General site updates, TODO list and discussion

[Dream of Omnimaga]

@p2 I meant the first post of that thread

[p2]

O_o
luckily I can just wait and see if all pictures are loading...  Else I'd never do this 

[Dream of Omnimaga]

Something I noticed sometimes on wi-fi mobile at home is that some images from sub-domains will fail to load, then  will load successfully on the next reload. It's very rare, though.

Also, now that we use Let's Encrypt, /me pokes @Streetwalrus and @Juju to setup img.codewalr.us so that it can be reached via SSL.

[p2]

how about enforcing users with >100 posts to use their own avatar...?
I'm ALWAYS at the urge of sending a "WELCOME TO CODEWALRUS AND GO INVITE YOURSELF" message to @Lionel Debroux since he has no avatar... then I realize he has >200 posts... and STILL no avatar
Nothing against Lionel Debroux in particular, just something that came into my mind

[Lionel Debroux]

I wonder, what if I set an avatar which is a copy of the "no avatar" avatar ?

I don't think avatars, or for instance, the fact of introducing oneself in the appropriate topic / board, should be enforced, because that might make users not feel at ease and truly welcome - and we definitely don't want to cause such feelings
I know that's what I felt myself, a while ago, on another forum, where "you need to introduce yourself" was in the rules, IIRC. I didn't follow that ludicrous rule, but it turned that they were really serious about it. One of the admins requested multiple times that I introduced myself in the topic suitable for that purpose, but I had bigger fish to fry (posts technically more useful) than post an introduction post just for the sake of it. Eventually, I got a message telling me that I shouldn't even try to make another post on the forum, unless it was in the introduction topic, because my behaviour was considered disrespectful...

[p2]

yeah youre right I didnt think about it that way... :/
I usually ignore it once someone has >30 posts to tell them they should introduce themselves as many other members then already know them, I think an introduction post that late doesnt make any sense ^^
but you should anyway think about setting up a pic, even if it was just a red circle ^^ (for guys like me that are super bad with names but good with memorizing images) xD
didnt want to annoy you with this, I'm sorry. <3

[Yuki]

Eh, here we don't ever enforce anything such as this, Lionel here definitely needs no introduction, and if he likes the default avatar, then let him be.

I've seen many forum admins trying to enforce ridiculous things and come up with a 12-step procedure (including writing a 800-word essay formatted in a particular way you don't have time to write) in order to post and combat unwanted visitors, rest assured we won't do any of that.

[p2]

I would also never enforece that to new members, that would totally scare everyone away...
I just thought that members that obviously plan to stay longer (>100 posts) should probably set an avatar to recognize them by xD
I'm sorry I brought it up at all it wasnt ment that way >.<

[Lionel Debroux]

Don't worry, we know you didn't mean it that way

I used to use the following avatar on the dead TICT/TIGCC message board: .
Well, technically, I still do - it's just that I haven't browsed that board, even as a guest, for years, even though I am one of the place's owners, after a post of mine mentioning another forum (at the time, the ancestor of CW) with more activity than that dead board was censored for no valid reason by we know who, then I rewrote the contents of my post back and complained about the inappropriate censorship, yielding deletion of my post...
But animated avatars are considered annoying by some people, among which I think I am (they can distract eyes and mind from the post's contents). I know that some forum board software extracts an image from this kind of images, I haven't checked whether CW's SMF does.

[Dream of Omnimaga]

Lionel that forces member intro rule seems quite rash . I swear I saw it before on multiple forums but most of the time it was spambot protection as the rest of the board was unlocked after making the intro post.

As for TICT I made a similar post earlier this year when an user complained about the inactivity, where I explained that the activity just moved elsewhere, and it went unnoticed for now it seems.

[novenary]

I updated the cache policy for the site, so that static files don't need to be renamed (or other cache busting hacks) on each change without losing the benefits of caching. This will cause a request to be sent to make sure that you have the latest version of the file, if you do, the response will just be an ok from the server, if you don't, the new file will be loaded without any delay.
Best of both worlds ! ... as long as your browser hasn't cached said files before I made this change, so you might need to either clear your cache or wait until your browser discards cached contents to know that it should validate them instead of passively ignoring the server. Chrome (and probably the others) will always validate things on PCs regardless of the configuration, but not on mobile devices, so watch out for that.

[Dream of Omnimaga]

Good move @Streetwalrus . That was seriously problematic with certain images in the past, such as the post stats chart thing, which sometimes didn't even refresh even after an hard refresh.


Also I updated the front page pic with the screenshots. I also gave another site theme a try a few days ago but the theme is not public, because it's kinda broken (and probably won't be used at all). I think a theme switch will be problematic with Simpleportal x.x


By the way @Lionel Debroux , I haven't seen that TICT avatar in ages . It would probably be fine on CW, especially due to TICT history, TI-wise, but the original Omnimaga animation probably wouldn't

[novenary]

Actually, I made an exception for img.codewalr.us to cache aggressively, but that's because the contents aren't supposed to change once up.

[Dream of Omnimaga]

Which reminds me, isn't img.codewalr.us supposed to use https by now?

[p2]

as far as I know it's already fully implemented
@Sorunome already added that a few weeks ago ^^