topic Re: Go to latest post in thread in Community Site Feedback

Go to latest post in thread

Lurch — Sat, 25 Jun 2016 11:11:04 GMT

Quite simply, how do you do this? There seems to be no button/link/icon to view the unread posts since last visit which makes the forum almost unusable (by sane people).

Re: Go to latest post in thread

spraxyt — Sat, 25 Jun 2016 11:27:27 GMT

In your settings at https://community.plus.net/t5/user/myprofilepage/tab/user-preferences%3Alinear-format tick the "jump to first unread post in a topic" setting and save the changes.

Re: Go to latest post in thread

MauriceC — Sat, 25 Jun 2016 11:29:59 GMT

Just beat me to the post David. (Pun intended )

Re: Go to latest post in thread

Lurch — Sat, 25 Jun 2016 11:30:56 GMT

Accepting the above solution brings up a bug, I get a pop-up notification saying that I have accepted my post as a solution. This notification was obviously intended for @spraxyt.

Re: Go to latest post in thread

spraxyt — Sat, 25 Jun 2016 11:38:09 GMT

The incorrect notification text is a known bug. The correct fix message is shown on the forum.

Re: Go to latest post in thread

Lurch — Sat, 25 Jun 2016 11:41:11 GMT

Every forum I've been on today I have ended up filing bug reports and the like!

Why does everyone try to be so clever and release fancy looking but completely useless forum software. Still, at least you are not using Discourse.

Bring back phpBB!

Re: Go to latest post in thread

Anotherone — Sat, 25 Jun 2016 11:43:30 GMT

Indeed it is a known bug, and there's one other to note in relation to all this, once you have read all the posts in a thread, instead of being taken to the Last post of the thread which used to be the case initially, you are now taken to the first post in the thread..

Re: Go to latest post in thread

Lurch — Sat, 25 Jun 2016 12:59:48 GMT

So after a couple of clicks I have found some more bugs, not sure whether to start a new topic or not so feel free to move this post to a new topic if required.

When composing a reply hitting tab takes you to the browse button for attaching files first, where the tab order should be to go to post first.

Before I made this post I tried to search for existing topics/posts but the advanced search doesn't give me an option for 'match all words' which made it difficult.

And then finally if I come back to edit the post it seems to load the HTML, I can click in the post and start to edit it but then the page functions finally kick in and reload the page/post box which throws the cursor out to the page so the browser captures the key presses.

Re: Go to latest post in thread

Anotherone — Sat, 25 Jun 2016 14:25:16 GMT

Hi Lurch. As you are posting on the Community Feedback board, this is the correct place for mentioning any bugs, and there nothing to stop you mentioning as many as you want in your thread, but somehow I doubt you'll have discovered any that haven't been already highlighted either during the previous testing or since its gone Live - the question is simply how may have been fixed, unfortunately nowhere near as many as we wanted Most of these are down to the Software provider Lithium. Some more minor issues and usability problems can/have been fixed by "skinning" which Plusnet can apply.
Welcome to the forum by the way. I'll just try and go through what you've mentioned.

When composing a reply hitting tab takes you to the browse button for attaching files first

I'm not sure why you think there is a need to hit your keyboard Tab button. Having clicked the post "Reply" button, the cursor focus should be in the Rich Text box and you should be able to start replying. However that's not always the case, depending on which browser/OS is being used there is often a need to left click the mouse button in the box before you can start typing to get focus, one shouldn't need to click/hit anything. It is a known issue.

but the advanced search doesn't give me an option for 'match all words' which made it difficult.

The clunkiness of the Search is a total pain in the butt and as the search function currently used here also uses "stemming" that makes things really annoying when searching for more precise technical matters. There are some skinning improvements coming which should help to make it a little less clunky to use, but we are still pushing for a number of functional changes. Your comment about matching "all" words is one which has already been mentioned and the idea has supposed to have been forwarded to Lithium. I'll try and ask about the status of that.

Your last point about editing, sounds like the "focus" issue again, unless I've misunderstood what you are meaning.

Re: Go to latest post in thread

Lurch — Sat, 25 Jun 2016 14:41:54 GMT

@Anotherone wrote:

I'm not sure why you think there is a need to hit your keyboard Tab button. Having clicked the post "Reply" button, the cursor focus should be in the Rich Text box and you should be able to start replying. However that's not always the case, depending on which browser/OS is being used there is often a need to left click the mouse button in the box before you can start typing to get focus, one shouldn't need to click/hit anything. It is a known issue.

I think you have misunderstood, when I have finished typing my reply I can (or should be able to) hit tab to jump to the 'Post' button but the tab order of the paqge has Post as #2, which is not what I would expect as most forum software would be set to jump to post when navigating using the keyboard.
I am fully aware that I do not 'need' to hit the tab button, but I have been doing it like that for the last 15 years. As I have mentioned, I don't why usability has gone out the window in recent years, there are ways that things have always worked and it is almost like the current generation of developers intentionally try to do everything differently just for the sake of it.

