Posts by Marco Fontani

Re: My Comments

On mobile: I can't really tell the difference.

That might've been due to a blunder on my (Apache config) part - as we have an "edition switcher", mostly for mobile, which allows you to always see the mobile site if you've got that cookie set; and the "redesign cookie" wasn't taking over.

It now is, so... even if you've got your edition preference set to mobile, you should be seeing the new homepage if you've opted into it AND are looking at "www", not "m".

Re: Date ordering

I like that the timelines are now correct

Both the new and "classic" homepages have stories ordered from descending published at date, save for 1) the "don't miss" story, which isn't currently shown on the "new" layout - but could; and 2) for "sticky" stories Editorial decides to place somewhere on the page; now replaced with a similar method.

The _bulk_ of stories are ordered; some are sticky somewhere. This hasn't changed in a long, long time.

Re: Not much of a difference

the huge white bar at the top with a single button ("Back to classic homepage") is not supposed to be there in the long term

That's indeed only shown for the opt-in users, to allow them to go back to the "classic" version without having to look up the article, go to the "red pill" page and have to figure out that clicking "rm" removes the cookie ;)

are you getting rid of mobile.theregister.co.uk ?

Not a definite answer, and not in any official capacity - but "likely".

The way things are going web development wise is towards having responsive websites, and this (if and when done right) negates the need for having multiple versions of the same site / content (disregarding AMP for a minute).

We've already gotten rid of the mobile article pages, in case you haven't noticed. They're responsive, and the "www, responsive" version suffices. Next up will likely be getting rid of the mobile homepage - as this new, responsive homepage + our current "edition switching" logic suffices pretty well.

Chances are we will likely make each "page type" responsive, and kill the related mobile-only version as we go.

Re: Don't be Facebook

Can we have a "most recent" articles? (If that's what "Top Stories" is - call it "Most Recent").

Articles are ordered by published at date descending, so you just have to look (usually) at the first row to find those, and work your way downwards.

There'll be some "don't miss" or otherwise editorially-picked articles in the middle somewhere, along with the distinctly styled "Most read" row, but in general the bulk of articles are ordered as above.

Re: Setting cookie already takes JavaScript

the drive towards JS-only websites is rather infuriating.

I wholeheartedly agree - we strive to ensure the basic functionality of "things" works without JS. JS provides an additional layer on top of the basic functionality. You can see (or maybe not, if you leave JS disabled) that for the up/downvote buttons, which are simple/standard HTML forms, but "morph" into AJAX-based things if you have JS enabled. Progressive enhancement might be the correct term?

Or you can (again, maybe not?) see it with the "mobile website" footer button - as that feature is entirely JS-based, you won't find a trace of it in the HTML for the page. It'd be otherwise silly to have a non-functioning button.

On the other hand...

with the new design I will have to enable JavaScript for the The Register domain

The design will continue to work without JS enabled, but you might be missing on a few lazy-loaded images and such. There's no reliable way to do that with CSS only, unfortunately.

On a bigger/wider note, though, JS is pretty much a prerequisite for seeing ads, and the site "lives and breathes" through ad impressions - so by disabling JS you might be getting a subpar experience and might complain about it, but El Reg might be complaining more ;)

There does seem to be a disconnect between the numbe rof articles above the first row of imaged articles - looks to be about 1.5 box widths of whitespace on the right of the last box in the second row.

That "empty space" is actually for an MPU ad, which it seems you're either blocking or not seeing. Is it the former (not a bug) or the latter (a problem)?

Have you tried clicking on the "paperback" tab?

Re: Commentards booted off m.register?

Nope, the link to comments should display fine so long as the article allows them.

The AMP page comments link isn't styled, though - as we're pretty restricted when it comes to style on AMP pages… and the AMP pages kinda mimic the mobile page layout.

Are you sure you're looking at an article page on the mobile site, and not at an AMP page?

The posts don't update immediately like they used to.. Some server side caching I suspect

Your "requests" to post a comment, or edit a comment, are placed into a "FIFO queue" along with other things.

If the queue is not empty, your post may take a little while to show up on the site - depending on how many requests there are before yours, their type, and how long they take to be processed.

As the message shown after your post has been sent says, "be patient".

On top of that, if we're making sweeping changes to our backends, we may temporarily stop the processing of new forum posts. You're still able to post, and your posts will be recorded - they'll just not appear on the site until maintenance is complete.

