Forum: Public Forum

Len,

Would it be possible to remove infantilisms like "My Stuff", "My User Item", "My whatever"?
Cannot one just have "User Items", "Forum Topics" etc in one's user profile?

The "My..." gets on my nerves, one of the great things about M$-Vista was that it removed this idiotic prefix.
Nobody wants anyone to do an Amy Bishop now do they?

Thank you,

Laurent,

Note:
Got this again after clicking "Preview" which works fine then "Post" which did not work:

Notice: this variable may not be empty: $_POST"thread_sort_mode"

I could not even go back as the site did not track the browsing history or something.

Many of those "My" things, but not all, are menu item titles which I have control over, but some are actually hard coded and may be more difficult to modify.
What appears in the top and side menu is within my control, but within the pages themselves that is not always the case. For instance, the left menu item "My Tiki" could be changed, but the page that it went to is a module called My_Tiki, so that it would still be headed My Tiki once the option was taken.

The prefix My appearing infantile may be more personal than you might think. The term User is even mildly offensive to some.

We probably need to debate with other Early Adopters how the menus appear. It is plain to me from past usage history that Calendar and Forums need their own easily accessed menu item. Home is always useful. I shall start a discussion in the member area about the appearance of menu items Etc.

We have the capability to have other things that are assets either for the entire group, or for individual members, or in theory sub-groups. I have decided that for now at least, we use subsets of users only for allocating permissions. This gives us something we are familiar with from Meetup. We currently have:

• Anonymous which is anyone who is not signed in for whatever reason.

These are able to see much of the site, but not all of it.

• Registered Members which is automatically assigned to everyone who registers.

That gives a basic level of access and permission to everyone who signs in.

• Game Managers which is assigned to those who have proved themselves as DM/GM/Keeper/Story Tellers/Whatever. Game managers are also Registered Members, so inherit the permissions of that group, but also have permission to enter events on to the calendars. (They also see the planning calendar, which Ordinary Registered Members do not. The Planning Calendar is there for the purposes of Planning Events which require co-operation between Game Managers, and other user levels.
• Admin Team is a group with greater abilities assigned to them. These are the people who administer the entire group on a day to day basis. They have a greater degree of control over the site, but not absolute control. They can do things like authorise the use of specific HTML code by Registered Members in their Wiki Pages. (Wiki Pages are much like Meetip.com's About Pages.)
• Admin Level is a level only given to the small circle of people who will have absolute control over the site. They have abilities that are only dreamed of by mere mortals. They can do things like:

Close the site at times when maintenance is required that needs for there to be no users on it.
Set up new features.

Once I improve on the standard Mobile access functions it will be useful to mobile users who can not use the full site on their device. Early experimentation and feedback proved that the capability and formatting on the massive munber of different devices means that we will not be able to have a single site that is both fully featured for non-mobile users and fully usable by all mobile users. My decision has been to concentrate on the main site, and have this forum and the calendar viewable on mobile for now. The mobile access is crude, but then I was shown that many devices are just not capable of more.

Len,

When selecting the "week" view my events (Rise of the Runelords) on Wednesdays do not show up.
They appear fine on the "month"/"quarter"/etc views.

When trying to update the events by clicking on "Update every events of this recurrence rule" all hell breaks loose and I get the equivalent of a M$ BSOD. Same problem as before but this time I have copy/pasted the answer, see below:

The single event update works fine. I have added some pictures today.

The "preview" then "post" still crashed happily too.

Laurent,

Input Array does not match ?: UPDATE tiki_calendar_items SET description = 'Campaign: A six chapter Adventure Path from LV1 to LV12. Setting: Pathfinder Chronicles from Paizo Publishing. System: D&D / Pathfinder RPG Players: 6 players [Full] Information: The official page: Rise of the Runelords And also our official thread on the forum boards: Rise of the Runelords, Pathfinder RPG, "Vague Connections", Nottingham ' WHERE calitemId =
Site Logo
System error.

An error occured while performing the request.

Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware

Hmmm.

OK, I don't have an answer right now because I can't replicate it, but I will continue to delve.

