Greetings

[Razmoudah]

I don't normally do a "Hello" topic, but I think it might be called for this time, if for no other reason than because I don't think anyone else will care much about part of what I'm posting.  Not really sure what to say about myself, I do stink at introductions in general and self introductions in particular, so I guess I'll probably just leave people guessing.

I just found DMFA today and I've been going through the archives.  In strip #95 I've actually seen girly-girls have their pride over power their survival instinct like that, it isn't a uniquely masculine trait, just a trait of those with overly large self opinions.

There, now that I've broken one of the rules with my first post it's time to go back to archive running in Leftover Soup and DMFA while I wait for the admins to find this and ban me.  After all, I would've preferred to just send the comment to the author, instead of mentioning it to everyone, but I didn't see any likely links to follow to do that so I came here.

[Gabi]

You mean you didn't see this button on the comic's main page?

I don't think saying things like "I've broken a rule, now ban me" on your first post is a good idea. And I don't get how people not caring for a part of your post would be a good reason to make it. You're quite confusing. You could have posted your comment on the Lost Lake Inn and it would have been fine. After all, you're just commenting on how you've seen something similar to that strip in real life. I don't see what's wrong with that.

[Darkmoon]

Plus, there's more comic here than just DMFA... and Leftover Soup isn't even a CMF comic.

Weird.

[Razmoudah]

I was referencing a specific strip that was in the double digits of a comic that is now in the quadruple digits.  I don't have the patience needed to fight with getting the search system to find that thread.  As for the rule, I was 'correcting' the author on what the title for that specific strip should be, which some people will take as starting a fight and some people won't, but for those who do it can be considered breaking Rule II.

As for Leftover Soup, unless they've gotten a divorce (and I'm still archive running both, so it's possible and I just haven't seen it mentioned in his author's comments yet), the creator of it is the husband of the creator of DMFA, and it was actually from his profile page (while trying to find an e-mail address to send a comment to him, his was readily findable however) that I found the link for DMFA, thus the reason why it got a mention (here's the link if it bothers you so much).

As for that cute little mail graphic link, it's towards the bottom of the main page only, and I have to scroll down the rough equivalent of four 'screen' pages to find it (I'm using a 1280 x 1024 (5:4) resolution on a non-HD flat screen monitor with Lilith-rin, my Ubuntu Linux box, to do most of my web-surfing).  That's not the most findable location, especially when the archive pages have the fancy banner top with the links for 'Store', 'Forum', 'Cast', etc. on them.  As I hadn't scrolled the entire length of the main page before starting to go through the archive I did not have any special reason to believe there was a mail link (or graphic link) on that page that wasn't in the archives.  I focus on reading the comic itself, and when there is a sizable portion of page content that is not available in the archive I normally don't realize/notice that until after I've finished the archive, as that's normally when I give the main page a full look over.

Hopefully Amber won't take offense to the comment I made here, I'm assuming that someone will tell her about it, and thus I won't get banned, but that can be a very unpredictable thing when you don't have any author's comments to work with to gauge how she will react to that type of comment.

I do thank you Gabi for pointing out that there was in fact a mail link (well, graphic link, but that's a minor point) so that I can at least send these 'retro' comments to the correct place if I have any to make in the future.




And as a small note for the site admins, those little shortcuts you list just above the 'Post', 'Preview', and 'Spell Check' buttons don't work when using Ubuntu Linux.  Of course, maybe it's the fact that I'm using Firefox on my Lilith-rin, but either way they are of limited usefulness depending on a posters OS and/or browser.

[Gabi]

Huh? What shortcuts? The only thing I see right above the 'Post', 'Preview', and 'Spell Check' is the Quick Reply box, in which I am typing this post. Is that because I'm using Firefox on Debian? Maybe Ubuntu users get broken shortcuts That Debian users don't get at all? that would be weird.

No, wait, I've checked the forums on a computer with Ubuntu before. I didn't see any broken shortcuts either.

Oh, and many comics have things on their main page that aren't in the archives, so knowing this can help you with any future webcomics you may find.

[Razmoudah]

There's a quick reply box?  I haven't found the link for that one (and not all forums have it, so I don't normally look for it unless it's painfully obvious).  I use the small little reply link near the bottom of the page, it's just under the most recent post.  I have noticed that forums that have a quick reply option frequently have more links/buttons to utilize in the main reply page that are not shown for the quick reply, but those 'shortcuts' are keyboard shortcuts that a simple text line makes mention of.

Also, the other reason I didn't check the entirety of the main page is that in the past I've read webcomics where the author either didn't have a contact section/link (or a comment section/link) or else relied exclusively on a forum.  Megatokyo does have e-mail contact links, but Piro, Fred Gallagher, predominantly relies on the dedicated forum for reader feed back and you really have to look around to find his e-mail link, though it has fairly obvious links towards the top of the page that lead to it.  It's because I've gotten used to assuming that not all authors will have a readily available means of contacting them that I followed the forum link in the first place (actively reading 85 different webcomics can do that to a person).

