c4countdown

I updated our bulletin board software for the first time in... hmm, six and a half years as far as I can tell. There's so much new stuff since then that I don't even know where to start. Enjoy exploring the new features and please draw our attention to anything particularly cool or troublesome.

Oh shit. Didn't see this post. Evidently I thought the upgrade was more Countdown-relevant than you did.

We've lost the c4countdown graphic at the top.

I expect most people would like to go full width again too? Maybe.

common.css (line 177) (change to max-width and addition of box-sizing)

The contact drop-down on each post's author is awesome.

Can we have likes back?

I miss the 'read new posts' facility

It's still there Peter - click "quick links" in the top left hand corner.

I think this is a situation where the computer programming geeks (Morrison, Reams) get excited about all these new features and the rest of us say "What features?" It's an internet discussion forum; there's only so much you can expect it to do (it's not going to brush your teeth), and it already did pretty much all of it. The forum's biggest problem is that years ago "Active topics" broke, and that's not been fixed by this update, and any amount of other new features will not add up to the same improvement as fixing "Active topics" on its own. Likes would be nice too, but they're not that important. As it is, I normally use "unread posts", but it's not as good because often I read something and think "I'll reply to that later" but then I might forget, and there's nothing to remind me. And checking every subforum individually every time I use the board would be a bit much. The other thing I can think of that it hasn't improved that it could have done is typing in names in private messaging. It would be good to have an autofill thing.

But specifically on this update, we seem to have lost the last poster and post time for a thread on mobile phones, which I find a bit annoying. Mobile versions of sites in general seem to be rubbish. Can you override it?

But on the plus side, like many other sites, it now uses these "standard" icons like three horizontal bars, a cog wheel, which makes it cool and modern and awesome. But seriously, what new features? Matt mentioned the contact dropdown list, but how many people actually have that sort of stuff saved on their c4c profiles anyway? And how often will you use it? Another 200 features like that, and we're still not back to where we were before "Active topics" broke.

Gavin Chipper wrote:I think this is a situation where the computer programming geeks (Morrison, Reams) get excited about all these new features and the rest of us say "What features?" It's an internet discussion forum; there's only so much you can expect it to do (it's not going to brush your teeth), and it already did pretty much all of it. The forum's biggest problem is that years ago "Active topics" broke, and that's not been fixed by this update, and any amount of other new features will not add up to the same improvement as fixing "Active topics" on its own. Likes would be nice too, but they're not that important. As it is, I normally use "unread posts", but it's not as good because often I read something and think "I'll reply to that later" but then I might forget, and there's nothing to remind me. And checking every subforum individually every time I use the board would be a bit much. The other thing I can think of that it hasn't improved that it could have done is typing in names in private messaging. It would be good to have an autofill thing.

But specifically on this update, we seem to have lost the last poster and post time for a thread on mobile phones, which I find a bit annoying. Mobile versions of sites in general seem to be rubbish. Can you override it?

But on the plus side, like many other sites, it now uses these "standard" icons like three horizontal bars, a cog wheel, which makes it cool and modern and awesome. But seriously, what new features? Matt mentioned the contact dropdown list, but how many people actually have that sort of stuff saved on their c4c profiles anyway? And how often will you use it? Another 200 features like that, and we're still not back to where we were before "Active topics" broke.

But otherwise okay?

Ian Volante wrote:

Gavin Chipper wrote:I think this is a situation where the computer programming geeks (Morrison, Reams) get excited about all these new features and the rest of us say "What features?" It's an internet discussion forum; there's only so much you can expect it to do (it's not going to brush your teeth), and it already did pretty much all of it. The forum's biggest problem is that years ago "Active topics" broke, and that's not been fixed by this update, and any amount of other new features will not add up to the same improvement as fixing "Active topics" on its own. Likes would be nice too, but they're not that important. As it is, I normally use "unread posts", but it's not as good because often I read something and think "I'll reply to that later" but then I might forget, and there's nothing to remind me. And checking every subforum individually every time I use the board would be a bit much. The other thing I can think of that it hasn't improved that it could have done is typing in names in private messaging. It would be good to have an autofill thing.

But specifically on this update, we seem to have lost the last poster and post time for a thread on mobile phones, which I find a bit annoying. Mobile versions of sites in general seem to be rubbish. Can you override it?

But on the plus side, like many other sites, it now uses these "standard" icons like three horizontal bars, a cog wheel, which makes it cool and modern and awesome. But seriously, what new features? Matt mentioned the contact dropdown list, but how many people actually have that sort of stuff saved on their c4c profiles anyway? And how often will you use it? Another 200 features like that, and we're still not back to where we were before "Active topics" broke.

But otherwise okay?

Pretty much. I mean, did I mention that replacing "quote" with the quote marks seems a pointless gimmick, and then the quick links drop-down is a bit annoying? Also, when you replied to me it came up as a notification, but I came to the thread first anyway before noticing that, so I had to click on the notification and come to this page a second time to cancel the notification. A "clear all" like on Apterous would be good because I imagine I would still want to arrive at threads in the normal way rather than always going to notifications.

The global announcements are still listed, when you visit them from unread posts or similar, as under the "Historical Recaps" sub-forum. I've never understood why.

