Shaun's tried to post this on the Boot's thread: Philosophy is not dead, it just smells funny. I see an "Approve" and "Reject" buttons - not sure why - but Approve doesn't work. Did it trip a spam checker?
This topic was created by Andrew Orlowski .
Dunno what's happened today, but the format on the User Forums section and its dependants has gone fubar in IE8 (yes, I know).
<Quick check>
Oooo, Chrome too, so unusually it ain't an IE thang.
The bit with the boxes and ads on the right is overlapping the main section with the headings and forum stuff on the left. Looks like someone's got hold of the fixed-width bit and squeezed the two sides together, if you see what I mean.
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Only stands to reason.
While I'm at it, how about changing the "locked" icon to a picture of a lock with the universal red circle with a slash through it over a lock. Not all of us have perfect vision, c.f. ElReg commentards regarding this article
When posting links to ElReg articles to google+ an image appears that has no relevance to the article. A quick X dismisses it but it would be nice to include the correct pic when posting.
example
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/07/windows_xp_two_years_until_support_ends/
not sure if its a Register or Google+ issue but it should be looked into.
Top articles - keep up the good work.
My two biggest gripes:
1: Navigation between "my posts" and article comments
Can you do something to improve this, so it's less of a ball-ache to view comments I've made "in context"? If I login and visit the "my posts" link, I can view all my inane comments and see the upvotes/downvotes. However there's no way to easily return to view that comment in the context of the article itself. eg. to see if there have been replies. Clicking on "posted on..." links back to the comment's upvote/downvote page and there are links to the article itself and the beginning of the comments page, but the obvious link to comment in context is not there UNLESS my comment was a reply to someone else's comment, in which case there is a wee curly arrow reply icon next to my comment which DOES link back to viewing the comment in context. It's all very inconsistent and confusing.
2: Login cookie:
I've tried this across umpteen browsers, a couple of OSes and several devices and I can never stay logged in for more than a couple of hours. Can you either fix your login cookie, or replace the accompanying text to better reflect reality. Maybe "Keep me logged in for a random short period of time"?
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... indications of new posts, but with no new post. Are phantom posts a bug? A feature? Here's a link to the latest "open topic" that displayed this behavior:
http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2012/02/13/jake_Last_game_I_played_was_Wumpus_/
I say "probably" because I haven't gone looking ... might help with the debug process. Gut feeling is it's a calendar issue; it seems to be following itself up the backlog. Maybe the "read thread/subject" flag is resetting itself after 180-ish days?
http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/latest/2012/02/26/JustaKOS_Could_vegetarians_eat_a_test_tube_burger/
http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/latest/2012/03/21/Drewc_Forums_front_page_flipped_to_httpforumstheregistercouk/
http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/latest/2012/02/13/jake_You_mean_like_Self_Storage/
As a side note, what kind of sad person marks down posts specifically trying to help the staff perfect a forum that the thumbs-updowner seems to enjoy? For shame.
The trouble with downvotes, is the tendency of people to mark down posts they disagree with as opposed to posts that are trolling or are idiotic.
The downvotes-war-by-proxy then spills into comments as in "all those people who downvoted me / you are sad windows lusers".
Now, we could make people say why they are downvoting a comment - but isn't that a bit creepy, or we could suspend people who misuse the downvote - as with the guy picking on jake - or we could limit the number of downvotes someone can use in a month, or turn it in to some site currency game - e.g. you pay to downvote, you are are paid when you upvote. Or we could just drop them altogether. Many big sites just have upvotes - it just might just make the atmosphere a little better.
Maybe an "unfollow / ignore" button would work better - although how that would work with anonymous cowards, I have not tried to figure out.
"The trouble with downvotes, is the tendency of people to mark down posts they disagree with as opposed to posts that are trolling or are idiotic."
Interesting observation. Speaking for myself, all are valid reasons to downvote. The saddo serial downvoting me, even, is making a valid protest in the great scheme of things.
"Now, we could make people say why they are downvoting a comment - but isn't that a bit creepy"
As a long term moderator of mailing lists and Usenet, no. Just no. Entirely too creepy.
"or we could suspend people who misuse the downvote - as with the guy picking on jake"
No. If downvotes are allowed, my fanboi should be allowed. No skin off my teeth.
"or we could limit the number of downvotes someone can use in a month"
Only if you similarly limit upvotes. And even then, what with proxies ...
"or turn it in to some site currency game - e.g. you pay to downvote, you are are paid when you upvote."
That'd start another element gaming the system, just because they can.
"Or we could just drop them altogether."
My vote. They are pretty meaningless, when you think about it. Or leave 'em be, if they aren't causing you lot at ElReg too many fits. There is a reason I've never emailed you about this stuff, and kept it in forum ;-)
"Many big sites just have upvotes - it just might just make the atmosphere a little better."
All bright & fuzzy unicorns, rainbows & stars? Are you channeling HappyNet[tm]? Techies hang out here, for fsck's sake! Most of us have thicker skin than that. Hazard of the profession ...
"Maybe an "unfollow / ignore" button would work better - although how that would work with anonymous cowards, I have not tried to figure out."
Bozo filtering begins and ends with wet-ware. I suspect that if you were to point out that the ACs aren't actually AC, and that you have their IP addresses, some of this silliness would stop. But then again, there are always proxies for the truly determined ...
Ah, well. Relax & have a homebrew. Works for me :-)
> what kind of sad person marks down posts specifically trying to help the staff
As I've said elsewhere, there are certain individuals who will downvote anything they find in your posting history.
Whilst I like the idea of voting, I'd also like to see a public list of who voted for what; a "put yuor money where your mouth is" approach...
Vic.
It's a strange little metagame, replete with features without interface. I suspect that people raging about it probably need to relax a bit. The levels of sheer silliness, banter and facetious comments on what is far from a serious site mean that comments are a bit of a rough and tumble rather than a serious critique of the validity of complex ideas, anyway. Hell, most of the articles are rather silly and fall notably short of journalism (often on purpose, admittedly, so no fault and no blame there).
TL;DR: Y SO SRS?
hmm. Maybe hit shift reload, clear cache? We moved BOFH column to a different section - and different layout template. That was the case for two weeks.
As of yesterday 10 October, BOFH is sorted in reverse chronological order, just like it was before, only this time you can trawl through 10 pages to access every column we have published on The Reg.
at least if you're interweb paranoid like me.
Just posted on <http://forums.channelregister.co.uk/forum/1/2012/11/06/dont_bet_on_microsoft/>, found I had to enable javascript to do this. Precisely, I had to enable js to enable cookies. If you wish to (IMO unnecessarily) link cookie setting to JS support then I shan't argue, but it did surprise me.
I think you may need to stick some extra time into this process.
I started editing a post, but the "submit" was rejected because the time limit had expired. I think there needs to be an extension of the edit window once a user starts the edit process or the function may not be that helpful :)
FF
Drew,
Just tried to edit a long post, realising I'd run out of time, I made 2 changes then hit submit. No probs, then went back and did the same. OK. The third time I tried it timed out. So the limit is 5 minutes from original post. The real answer is I should have proofread it before posting, as it was a touch long.
10 minutes seems a reasonable compromise.
Although even though it's only 5 minutes (maybe 10), should there be an automatic thingy added saying edited by user?
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