Edit : It would appear the site is still tripping over the Logo. I have managed to solve the same problem with the Sponsor images, but it hasn't worked for the logo because it just corrupts the logo background, turning the transparency black.

Len

The Reason the events do not show is a basic shortcoming of the daily and weekly list formats. They do not respect the start/end times stipulated in the calendar, but assume a 12 hour limit. They are probably aimed at business meetings, the default setup times limit the day to normal Working Hours. which the lists deal with perfectly. I had not been concerned by that previously, as we tend to work on a Monthly calendar normally. I will take a look at that when we do the upgrade to the calendar, but I am not going to stress over it at the moment.

Provided people are aware that the weekly and daily calendars, in list format, do not deal with the 24 hour day at the moment, we should be able to make do.

Len

The pagination for threads with a lot of messages still does not work with the latest release.

As I have more permissions than others I can indeed force the display to "newest first", but this is not available to everyone.

At times - I have not been able to reproduce it - going on page 2/2 (or 2/3, 3/3, etc except 1/n of course) and switching "Show Post" to "Last 24 hours" seems to work and display the expected contents of page 2/2. In fact I think this trick works only when there has been a post within the last 24 hours (or 48 hours with the other drop-down menu option).

A good example of this is Leah's post on the "Calendar event posting" thread on the Members Only forum. The thread is long enough to be on two pages and her post has happened within 24/48 hours.

I assume the "Show posts" drop down menu is available to all members and the "Moderator actions" menu, found on the top of the thread, is only available to superior beings who can merge with the ether at will. In other words, basic users are screwed if they want to see a post on page 2/n when page 2/n has not seen a post for more than 48 hours.

This is a pretty serious fault, as a forum tool that cannot handle the display of multiple pages would indeed be pretty poor. There is no way that this mistake could have survived five updates, let alone the first release of TikiWiki.

Even Meetup.com would not do that, assuming the freetards at TikiWiki are more proficient than them, which is an easy hypothesis to take, this must be a big "Doh!" kind of bug somewhere in our set-up.

I propose that we kick this "Len" fellow out of our website and contact decent coders at Meetup.com.

Laurent,

If thie particular "Len fellow" did not have to earn a living, and could simply rely on others to do all the work, he would happily hand over to other coders. Not meetup ones admittedly, but there are certainly ex-meetup coders out there who have their wits about them.

You will get fixes when I can do them unless there are other volunteers who step forward to help.

If you carry on, I will turn on multi-language, then YOU will have the task of imterpreting everything on the whole site into French.

Len

Len,

Multi-lingual support is indeed needed.
Let's translate my previous post for our foreign members:

Beneres? Niko fuerto tipomagico - te bai-by-gizmo. La pagina del reply no est chris waddle. La pagina secunda non facilos action-pumpo. Eh la pagina terra jaxil. Yakkitiyak venito toncilaitis thranticillio go-go-gohgggh! Meetup dotkom!
El se problematico tecnica IN-FLAY-TION si user di TikiWiki mucho post.

Si el seleczion on "Show Post" te "Last 24 hours" heth - eth - eth - eth - eth - eth - eth - eth - eth "Last 48 hours" O.k! Nobo squintero tos con Plungers!

Vo, tidiaka Meetup dotkom mit functioni moronico. TikiWiki bay-by-gizmo te facilos action-pumpo! Zo, nea shopping, nea collo, te "bai-by-gizmo".

Il Len mucho worko. Pi pi snaa!
Heth - eth - eth - eth - eth - eth - eth - eth - eth!
Scorchio, heh heh! Nio dudupos, sminki pinki tenuros tomano.

Boutros Boutros Ghali.

"              "

Again, I am left utterly speechless by the might of your fantastico humouroso.

Len

Well, some tweaking, after a little research and it looks like the buglet has been swatted. Whether it stays dead is another matter because I don't have a solid answer to the combination that causes the problem, and I suspect neither does anyone else. There are quite a few settings that could be set in a multitude of different combinations. It would appear that a certain combination, or possibly several combinations will cause tyhe problem.

