Little things that bug you/me about the forum

[LoyceV]

What I had in mind when I suggested that was actually treating the "s" key like a modifier (s for "skip").

Left-handed people are not going to like it, that's the equivalent of pressing "L" while my right hand is on my mouse.

Only good reason to have confirmation pop-up is when I am permanently deleting/changing something or closing my account.

Good point: there's nothing permanent on Ignoring a user. It will replace having to unignore maybe one in a thousand by having to confirm ignoring someone a thousand times.

[promise444c5]

My apologies for not allowing the previous suggestion...cool down before bringing another one up .
I created a thread thread yesterday about having an additional quote button to quote just the poster comment within a pyramid or multiple quote post. this should reduce pyramid quote as most creating pyramid quote only reply the last comment on the hierarchy of pyramid:multiple posts, this shouldn't affect the way users want to quote other they can decide to quote everything or just only the comment of a post and if there's no additional quote / if there's a multiple quote with each quote having a comment below by the poster then  both quote button quote should work the same i.e quote all  (or if you have a better way to implement this), the  second quote should only take effect when there's one or more quote following each other within a post .This is my little contribution i don't know if it will workout...

 

[PowerGlove]

My apologies for not allowing the previous suggestion...cool down before bringing another one up .

No problem. (I think the previous suggestion has run its course, anyway; I'll either implement it in a way that doesn't affect desktop users, or, more likely, put it behind a new setting.)

I created a thread thread yesterday about having an additional quote button to quote just the poster comment within a pyramid or multiple quote post.

I saw. It's a nice suggestion.

I'm a desktop user, so it's not always easy for me to appreciate how much more difficult certain things must be for mobile users. But, it's easy for me to imagine that trimming quotes must be a real pain in the ass.

I'll think carefully about your idea. Thanks for sharing it.

(The below thoughts aren't directed at you, they're just me thinking about your suggestion, and ranting at nobody in particular.)

I'd like to do something about this (assisted quote-trimming), but I'm not sure what...

The thing is, Bitcointalk is really awkward (for me) to work on. I don't have any privileges that an ordinary user wouldn't have: I don't have special access to code, theymos, or anything else. I'm literally just a dude with this download.

When a suggestion like this comes up, I (against my better judgment, because it's normally a waste of time) tend to think of the problem first in terms of what I'm capable of doing (that is, without regard for outside constraints): in this case, I think the direction I'd head in, at least initially, is probably a selection-aware quote button that can unparse the selected HTML back into BBCode (and if I couldn't get the unparsing to work well, then I'd probably explore client-side parsing the quotefast BBCode to create some kind of BBCode <-> HTML mapping, and if I couldn't get that to work well, then I'd change the server-side BBCode parser to emit and embed the mapping data).

A from-scratch BBCode (un)parser might seem like way too much work, but it doesn't even register on my pain scale (I mean, on projects where I'm the lead and can control things; for Bitcointalk, where I'm programming mostly in the dark, I wouldn't even attempt it). In fact, it's the kind of work that I really miss having a reason to do: I hate solving problems by reaching for someone else's work or stitching together incompletely understood dependencies (and, more and more, I see modern programmers that couldn't code their way out of a paper bag without pulling in 10 dependencies; ask them to do something like write a C99 program to calculate the image histogram of a PNG file, and most will quickly find their way to a solution, but ask them to repeat that same exercise, only this time using just what's provided by the standard library, and once you get past the why-reinvent-the-wheel stuff, you'll see the blood drain from their face as they realize that they're going to have to admit that they can't even try, at least not in front of you, because without the dependencies/packages they've been relying on, they actually have no idea where to even begin. If you have the good fortune to bump into a programmer that, with the right documentation in front of them, doesn't struggle with the task and is quick to point out that even the standard library can be avoided, then pay them well and keep them close: people that have explored their craft to that extent are rare and the work they're capable of doing basically can't be done by the other types).

Anyway, I'm rambling, the point is that after I've thought about how I would like to solve a problem, I then have to basically throw the full-strength solution out of the window, and instead come up with some kind of tortured compromise that somehow possesses both the property that it doesn't depend sensitively on the surrounding code and the rest of the system (which I can't clearly see), and also the property that it should be small/tidy enough for theymos to be willing to actually set aside the time to review and merge it. Unfortunately, the best that I can do, given those constraints, is often just to find some kind of semi-solution that, all things considered, actually works fairly well, but not perfectly. (And, in those situations, where I've managed to thread the needle just so, it's more than a little annoying when someone who isn't operating under the same constraints that I am, points out that it's not a perfect solution.)