Your last point about editing, sounds like the "focus" issue again, unless I've misunderstood what you are meaning.

Yep, it is focus issues again but it is a page load time issue that means that once the box has focus it loses it when the page finishes loading. I just thought I'd mention it as I was listing all the other things that aren't quite right. More of an annoyance than anything, but again if the page wasn't so complicated then it would load quicker so I refer you to my paragraph above!

Re: Go to latest post in thread

Lurch — Sun, 26 Jun 2016 09:23:43 GMT

And then back to the original problem, the links on https://community.plus.net/ seem to be a bit hit & miss as to where in the topic you are sent. Sometimes you are sent to a specific post (#M12345 after the link target) or sometimes to the first post in a thread, but never to /jump-to/first-unread-topic as per if you browse the forums directly.

Re: Go to latest post in thread

MauriceC — Sun, 26 Jun 2016 11:32:07 GMT

@Lurch wrote:

And then back to the original problem, the links on https://community.plus.net/ seem to be a bit hit & miss as to where in the topic you are sent.

Another of those items on the list of things to be fixed "Real soon now" or Mañana. It's a really annoying bug!

Re: Go to latest post in thread

Lurch — Sun, 26 Jun 2016 12:01:59 GMT

Is there a decent editor that can be installed? The rich text editor is terrible and the HTML editor is awful. There are a few forums that I have found have terrible editors, but I can easily switch to the text editor (note: not rich text) and use bbcode without issue. It seems Lithium have binned the established standard way of doing things completely just for the sake of it?

Re: Go to latest post in thread

Anotherone — Tue, 28 Jun 2016 17:28:32 GMT

The Editor that Lithium have chosen to implement is the TinyMCE one. As you've discovered, there are a number of bugs here, some we believe are due to the way it's been implemented. I apologise for forgetting to mention in an earlier reply here (not your fault but I know I mentioned it elsewhere) that an update to the editor & implementation is supposedly due with a forum software update due shortly. However from what I've seen to date, I'm not confident that the main bugs we've complained about have been resolved (or even addressed!).

As far as inconsistent jumping to "posts", as Maurice implied, there is now an annoying bug which I outlined in Message 7.
I assume you've found the 'Jump to first unread post in a topic' setting on this page?

Re: Go to latest post in thread

Lurch — Wed, 29 Jun 2016 11:09:04 GMT

@Anotherone wrote:

I assume you've found the 'Jump to first unread post in a topic' setting on this page?

Yep, that works fine if I browse each subforum directly, just not from the community summary pages.

Another bug/lack of feature I've found is that on https://community.plus.net/t5/forums/unreadpostspage/tab/thread you do not have a 'last post posted at ...' column.

Re: Go to latest post in thread

Lurch — Thu, 30 Jun 2016 09:13:52 GMT

So I was going to edit the above post with some new information but it appears there is some sort of timer on that function, but then the forum rules say that I cannot post multiple posts as this is considered spamming (which I agree with) but the forum features are preventing me from not doing this so I do not expect to get a warning. Other forum software does auto-merge consecutive posts fro the same member so maybe this is something to add to the Lithium feature list?

Anyway, todays bug is the notification feed and the clearing of notifications. If I browse a topic that has new posts and I am subscribed (either by clicking the toaster popup or just happening to browse the thread) then the notifications are not cleared. They remain as a notification until I go into the notification feed and view the posts from there.

And another small issue (pun intended) is the editor window is only resizeable vertically, which is a bit odd/useless. It would also be handy if it was a decent size to start with.

Re: Go to latest post in thread

jaread83 — Thu, 30 Jun 2016 09:32:40 GMT

There isn't much I can do about the notification feed. I am hoping that it will be a bit more intelligent in the future and keep the 'new' status until clicked (like Facebook notifications) and that it would clear the new status if you visit those links via a different route like the popup on the bottom right or email link.

I am unable to change the behaviour of consecutive posts either as that would require a lot of backend changes to implement (something I do not have access to) but I could submit the idea to the Lithium ideas exchange and see what others think.

As for the resizing of the editor, I can override the CSS property for this so there is something I could do to change this. The CSS is currently set as resize: vertical; and I could change it to resize: both;

If I do change that I would also need to take into consideration how it overlaps with the right side container as currently the text on the right shows through the text editor when expanded horizontally. I will add this to my list of enhancements to consider.

edit: sorry, almost forgot.. there is a time limit on editting a post so you can go back and edit a post within 19 hours of creating it.

