JoCo Forum/Website Update

[Angelastic]

Woohoo! The song template doesn’t have negative margins any more (and somebody added smaller negative margins around the main purchase links in the SongDetails template itself), so I added a (plain text, for now) heading for the demo version purchase links, and it appears in the right place. 🙂 Now songs with demo versions don’t look like they accidentally have the same links repeated twice.

[robgonzo]

I miss the ability to hide certain categories from my discussion stream. I had just decided to hide the JoCo Cruise discussions to keep me from being depressed about not being able to go when the format changed now I see them all again.
Also, the RSS feed would be nice to get back too.

[Bry]

@Angelastic: Looks like you can now add a picture to your profile. Avatar away.

[origamislayer]

Another vote for the return of RSS. There seems to be a link for it in the source of the category page, but it leads to a 404.

Having links for RSS of individual discussions and/or categories would be quite nice.

[Bry]

@origamislayer, looks like the category RSS feed does exist, although again the server isn’t properly rewriting the request (just like here, above).

For, say, the JoCo Music category, the link in the source goes to
http://www.jonathancoulton.com/forums/categories/joco-music/feed.rss
which 404’s.

If you correct that to
http://www.jonathancoulton.com/forums/index.php?p=/categories/joco-music/feed.rss
you get to the RSS feed.

However, as noted above by @chicazul et al, this feed only includes the first post from each discussion, not each individual post. (Similarly, you can get a feed for All Discussions at http://www.jonathancoulton.com/forums/index.php?p=/discussions/feed.rss that only includes the first post in each discussion.)

@chicazul also mentions, and this thread from the Vanilla Forums forums seems to confirm, that the only way to get the proper kind of feed (one with all comments) is to go in and muck around with creating a custom view. For that you have the documentation, this default code, and my best wishes 🙂

If you just want to get notifications about new posts in specific threads, you can bookmark discussions by clicking on the little star next to the discussion title; then in your profile you can set your preferences to “Notify me when people comment on my bookmarked discussions.” This may cause e-mails.

[chicazul]

I just tried to upload the new album cover to the wiki and got an error saying: The upload directory (public) is not writable by the webserver. This sounds like something that needs to be addressed by The Powers That Be. I doubt TPTB are still checking this thread though, so should I email someone, or is @Bry taking charge of these administration details?

[Jmonkee]

So there’s still no way to edit old posts, correct?  I really want to keep the bootleg thread updated, but I guess it isn’t possible.  I’m not sure how this is an improvement over the old forum design, which was both functional and elegant.  Am I missing something?

[Bry]

Oops, accidentally fell off the face of the earth.

@chicazul, I can e-mail or you can e-mail, either way. I haven’t been in touch with TPTB for about as long as I haven’t been in touch on these forums.

@Jmonkee, I just went in and changed that so authors can edit their posts forever. I dunno what purpose it serves to block old edits.

Just FYI, I’m keeping a possible improvements for the future (I haven’t the time now, but someone else might take these on for a lark) on the wiki: http://www.jonathancoulton.com/wiki/User:Bry/Forum_to-do

[Jon Who]

Not sure if this has been brought up yet (running on fumes here so haven’t read everything) but I’ve been fiddling around with this new layout and noticed that in my profile I can change my e-mail address (which is useful since that was 5 years ago now) but the box tells me I can’t do it due to my username containing a space which I guess is an invalid character now. I also figure that this isn’t the most common of problems since I don’t remember anyone else with a space in their name, so don’t feel this is as urgent as some other things.

I apologise if this doesn’t make sense to anyone but me, if needs be I’ll write a translated version when I wake up.

[Jmonkee]

The search function used to be fantastic on this forum, and now it stinks.  Anyone agree?

Before the change, I could search by subject field, or by the body of a post.  Either way I got accurate and useful results.  Now there is just a single search bar, and no matter what I try to search on, I get garbage results.  

Any idea if this can be fixed?  Am I just doing something wrong?  

[Angelastic]

I agree. I can only ever get one page of results (clicking ‘More Results’ loads the same results without the ‘More Results’ button) and I think it’s finding posts with any of the search words rather than all. So to find an old post I have to think of a really specific single word that less than a pageful of other posts have.

[Bry]

@Jmonkee I believe the new forum software skimped on search by just using whatever the default database search is… I’ve mostly given up using the search now, which is sad for me.

[Jmonkee]

Yeah, sad for me too.  There’s a lot of history on this board that is all but inaccessible now!

Is it something that JoCo himself could easily fix, if he were so inclined?  Since he never comes here anymore, he probably won’t even realize it’s a problem unless someone lets him know.

[Angelastic]

Well, now if we need to find an old thread, we can just ask @Bry, who knows where everything is. 😉

[chicazul]

@Jmonkee: Someone appears to be writing a Google search plugin for Vanilla2, but I don’t know how well it works. We should look into that.

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