[LoyceV]

I'm a desktop user, so it's not always easy for me to appreciate how much more difficult certain things must be for mobile users. But, it's easy for me to imagine that trimming quotes must be a real pain in the ass.

I don't think I've mentioned it in this topic yet, but a "split quote" button would be great. On a keyboard, I type "[/quote]....[quote]" in less than 2 seconds, but on mobile, it takes about 2 days of clicking through the different keyboards.

[joker_josue]

@PowerGlove do you think it would be possible to set up something like this to work on tables?

Code:

[table]
[tr][td style="background-color:#f0f0f0;"]Line 1[/td][/tr]
[tr][td style="background-color:#e0e0e0;"]Line 2[/td][/tr]
[tr][td style="background-color:#f0f0f0;"]Line 3[/td][/tr]
[/table]

[tbct_mt2]

@PowerGlove do you think it would be possible to set up something like this to work on tables?

Code:

[table]
[tr][td style="background-color:#f0f0f0;"]Line 1[/td][/tr]
[tr][td style="background-color:#e0e0e0;"]Line 2[/td][/tr]
[tr][td style="background-color:#f0f0f0;"]Line 3[/td][/tr]
[/table]

It will help to make table formatting more easily.

Like this table format used by irfan_pak10, it is good visually but when you come to code block, it is complicated, so if your suggestion can make formatting with colors, background colors in tables more easily, I strongly support it.

[Translators] List of Bitcointalk Translators

Code:

[table]
[tr][td][b][size=16px][glow=black,2,300][color=transparent]..[/color][color=#fff]Username[/color][color=transparent]..[/color][/glow][/size][/b][/td][td][b][size=16px][glow=black,2,300][color=transparent]..[/color][color=#fff]Language[/color][color=transparent]..[/color][/glow][/size][/b][/td][td][b][size=16px][glow=black,2,300][color=transparent]..[/color][color=#fff]DT Status[/color][color=transparent]..[/color][/glow][/size][/b][/td][td][b][size=16px][glow=black,2,300][color=transparent]..[/color][color=#fff]Account Status[/color][color=transparent]..[/color][/glow][/size][/b][/td][td][b][size=16px][glow=black,2,300][color=transparent]..[/color][color=#fff]BPIP Profile[/color][color=transparent]..[/color][/glow][/size][/b][/td][td][b][size=16px][glow=black,2,300][color=transparent]..[/color][color=#fff]ANN/Portfolio[/color][color=transparent]..[/color][/glow][/size][/b][/td][/tr]

[tr][td][b][url=https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1081511]Tszunami98[/url][/b][/td][td]Romanian[/td][td][/td][td][size=12px][glow=green,2,300][color=transparent]..[/color][color=#fff]Active[/color][color=transparent]..[/color][/glow][/size][/td][td][url=https://bpip.org/profile.aspx?id=1081511]Tszunami98[/url][/td][td][url=https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12p79kj5j6IjV_UebaFWe_HH-CnKW7HYODhIURciFK_s/edit#gid=0]Link[/url][/td][/tr]

[/table]

Visually

..Username..	..Language..	..DT Status..	..Account Status..	..BPIP Profile..	..ANN/Portfolio..
Tszunami98	Romanian		..Active..	Tszunami98	Link

[joker_josue]

Like this table format used by irfan_pak10, it is good visually but when you come to code block, it is complicated, so if your suggestion can make formatting with colors, background colors in tables more easily, I strongly support it.

[Translators] List of Bitcointalk Translators

Yes, this could be an interesting solution. It involves more BBCode, but ends up being minimally efficient.

The way I suggested could also be different, with a more appropriate tag. But, it could be a way to create more dynamism in the tables on the forum.

[irfan_pak10]

@PowerGlove do you think it would be possible to set up something like this to work on tables?

Code:

[table]
[tr][td style="background-color:#f0f0f0;"]Line 1[/td][/tr]
[tr][td style="background-color:#e0e0e0;"]Line 2[/td][/tr]
[tr][td style="background-color:#f0f0f0;"]Line 3[/td][/tr]
[/table]

It will help to make table formatting more easily.