Upgrades like this are almost always a change for the better, and I think that's true of this one. Most of the changes tend to be things you can't see, like fixes to security problems and bugs that rarely happen, or minor cosmetic changes that you'll get used to in a few days, like the page not filling the full width of the screen any more, or the quote symbol in place of the word "quote".

Gavin Chipper wrote:But specifically on this update, we seem to have lost the last poster and post time for a thread on mobile phones, which I find a bit annoying. Mobile versions of sites in general seem to be rubbish. Can you override it?

However, this I agree with - I can see this getting annoying, especially as when you tick "request desktop site" in Chrome (at least on my phone), phpBB stubbornly persists in serving you the mobile site.

Does this mean that with a mobile device, there's no way to check whether any new posts have been made without manually visiting each subforum?

Gavin Chipper wrote:Also, when you replied to me it came up as a notification, but I came to the thread first anyway before noticing that, so I had to click on the notification and come to this page a second time to cancel the notification. A "clear all" like on Apterous would be good because I imagine I would still want to arrive at threads in the normal way rather than always going to notifications.

You can switch off notifications for when someone quotes you (and for other events too) in your User Control Panel under Board Preferences - Edit notification options.

Also, let's give phpBB credit where it's due. In contrast with lots of software nowadays, its developers have so far resisted having the following meeting...

"So these things that look like 'Tue 09 Dec 2014, 10:41 am'... you know, the... thingies..."
"Timestamps?"
"Yes. They're not bad, it's just that they're a bit..."
"Useful?"
"Accurate?"
"Easily understood?"
"Yes! All of those things. What can we do about that?"
"How do you mean?"
"Well, is there a way we can communicate timestamps in such a way that they're less precise, and require the reader to do mental arithmetic to make sense of them?"
"What about, instead of saying 'Tue 09 Dec 2014, 10:41 am', we make it say something like 'about 14 hours ago'?"
"That's brilliant! Code it up and roll it out immediately!"
"Okay. Also I'll put a tick box somewhere on the preferences menu so that users can choose to have the ordinary timestamps if they want. You know, just on the off-chance that someone, somewhere, wants to know what time a thing happened."
"No, don't bother with that. It's such a wonderful and uncontroversial feature that it isn't even worth the effort of adding a single tick box to a menu somewhere. I can't possibly imagine anyone getting annoyed at this. Ship it!"

Thankfully, no such antics with phpBB.

You can also mark all notifications read in one fell swoop actually, so that's fine.

Marking all posts read is done via AJAX. That's beautiful.

It looks funny =/

This is my only input at this time =/

(Seriously, I'm sure it's useful and I'll get used to it, but I'm the one that starts throwing things every time Facebook does one of its helpful "improvements" and then forgets it's anything different within a fortnight")

You can unsticky threads without editing the OP! Finally.

Gavin Chipper wrote:But on the plus side, like many other sites, it now uses these "standard" icons like three horizontal bars, a cog wheel, which makes it cool and modern and awesome.

On a serious note, why is there no Cluedo playing piece? Oh no, panic over. If you click on the arrow by your name, you get a menu and there's not one but two of them.

On the "View Active Topics" thing, I Googled it (on the advice of Jono actually), and from what I understand, it should be relatively easy to fix. According to here, for example:

There was a bug in 3.0.5 that meant all the forums were used for active topics even if the option was on no.

In 3.0.6 this has been fixed so you need to edit each forum (manage forums>green cog icon) and turn it on for the ones you want to use.

So it just needs turning on manually (assuming this is the same thing). Charlie, it would be most awesome if you could do this. Please?

Does anyone else get a facebook symbol as the logo when adding c4c to the bookmarks bar (this is in Chrome)?

Adam Gillard wrote:Does anyone else get a facebook symbol as the logo when adding c4c to the bookmarks bar (this is in Chrome)?

It can happen, but then it resolves itself eventually.

James Robinson wrote:

Adam Gillard wrote:Does anyone else get a facebook symbol as the logo when adding c4c to the bookmarks bar (this is in Chrome)?

It can happen, but then it resolves itself eventually.

It had been like it for several months, so I tried removing and readding it in various ways and still it reverts to the facebook symbol!

Adam is correct. There is no favicon setup in the HTML code, and there is no default one here.

Matt Morrison wrote:Adam is correct. There is no favicon setup in the HTML code, and there is no default one here.

And am I correct about "View Active Topics"?

If you were proposing that I don't care, then yes.

Matt Morrison wrote:If you were proposing that I don't care, then yes.

So why do you get excited about all these "extra features" that make very little difference but don't care about basic functionality?

I don't think UI/UX makes "very little difference". I also don't believe anything to do with view active topics is basic functionality, I've never ever clicked it. Ever.

Matt Morrison wrote:I don't think UI/UX makes "very little difference". I also don't believe anything to do with view active topics is basic functionality, I've never ever clicked it. Ever.

What is UI/UX and what difference does it make to one's forum experience?

UI is User Interface and UX is User Experience, which does have a major impact on your forum experience, being the thing itself.

Jon O'Neill wrote:UI is User Interface and UX is User Experience, which does have a major impact on your forum experience, being the thing itself.

Well when I was talking about things that make very little difference, I was talking about things like "Marking all posts read is done via AJAX. That's beautiful."

"View active topics" is back! Thanks to Charlie for sorting it out.