provider has been steadily optimizing some queries related to search... today, it SEEMS to have produced some results at last. Hopefully that's because they have correctly identified that performance problem and made progress, as opposed to getting lucky on the timing, but we'll see.

This graph is what things have looked like today, and this is much more what I expect. When the worst spike is 1.7 seconds, and it happens rarely, then that's not too bad.

6 hours ago, paul747 said:

COIN AND MONEY BOARDS

Where do you find the chat boards for gold and silver. thanks

Https://www.ngccoin.com/boards