Like this table format used by irfan_pak10, it is good visually but when you come to code block, it is complicated, so if your suggestion can make formatting with colors, background colors in tables more easily, I strongly support it.

[Translators] List of Bitcointalk Translators

Code:

[table]
[tr][td][b][size=16px][glow=black,2,300][color=transparent]..[/color][color=#fff]Username[/color][color=transparent]..[/color][/glow][/size][/b][/td][td][b][size=16px][glow=black,2,300][color=transparent]..[/color][color=#fff]Language[/color][color=transparent]..[/color][/glow][/size][/b][/td][td][b][size=16px][glow=black,2,300][color=transparent]..[/color][color=#fff]DT Status[/color][color=transparent]..[/color][/glow][/size][/b][/td][td][b][size=16px][glow=black,2,300][color=transparent]..[/color][color=#fff]Account Status[/color][color=transparent]..[/color][/glow][/size][/b][/td][td][b][size=16px][glow=black,2,300][color=transparent]..[/color][color=#fff]BPIP Profile[/color][color=transparent]..[/color][/glow][/size][/b][/td][td][b][size=16px][glow=black,2,300][color=transparent]..[/color][color=#fff]ANN/Portfolio[/color][color=transparent]..[/color][/glow][/size][/b][/td][/tr]

[tr][td][b][url=https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1081511]Tszunami98[/url][/b][/td][td]Romanian[/td][td][/td][td][size=12px][glow=green,2,300][color=transparent]..[/color][color=#fff]Active[/color][color=transparent]..[/color][/glow][/size][/td][td][url=https://bpip.org/profile.aspx?id=1081511]Tszunami98[/url][/td][td][url=https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12p79kj5j6IjV_UebaFWe_HH-CnKW7HYODhIURciFK_s/edit#gid=0]Link[/url][/td][/tr]

[/table]

Visually

..Username..	..Language..	..DT Status..	..Account Status..	..BPIP Profile..	..ANN/Portfolio..
Tszunami98	Romanian		..Active..	Tszunami98	Link

Still writing the code manually? I use GPT to write bbcodes from google spreadsheet. It generated within seconds.

like with this code I can generate any bbcode from my google spreadsheets

Code:

function generateBBCode() {
  const sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet().getActiveSheet();
  const data = sheet.getDataRange().getValues();
  let bbcode = `[table]\n`;

  // Add headers dynamically based on the first row of the sheet
  const headers = data[0];
  bbcode += `[tr]`;
  headers.forEach(header => {
    bbcode += `[td][b]${header}[/b][/td]`;
  });
  bbcode += `[/tr]\n`;

  // Iterate over the rows and generate BBCode for each
  for (let i = 1; i < data.length; i++) {
    const row = data[i];
    bbcode += `[tr]`;
    
    row.forEach((cell, index) => {
      let cellValue = cell || "N/A"; // Replace empty cells with "N/A"

      // Add link to usernames or URLs based on column index (e.g., link columns)
      if (headers[index].toLowerCase() === 'username' && row[index + 1]) {
        cellValue = `[url=${row[index + 1]}][b]${cell}[/b][/url]`; // Assuming next column contains the profile link
      } else if (cellValue.startsWith("http")) {
        cellValue = `[url=${cell}]Link[/url]`;
      }

      bbcode += `[td]${cellValue}[/td]`;
    });

    bbcode += `[/tr]\n`;
  }

  bbcode += `[/table]`;
  Logger.log(bbcode);
}

[PowerGlove]

@PowerGlove do you think it would be possible to set up something like this to work on tables?

Code:

[table]
[tr][td style="background-color:#f0f0f0;"]Line 1[/td][/tr]
[tr][td style="background-color:#e0e0e0;"]Line 2[/td][/tr]
[tr][td style="background-color:#f0f0f0;"]Line 3[/td][/tr]
[/table]

Hmm... Do you want the background color to affect just the cell's contents, or the whole extent of the cell?

If it's the former (the cell's contents), then I did a patch some time ago to clean up the [glow] tag. It basically turns the [glow] tag (in a backward-compatible way) into something that always gets converted into a <span> with a style="background-color: $color;" on it, so it doesn't need the extra parameters that the previous [glow] tag used.

