Bugginess


Some of you have noticed some buggy behavior lately: it’s because the gnomes have been tinkering. In other site news, we’re hearing promises that a new front page will roll out in about a week, and there is now a contact link so those of you who experience technical issues know where to complain.

Comments

  1. Doubting Thomas says

    What I’d like to see is the page swapped and put the panel with your icon and ‘About the Author’, etc on the right. As it is, when I make the text larger so I can read it, the text falls off my screen on the right so I then have to scroll over. Have some consideration for those of us with poor eyesight please.

  2. René says

    I wholeheartedly second Doubting Thomas’s request in #1. I suffer from the same. Let me add that it is better to have the ‘panel’ on the right as it often is enough to see just the beginning of the lines, for instance who has recently added a comment — I am interested in some specific commenters.

  3. carlie says

    and there is now a contact link so those of you who experience technical issues know where to complain.

    Halle-fucking-lujah and amen to that!

  4. carlie says

    The panel being back on the right also helps for scrolling/clicking – if your mouse is already on the scrollbar side, it’s a lot easier to click links there rather than scroll all the way back across the page to get there.

  5. says

    I’m looking forward to the new set of bugs. Some suggestions for glaring faults you might like to consider:

    * A pathological “older comments” link, that leads to a page containing comments -499 to 0.
    * Javascript which defocuses the message box whenever the space bar is pressed.
    * 10,000 character URLs.
    * Text rendering that replaces all non-ASCII characters with a picture of Franc Hoggle.

  6. sisu says

    Hurrah for the new front page! I tend to navigate the site and look for new posts by the front page, and it’s been less than completely useful for quite some time now. Also yay for the contact link!

    Oh, hey, what happened to Assassin Actual’s blog? Usually there’s some sort of announcement but his blog just slipped quietly away. Which I suppose would be appropriate, but still, inquiring minds.

  7. Trebuchet says

    When the site was down for a while last night I was first alarmed and then ecstatic — alarmed that it was down and then ecstatic because I figured it was the new main page going up. So I was sad to see the same old page this morning.

    Inspired by someone else’s post I spent a little time reviewing the main page yesterday:
    Blogs in sidebar: 37
    Blogs in main panel: 33, with the four newest blogs not showing.
    Total active blogs: 30, including five rated by me as only moderately active, one active only at a low level, and one too new to rate.
    One (Blag Hag) inactive for very understandable reasons.
    Three each officially closed or moved to Patheos.

    So I’m really, really, REALLY glad to hear the long overdue main page update will happen soon.

    @Sisu, #6: AA’s blog was removed a few weeks ago, along with a couple of others which were never officially closed or moved but simply stopped updating. That happened shortly after I had complained to Ed about the page, but of course correlation does not imply causation!

  8. says

    I’ve put a few angry rants in our back channel about the state of the main page, but we’re limited by our available personpower. It is a high priority.

    If you have gripes about the behavior of the software, you should use that contact form — it goes to Ed, our tech person, and Jason Thibeault. The last two have the technical expertise to fix stuff, while the first can crack the whip.

  9. Trebuchet says

    Wow! Five defunct/moved blogs just disappeared. Pretty sure they were there when I first came in this morning. Thank you Ed, Jason, and “tech person”!

    My post above was slightly incorrect, BTW, only two had moved to Patheos not three.

  10. Trebuchet says

    And now the four new ones are on the main panel. Happy, happy, happy.

    Now if we could just have an edit function….

  11. Draken says

    +1 for sidebar on the right.

    And fix please for the faulty preview when a link (a href) is present.

    And once I discover what precisely causes (linkless) comments to be rejected silently and be lost for editing, I’ll report it.

  12. Pierce R. Butler says

    Why does the “FTB Recent” box, whether on left or right, still have only 6 entries?

  13. sisu says

    Wow! Five defunct/moved blogs just disappeared. Pretty sure they were there when I first came in this morning. Thank you Ed, Jason, and “tech person”!

    Seconding this! Dead blogs are gone from the sidebar and front page, and the new blogs have appeared! Love it.

  14. says

    Ah.. So, no more strange disappearing article titles, and that big “site tried to open a popup, but you have those disabled”, bars at the top of every page? Man, I am going to miss those.. or, where those considered ‘bugs’? lol

  15. says

    PZ:

    I’ve put a few angry rants in our back channel about the state of the main page, but we’re limited by our available personpower. It is a high priority.

    The only thing I want is for someone, anyone, to get it through their head, once and for all, that the Preview button should be first, and Submit second.

  16. says

    lol I was joking PZ. I haven’t seen either glitch today, so.. I have to assume the one was fixed, and the other, if it recurs, is probably some damn advert thing.

  17. says

    Preview with links still borked?

    …yep.

    I did some testing previously and found some CSS fixes for it. I’ll restest and pass the results along to the contact list.