I had turned off threading as it can make the conversation difficult to follow, it also made the forums more "meetup-like" and therefore more familiar in form. I have turned it on here, and set a few other parameters to definite rather than default settings. I can not now get it to appear wrongly in any of the browsers I have to hand. I only have one version of MSIE, and that also behaves.

Len

Buena estentes,

Falia helee, falia helii, falia helaa.
La pagina non est moronico ton!

ethethetheth pethethethethe... Sminki-pinki.

Boutros Boutros Ghali.

Alright, time to switch off the multi-lingual filter for TikiWiki.

The pagination seems to work now.
I guess the large blank I see below the first post on page 2 (a recap of the original post) is due to my credentials and thread editing powers, thus I will not complain.

Note:
I hope everybody got the joke, if not, they need to watch "The Fast Show", a sublime series from the 90s.

Scorchio!

... I'll get me coat.

Laurent,

I still cannot preview a message twice in a row or "preview then post" a message on the boards.

No horrible BSOD like page this time but a blank (battlemat background) one with a message in red close to the menu:

Notice: this variable may not be empty: $_POST"thread_sort_mode"

Firefox with or without my No-Script thingy.

Laurent,

Hi Len,

I'm interested to see Laurent raised my own concern re: the My Our_. It's the term "stuff" I don't like too. What is our identity (as a group)? I, like Laurent, only want to play D&D with adults. That goes for the discussions on the boards too. Accordingly, our descriptors should reflect this identity if others agree with me. And, new members (like me) might get put-off if the impression of the board is child-like.

In terms of the appearance I'm getting a different experience at work, where I have a large-ish wide-screen monitor, compared to home where I'm using a 5-year old 15 inch screen. The layout is much better here. At home it's almost prohibitive - so much so I can't be bothered logging-on. Not sure what can be done. Just reporting what I see.

Finally, how do I spell-check messages?

Bruce

Len,

Owen seems to have some odd issues with his registration to my game event, the one on July 7th. Could you check on my "Rise of the Runelords" thread to read about it?

About the "Add guests" button. It seems it is available to anyone, anytime, whether or not they are registered for a given game. Well, I have not tried to register idiotic names on someone else's game event, but I have the feeling I can.
This is not really a bug, and I do not expect anything childish like that to happen, but...

Laurent,

The Guest field issue is something I may well want to address if it ever becomes an issue.
The problem with it is actually exactly the opposite of your issue with the labels as Bruce also agrees, that you want to play with people who are adults, and we either trust that people are adults and can be trusted, or they are not, and can't.

I have to walk a fine line. The problem Bruce has with an old 15" screen is not that it is only 15 inches, but that it is probably set to a very low resolution. The layout I have plumped for after a fair amount of investigation works on an old, tiny 12 inch screen as well as a much larger wide screen. It is not screen size at fault, but the resolution used. That is a setting you can usually change.

The two side columns take up a set minimal width, and the centre column expands to use whatever is available. Provided the screen resolution is above the old windows 98 resolution of 800x600 you should see a reasonable display. I believe that some mobile devices do not handle the full version well, but there is a temporary mobile version that displays on all devices, but it is crude and primitive. Early research proved that there was no such thing as a layout that allows for every viewing combination. This is a compromise that will work on most systems.

Currently, spell checking is probably best achieved by using a browser that supports spell checking. When I use most browsers, and when Laurent uses his usual Firefox, or anything but Microsoft Internet Explorer, the browser itself has a built in spell check function. When I use even my BlackBerry with Opera-Mini, it checks my spelling.

Getting the site's own spellcheck functional is on my to do list though.

Len

Len,

It seems that my players, for "Rise of the Runelords" cannot even see the Add me to the list of participants box. They say that they can see and use these boxes on the calendar events posted for other games.

Obviously I can see it, and use it. Owen (Reglathium) and Alex (lilal665) are the ones who have reported the issue.

Could you create for yourself some kind of basic member profile and attempt to register for my game planned for July 21st?

Ian (ian_t) is a new player to RotRL and he says he cannot post in the game thread. I guess this is because he has just registered and maybe waiting for some activation process.