With it, you could write your example like this:

Code:

[table]
[tr][td][glow=#f0f0f0]Line 1[/glow][/td][/tr]
[tr][td][glow=#e0e0e0]Line 2[/glow][/td][/tr]
[tr][td][glow=#f0f0f0]Line 3[/glow][/td][/tr]
[/table]

If it's the latter (the cell's extent), then that's much trickier. I spent a few hours (before giving up in frustration) trying to get the BBCode parser to correctly handle something like [td bgcolor=#e0e0e0]. At first glance, that would seem to be a very simple job, but there are a ton of strange interactions in the parse_bbc function (including one between descriptors with both a parameters key and a require_parents key). I can get close, but I can't shake out all the bugs without making deeper changes to that function. Probably it's down to that code being hacked on by different programmers at different times, but the BBCode parser in its current state is a very fragile, barely working POS.

[joker_josue]

If it's the latter (the cell's extent), then that's much trickier. I spent a few hours (before giving up in frustration) trying to get the BBCode parser to correctly handle something like [td bgcolor=#e0e0e0]. At first glance, that would seem to be a very simple job, but there are a ton of strange interactions in the parse_bbc function (including one between descriptors with both a parameters key and a require_parents key). I can get close, but I can't shake out all the bugs without making deeper changes to that function. Probably it's down to that code being hacked on by different programmers at different times, but the BBCode parser in its current state is a very fragile, barely working POS.

Well, my idea was in that case. If it's complicated, that's it, we continue working with what we have. 

By the way, regarding the patch you mentioned, it hasn't been implemented yet, has it?

[LoyceV]

This could be fun:

It occurs to me that keeping a counter on what percentage of posters in the thread are ignoring a poster could help, but that's getting offtopic.

[ibminer]

This could be fun:

It occurs to me that keeping a counter on what percentage of posters in the thread are ignoring a poster could help, but that's getting offtopic.

It was sort of tried before, maybe there is a new way to approach it that would be less resource intensive?

[LoyceV]

I hit it again while reporting spam:

An Error Has Occurred!
The last posting from your IP was less than 4 seconds ago. Please try again later. The thing you were trying to post was saved as a draft. This limit decreases substantially as your account becomes more established.

If this can be reduce to 0 seconds once you've earned 1000 Activity or 1000 Merits, that would be great. The forum rate limit (1 access per second, burst allowed) should be enough of a limitation.
I get this error when reporting a lot of spam.

The current posting delay is almost as old as Bitcoin itself:

waittime = 360;
if(activity >= 15)
        waittime = (int)(90 - activity);
if(activity >= 60)
        waittime=(int)(34.7586 - (0.0793103 * activity));
if(activity >= 100)
        waittime = max((int)(14-(activity/50)), 4);

Reporting counts as posting. I think deleting the red parts would solve it (I had to replace code tags by quote tags to make it visible).

[joker_josue]

I hit it again:

An Error Has Occurred!
The last posting from your IP was less than 4 seconds ago. Please try again later. The thing you were trying to post was saved as a draft. This limit decreases substantially as your account becomes more established.

If this can be reduce to 0 seconds once you've earned 1000 Activity or 1000 Merits, that would be great. The forum rate limit (1 access per second, burst allowed) should be enough of a limitation.
I get this error when reporting a lot of spam.

I realize that you are a machine, but making posts in less than 4 seconds makes you almost super machine. 

I think 4 seconds is a minimum reasonable time for posts made by humans, in order to avoid bots and spam from overloading the server. I realize that some tasks can be very quick to carry out, and this limit can come up against this speed. Despite realizing this situation, I don't think it is very viable for the forum to reduce this value even further. Even if it is exclusive to users with many merits and activity.

[LoyceV]

I realize that you are a machine, but making posts in less than 4 seconds makes you almost super machine.  

It's barely a problem while making normal posts. That only happens when I create multiple posts, and then click "Post" to post them all. That's a limitation I can live with.

I hit this (often) while reporting spam. On loyce.club/badposts/spam.html, I click "report" with my middle mouse button (to open them in a new tab), then go through the tabs to report them.

So the problem is the post delay is also used as a Report delay. Merit doesn't have that delay, I can Merit 4 posts within the same second (and I've done that many times, but never reached 5). I'd like to have "unlimited reporting".

[hosemary]

Reporting counts as posting. I think deleting the red parts would solve it (I had to replace code tags by quote tags to make it visible).

It may worth mentioning that seaching and sending pms are also counted as posting.
If that red part is removed, users with activity of bigger than 99 500 will be able to use forum search engine multiple times and send multiple pms in less than 4 seconds.