[Darkmoon]

Amber is an admin here. If she cares, she'll say something.

[Razmoudah]

Well, at least I got it someplace where she will hopefully find it eventually then.  I've at least accomplished my primary objective.

[Brunhidden]

always understand that not giving a flying fart is also an option amber could choose, or not noticing as she is busy.

however i will savor this as probably the closest i will ever get to saying 'wow, you were burned by Gabi, im impressed'

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

And as a small note for the site admins, those little shortcuts you list just above the 'Post', 'Preview', and 'Spell Check' buttons don't work when using Ubuntu Linux.  Of course, maybe it's the fact that I'm using Firefox on my Lilith-rin, but either way they are of limited usefulness depending on a posters OS and/or browser.

"site admins" would be me. Amongst others. All of whom are listed in the rules you're asking us to ban you by. I'm not sure what the links you're referring to are, though, or in what way they don't work.

There's a quick reply box?  I haven't found the link for that one (and not all forums have it, so I don't normally look for it unless it's painfully obvious).  I use the small little reply link near the bottom of the page, it's just under the most recent post.  I have noticed that forums that have a quick reply option frequently have more links/buttons to utilize in the main reply page that are not shown for the quick reply, but those 'shortcuts' are keyboard shortcuts that a simple text line makes mention of.

Oh. Not in quick reply. Let me look.

Oh. Do you perhaps mean the alt-s and alt-p shortcuts? Yeah, those don't work (to my best recollection) in anything other than IE on Windows. I'm not sure why the people who coded SMF put them there; certainly, were it me, I'd put in a limit to make it only show the instruction if the OS was Windows. I last looked into that about two or three years ago, and, since linux has many different variants of how to manage the keystrokes, and MacOS is a whole other ballgame, I couldn't see a way of consistently making it work for more people than would find it broken now, nor for changing it without breaking it for more people than I'd be fixing it for.

If you have specific suggestions for how to resolve this particular problem, I'm all ears.


By the way, if you're going to supply corrections, either email or PM is Amber's stated preference, since, if the correction is acted upon, the post will be misleading. Just so you know.

[Razmoudah]

Now that I've managed to find an e-mail address for Amber I'll be sending comments (until I finally get to within two months or so of current) there.

As for the problem with the 'shortcuts' mentioned.........as you said there isn't any practical way of fixing it, other than to encode it to do a quick OS and browser check before displaying them (I've only lightly messed with HTML, but it seems to me I've seen other sites do that, so I believe it to be doable).  Also, I have yet to find a 'Quick Reply' link, which is the primary reason I even found that.  Of course maybe it could just say 'for IE users you can shortcut with:...' as that'd let everyone who knows better than to trust IE know that the shortcuts aren't meant for them.  I honestly don't know enough about web-coding to offer much in the way of useful suggestions, not that I'm not willing to learn it (I enjoy a good challenge that requires me to think to fix it, I know it marks me as being extremely queer, by the original definition of the word).

[Gabi]

Don't underestimate the rest of the people around you. You'll find that most if not all of the people who have posted on this thread like challenges that require thinking.

Now, I still don't see any mention of shortcuts nor alt codes anywhere on this page. Perhaps they only show on certain themes?

I have found that Quick Reply can be enabled or disabled at the "Look and Layout Preferences" section of the user CP (click on Profile to get there).

[Razmoudah]

Ah, well I'm not that fond of using the Quick Reply, but the admin was able to find the line of text I was referring to in the Standard Reply page (it does not seem to be in the Quick Reply page), and I'm still using the default theme (which I actually kinda like, but I'm known for being weird, that and it meshes nicely with the theme I use on my Lilith-rin, which Yahoo! tends not to).

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

Gabi,

The "alt-s" shortcut mention is made above the reply box on the full reply page, rather than in the quick reply. The default theme has this listed; your specific theme should, but may or may not, depending on which theme you're using.

Raz,

Before you ask, changing this would involve editing the core SMF theme, which is not something I would approach lightly, for several reasons. Just off the top of my head, you're looking at editing php to generate javascript to generate html, in many cases - at least php + html in this specific case, without looking; the core files are core, not templated, so will change on all themes that don't have that specific file in them (a corollary to this is that if you wish to change a templated file, you need to edit all 10+ themes individually); changes to them will be reverted the next time we do a system upgrade; if they don't revert, they may _break_ patches, in which case the admins will have to spend a bunch of time manually doing the upgrade; finally, this would involve a certain amount of my time in poking at this, and I don't get paid for that.