Laurent,

Len2 is the user that I keep especially for this purpose. Len2 has no priviledges that registered members do not have, it is literally one of them.

As designed, Len2 sees only the View calendar button at the top. If I had more priviledges I would see more buttons there. At the bottom of the event, Len2 sees the big add me button, again just as designed.

As Len2 I have registered for your game on the 21st, removed myself from the list, and re-added myself on all the main browsers. It works on Safari, firefox, chrome, Opera, & MSIE.

I can only suggest it is a browser/cache/settings issue. I can not replicate the problem.

Ian should be able to post as soon as he confirmed his registration. Again it could be a cache/settings issue. Some browsers do not accept cookies by default. Without session cookies the system will attempt to work, but may not be able to tell youi are logged in. At the top right you should see your user name when logged in, but a log in username / password dialog if you are not.

If you are logged in, the system knows it and shows you the "Since your last visit" box on the right, and your personal menu on the left.

Len

Len,

I guess it is a cookie issue, I will point my players to this thread. Still, one claimed, I think it was Owen, that they could see the box for other games and not mine. Well, I am going to ask them again in the RotRL thread.

As for Ian, it is sort of as I expected. Odd though, he was able to send me a message via the TikiWiki "send message" option, so he was already registered on the site.

Something I thought about last night: They could not see the box on the event for yesterday (July 14th). Coming home after the game, I wanted to copy the event - it worked fine for July 7th to July 14th - but for some weird reason it crashed repeatedly when I tried to post it (Firefox, then I even tried M$-IE8). Because I always copy/paste to Notepad++ or M$-Word when I type more than five words in a post, I merely created a new event from scratch, which worked perfectly. In other words, there could have been something wrong with the event for yesterday's game.

Laurent,

I never tried the 14th game, so it is possible.

I know I managed to corrupt an early version of the photo album page I am doing for the domain landing page because it crashed whenever I tried to save. I found that was due to a bad parameter on the colorbox widget that seemed to corrupt something else in the page. The upshot there was that the last part didn't show at all, and any change to it (even a space) could not be saved.

I re-did the same thing after deleting the whole page and it worked just fine.

Update. I checked the 14th as Len2, and see no button. Yet I do as me. I shall dig deeper and find out why.
Later Update. Found out why. I Squashed a bug, it should now not happen. It must have damaged the permissions table (actually for the whole nottingham calendar, so why it only affected some games and not others I am not sure.) however its fixed now I believe. It is certainly fixed for Len2.

Thanks for finding (and maybe even causing?) This bug. Corruption like that often snowballs. The permission tables now all appear to read correctly. I think that will be the end of it.

(Actually it is just possible that you were originally posting or editing that game when the new functionality was added, and it never got written correctly. That should not happen, but in theory you could have had an existing event open, the changes made while you had the copy open, and you only saved after the change was made, an event which was created before the change. This could, I suppose have had unforseen effects. I'm grasping at straws. It is highly unlikely as the site was offline for several minutes. It could just be some special anti-Laurent code kicking in.)

Len

Len,

Old events
This is not really urgent, but reading your post I thought that it would be a good idea to have a "sell by date" for event registration.
I am not asking for something like the Meetup "RSVP open at/RSVP closed at" setting as I never really used it, but at least closing the "add me to the list" function once the meetup has started - thus by default ended.

Calendar tags
The "Nottingham calendar" issue could have corrupted the event: I had been looking for extra players, so I switched my event from being "Nottingham [FULL]" to being merely "Nottingham", the July 7th event was thus copied from a "Nottingham [FULL]" event description.
The July 14th event was copied from the July 7th one as indicated.
When I wanted to copy July 14th to create July 21st, I changed back to "Nottingham [FULL]".

I understand you have squashed the bug, but I would rather point out the change of calendar tag issue even as a mere coincidence, just in case this problem shows up again for me or someone else.

Editing while updating
Unlikely, for the July 14th event anyway. I remember the function going up when I was in the States, so it was definitely there when I set up the July 14th event as I was obviously back in Blighty to run the July 7th game.
When I think of it, I had registered my players manually for July 7th... so it may have been the first corrupted event!

Laurent,