I think the better solution is to change the code, so that reporting isn't counted as posting.

[LoyceV]

If that red part is removed, users with activity of bigger than 99 will be able to use forum search engine multiple times and send multiple pms in less than 4 seconds.

They'll still need to deal with "14-(activity/50)", so 100 Activity gives a 12 second delay, 700 Activity gives 0 seconds delay, and more Activity just made me realize this value shouldn't become negative so the "4 max" should change into "1" or "0".

I think the better solution is to change the code, so that reporting isn't counted as posting.

That would be ideal

[hosemary]

They'll still need to deal with "14-(activity/50)", so 100 Activity gives a 12 second delay,

You are right. Just edited the previous post.
If that red part is removed, users will need to have more than 500 activity, so that they can post, report, send pm or search more than once in less than 4 seconds.

[joker_josue]

I realize that you are a machine, but making posts in less than 4 seconds makes you almost super machine.  

It's barely a problem while making normal posts. That only happens when I create multiple posts, and then click "send" to post them all. That's a limitation I can live with.

I hit this (often) while reporting spam. On loyce.club/badposts/spam.html, I click "report" with my middle mouse button (to open them in a new tab), then go through the tabs to report them.

So the problem is the post delay is also used as a Report delay. Merit doesn't have that delay, I can Merit 4 posts within the same second (and I've done that many times, but never reached 5). I'd like to have "unlimited reporting".

I understand. Doing it this way kind of makes 4 seconds seem like a long time.

But, honestly, I believe that this limitation goes beyond the simple user level. At lower levels, I believe this could be a feature used to minimize spam and the like. Afterwards, the limitation becomes aimed at controlling the flow on the server and avoiding underloads.

Honestly, I don't remember any forum - and I've been to several, some as moderator, and there are no time limitations between posts. There is always some limit. And the limit cannot be 1 second, because that is not a limit. 

[PowerGlove]

By the way, regarding the patch you mentioned, it hasn't been implemented yet, has it?

No, it hasn't. (But, I plan to send theymos a summary of all the outstanding patches at some point. Hopefully that'll help. I think that a few of them are just waiting on theymos to come into enough free time for him to be able to really sit down and focus. Right now, theymos and I have a pretty stupid relationship... I'm often blocked on the thing that he has in abundance: access, and he's often blocked on the thing that I have in abundance: bandwidth. At some point, we'll figure out some compromise that makes better use of both of us.)

This could be fun:

It occurs to me that keeping a counter on what percentage of posters in the thread are ignoring a poster could help, but that's getting offtopic.

Yep, I noticed the "Implement stabbing" topic. (I was working on a response to do with superconducting loops, quantum states, and just how unreliable a face-stabbing implementation in PHP would be, but, yeah... I ran out of energy after considering my wife's constant warnings about my deadpan sense of humor being very hit-or-miss with most people.)

At some point I'm going to (try to) convince theymos to let me replace the whole ignore system, and when I get around to that, I'll think carefully about how to lay things out so that these kinds of suggestions can be looked into (that is, suggestions that depend on the availability of ignore-related statistics).

It was sort of tried before, maybe there is a new way to approach it that would be less resource intensive?

I've got a few ideas (and some guesses about why the previous approach didn't scale), but, I'm not going to put my thinking cap on just yet.

The current posting delay is almost as old as Bitcoin itself:

waittime = 360;
if(activity >= 15)
        waittime = (int)(90 - activity);
if(activity >= 60)
        waittime=(int)(34.7586 - (0.0793103 * activity));
if(activity >= 100)
        waittime = max((int)(14-(activity/50)), 4);

Reporting counts as posting. I think deleting the red parts would solve it (I had to replace code tags by quote tags to make it visible).

Hmm... I wonder if that pseudocode is still correct? (Only theymos would know, but, I've been bugging him a lot lately, so I'm not going to PM him for a while.)

I mean, one thing that occurs to me is to replace all of that with something simpler:

Code:

waittime = (int)min(988 / max(activity - 12, 1) + 1, 360);

Then, instead of it looking like this (red is when activity is < 15, blue is when it's >= 15 and < 60, green is when it's >= 60 and < 100, and purple is when it's >= 100):



It would look like this:



(That way, the important features are matched, and, with that cast-to-int truncation, the wait-time would become 1 second once activity is > 1000.)