Re: Go to latest post in thread

Lurch — Thu, 30 Jun 2016 09:41:57 GMT

@jaread83 wrote:

There isn't much I can do about the notification feed. I am hoping that it will be a bit more intelligent in the future and keep the 'new' status until clicked (like Facebook notifications) and that it would clear the new status if you visit those links via a different route like the popup on the bottom right or email link.

I am unable to change the behaviour of consecutive posts either as that would require a lot of backend changes to implement (something I do not have access to) but I could submit the idea to the Lithium ideas exchange and see what others think.

Yeah, these were more of a 'pass up the chain' type things, I wasn't necessarily expecting you to sort these features out. I have just noted another bug related to these though, in my notification feed it says @jaread83 and @Anotherone have replied in this thread, but @Anotherone replied days ago and that notification was already clicked so it does cause some confusion as notifications are reused for no sensible reason.

@jaread83 wrote:

As for the resizing of the editor, I can override the CSS property for this so there is something I could do to change this. The CSS is currently set as resize: vertical; and I could change it to resize: both;

If I do change that I would also need to take into consideration how it overlaps with the right side container as currently the text on the right shows through the text editor when expanded horizontally. I will add this to my list of enhancements to consider.

For me personally I sometimes feel cheated on the internet as a lot of content fills 1/3 of my screen width, and that is just 1 monitor, there are 2 more to use as well. Obviously the monitors primary purpose is stuff for work so the internet is a secondary use in effect, but it still irks me that everything is fixed width and most of my monitor is background/whitespace everywhere!

@jaread83 wrote:

edit: sorry, almost forgot.. there is a time limit on editting a post so you can go back and edit a post within 19 hours of creating it.

It makes sense to have the timer, I was just pointing out how it conflicts with forum rules.

Re: Go to latest post in thread

jaread83 — Thu, 30 Jun 2016 10:10:24 GMT

For the screenspace being used its 1140px max width which will reduce as your screensize goes down for responsive layouts. This can't be changed as its part of the corporate brand guide so it matches the main plusnet website. With this in mind, I cannot change the width. I am also using 3 screens and two of them are 27" wide so I know how you feel.

However, you can easily update the CSS for your browser if you feel the need using Stylish (for Firefox) or the Chrome equivalent. Here is a post I made about custom themes on the community. And if you want to make the community use the most of your screen, try adding these to the browser custom CSS styles (after following the instructions in my post):

.wrapper {
    max-width: 95%;
}
.lia-content {
    max-width: 100%;
}

Doing that will make the community full width if you want to customise it for yourself.

Re: Go to latest post in thread

Anotherone — Fri, 01 Jul 2016 04:36:41 GMT

A number of things here to pick up on, but I'll have to do so later, so just for now, as the forum search is so clunky, I can't blame you for not discovering these few things about the Notification Feed. See This thread and here are some posts that are helpful -

@Anotherone wrote:
Not a lack of interest by any means. the Notification Feed is ONE of my pet topics. Just clarification for starters, the time refers to the last poster, not the 2nd or previous ones - I know - it's not clear, someone else mentioned it last week as well.
If you go to My Settings : Preferences >Display you can change your "Display dates as" to an absolute date if you'd rather that than "yesterday", "last week" etc.

Lithium have made changes to the Notification feed since our testing and also since live, none of which are in-line with what we wanted.
We used to get a notification for each and every post that was made - which was fine as far as I was concerned - you could see who had responded since you last looked. Also the link on each notification took you to that specific post. Now you only get the Notification for the last post with the last two posters named and the link goes to the last post which means you can miss previous posts especially if they are on a previous page.
Also the size of the list (the actually history) is limited, when I checked recently it was barely two weeks.

@jaread83 wrote:

The notification system displays the last few users who replied to your topic. It isn't indicating that two users replied at the very same time. The latest user to reply would be the first on the mini list and if there are more who replied, the last one is shown in the list. There is no issue here with what you are describing.

Edit: Maybe a better explanation of this would be this...

User A replies to a topic you are subscribed to. You get a notification feed item that says 'A replied to your topic'. Now user B replies to the same topic, the last notification feed item is updated to then say 'B and A replied to your topic'. This notification item is then moved up as more recent reply has occured. Now, User C also replies to your topic, the notification item is then updated further to now say 'C, B and 1 other user has replied to your topic'. The timestamp is then updated again.

@Anotherone wrote:

@Anotherone wrote:
.......Now you only get the Notification for the last post with the last two posters named and the link goes to the last post which means you can miss previous posts especially if they are on a previous page.

Allowing for Jack's explanation above in my remark about only getting the Notification for the last post - it's this link going to the last post that is the problem I just missed some previous replies to a thread for that reason.
However many people have replied, the link should go to the First Unread post. I hope this has been raised to Lithium @jaread83 @LouisaMartin.