If you wish to donate to the forum, in order to hire some time of someone to sort this out, I'm sure we can list our rates somewhere, provide you a quote, et al, if it really means that much to you. ;-]

[Razmoudah]

You're kidding, the original creators of the code utilized for this forum actually coded that into the base program?  Either your supplier is Microshit themselves, or you've found their only overly zealous fan-bas whom the hacker community haven't striven to destroy yet.  I especially don't even want to think about what kind of a nightmare it would be to alter such a mess of code (PHP generating JavaScript that generates HTML?  That's got to be close to the absolute worse nightmare to code with in web-design.  The only thing worse I can think of would be trying to mesh PHP and ASP pages, which should also give you an idea as to just how long ago it was that I was in college and had that semester on web-design.).  If it's one of those types of bluntly stupid design things that is a core feature to fix I'll just keep ignoring it, and I think the next thing I'm doing is checking the User Control Panel to enable the Quick Reply box, it is a tad distracting at times.  I do appreciate the info as to just what kind of a mess the back-end of the site could look like if a person started messing with the code, it could still be fun to mess with, but I'd probably need a few weeks of refresher work before I'd even be able to figure out more than half of what I'd be looking at, and I've got enough unfinished projects to deal with at present.  Maybe in a year or two I'd have the time to volunteer my time working with it, hopefully I'll be financially sound enough, with enough cleared projects, to do that.

Hmmm....but my purple and violets color scheme does look wonderful along side these burgundy, red, and black colors of the default theme.

[Darkmoon]

Any time you use an open source web app, you run the risk of stupid stuff being hardcoded into the layout. The alternative is coding it, from the ground up, which as llearch said, no one is paying us to do.

[Razmoudah]

Oh, I know just what you mean.  I went to college for computer programming (and now I haven't used it for nearly a decade, fat lot of good that tens of thousands of dollars of debt has done me).  As a general rule unless you're wanting something very special and unique it's usually easiest to find something similar that can be easily modified into behaving like what you'd wanted.  Aside from saving you who knows how many dozens of hours of work, unless it has something extremely weird in the base code you also don't have to spend as much time on maintenance so long as it is still being 'supported' by whoever developed it.  That applies whether it's open source or something you had to pay for.

[Razmoudah]

Errr.....And after spending some time 'playing' with the date and time settings I can't seem to get the time display to adjust to anything other than the default.  I have no clue what I'm doing wrong, but it has become very annoying.  I guess I'll just have to live with trying to do conversions from GMT -5 to GMT -6 since I can't seem to figure out what to do to change it.

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

Errr.....And after spending some time 'playing' with the date and time settings I can't seem to get the time display to adjust to anything other than the default.  I have no clue what I'm doing wrong, but it has become very annoying.  I guess I'll just have to live with trying to do conversions from GMT -5 to GMT -6 since I can't seem to figure out what to do to change it.

I've set that for you. Look and Layout Preferences in your profile, it's the top box. Again, auto-detect doesn't seem to work on Linux (neither Chrome nor FF, nor the other two browsers I've tried in the past), but you can always just type something reasonable into the box.


Somewhere on the todo list is upgrading to the latest major release of SMF, but we're not in any way rushing towards it.

[Razmoudah]

Errr......blankity, blank gremlins.  I attempted putting in a time adjustment of -1, I tried -2, I tried -60 (just to see what it would do, that one at least got me an error), I even tried just 1.  Aside from the error for -60 none of them gave a time offset adjustment.  I would've tried using GMT -6, but the field wasn't long enough.  Now I take a glance at the setting in my profile (thank you thank you  thank you for adjusting it) and the simple -1 should've adjusted it.  I will have the absolute strangest glitches and problems crop up around me.  I don't see the 'common, but not everyone experiences it' bugs, I see the 'tech support from the developer doesn't believe it exists, until I show it to them (and it will always rear its ugly head in front of them, lucky me)' bugs and the 'this is a major flaw that everyone experiences and the developer is working on a patch' bugs.  As a character in one of the webcomics I read stated "Computers don't have gremlins, people have gremlins." and mine can even affect a website I'm viewing (exceptionally annoying).

Again, thank you for getting that adjusted, as it just refused to adjust for me for some (probably gremlin related) reason.  And yes, after putting in a specific adjustment value I even clicked the save profile button, with no results.

*edit*Forgot to mention that I didn't have any problems adjust the time and date display (and with what it wants for an input string I'm thinking the back end code probably looks like a train wreck of mashed up code, I'm not going to swear to that, but it isn't using the standard PHP format string input for adjusting the date, and some of the values it does want are not the correct values in a standard PHP format string for adjusting the time and date display, thus my impression of what the back end code must look like).

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

It's almost certainly not a printf string. It is likely borged _into_ one, after input, but that would be about as close as it gets.

Sounds to me like your browser (chrome, you said? Which version? beta/stable/unstable ?) is not sending the save profile correctly. (you _do_ need to hit save manually before paging onto something else; if the save doesn't work, then no changes will be made to the DB)

I'm not sure why that is.

[Razmoudah]

No, I'm running Firefox 13.0.1, as is modified by Mozilla corporation for running in Ubuntu Linux.

Yeah, the borged in string is what I was referring to in the previous post's edit.  But still, it goes through an awful lot of translation in the process, far more than is practical unless some of the code used in the back end is so old it predates being able to utilize the universal user end input strings.  I think I've seen a couple of extremely old forums before that might've used a similar one, but I haven't been active on any of those in many, many years.