Re: Odd HTML error.

I've tracked this down. Your original submitted text contained newlines at the end of the href, just before the ending double quote… which in turn later made the auto-paragraphs feature spit out horribly invalid HTML.

I've "fixed" your original post, and I've made it so that newlines found within those hrefs now constitute an error.

Re: @Drew Spurious Blank lines at end of comments

Could you email us at webmaster@ this domain?

See https://www.theregister.co.uk/Page/problem.html for the kind of information we'll likely need, i.e. the exact url you're seeing this on, the browser, IP, etc. etc.

Look forward to hearing from you!

The Webmaster ;)

Re: Website unusable at the moment

Specifically the NetApp animation, that takes about 3 minutes to load.

I've alerted our ad/ops team to this, thanks for your report!

Re: Perl.... Arrggh

I started to learn perl - from books - and it was the worst experience ever. (in regards to what i was learning from a book, that is).

I'd recommend you read Moden Perl, then. Good book to read if you already know how to program and don't need your hand held.

Re: common::sense

Now if only I didn't have to open files with 'open FILE, "<:encoding(UTF-8)", $fn' every time ...

You might want to look into utf8:all, then :)

Re: common::sense

$ perl -le 'use utf8; my $a = { 私 => "あな た"}; print $a->{"私"};'

Wide character in print at -e line 1.

あなた

That "use utf8" only told Perl that your _program_ is encoded thusly, and did nothing to say that your standard output or standard error should output utf8.

$ perl -le'use utf8; binmode *STDOUT, ":encoding(UTF-8)"; my $a = { 私 => "あな た"}; print $a->{"私"};'

あな た

There you go, no warning.

Oh, you wanted to warn instead of print? There we go again…

$ perl -le'use utf8; binmode *STDOUT, ":encoding(UTF-8)"; my $a = { 私 => "あな た"}; warn $a->{"私"};'

Wide character in warn at -e line 1.

あな た at -e line 1.

So, you've got to set STDERR to also encode stuff as utf-8:

$ perl -le'use utf8; binmode *STDERR, ":encoding(UTF-8)"; my $a = { 私 => "あな た"}; warn $a->{"私"};'

あな た at -e line 1.

… or just do what we do, and create a module which does the above for you, as unfortunately common::sense removes a little too many warnings that we want to instead keep enabled... and we don't always want or need to have the utf8 encoding layer enabled on either stdout or stderr.

Re: An admirable effort.

It's nothing more than a generic cert from CloudFlare

Well, not quite "a generic cert"… the certificate contains another couple second-level subdomains in the cert – a "generic wildcard cert" wouldn't be able to secure "m.forums" or "m.search".

Once another CA will make it as frictionless and cost-effective to have the same, I'll reconsider… We already use another wildcard cert on whitepapers, for example – and that's not under cloudflare, it's RapidSSL.

Unfortunately, the above situation means while we probably could also enable HSTS, we'd be doing that using Cloudflare's certs (something I'm neither strongly for or against, but I'd rather those were "our" certs)… and having two different CAs means we can't yet implement HPKP.

I guess once LetsEncrypt starts giving wildcard certs we'd be able to… so long as they offer one cert for all (?:sub)?domains we require ;)

Re: An admirable effort.

Complaining that you hadn't adopted HTTPS on every article in which you tell people to adopt HTTPS was one of the few pleasures I had left in this world!

The most common complaint du jour is lack of IPv6 support, you can jump right in!

Re: Please don't

ElReg's current methodology behind thumbing people is all but useless.

… as it's always been :)

up/downvotes "just" serve as an indication of whether commentards are liking or not a given comment.

I just need the tool to see who's downvoted me

Ain't gonna happen.

This is going to be addressed Soon®: we'll be showing a slightly different icon depending on which way you up/downvoted a post

The time has come ;)

I just upvoted everyone. Then logged out and back in again. And was allowed to upvote everyone again. Hooray!

You've always been allowed to "do" that.

I say "do" as our forums code simply "records your vote preference", and then kicks off a separate task to actually "make it so".

In the end, the last vote wins and gets recorded – as each "per forum post, per user" vote can be expressed only once, but you can change your mind anytime.

Unfortunately, the front-end code isn't currently showing which way you voted, so by tricking things a little you can make it appear as if you managed to (up- or) down-vote somebody into oblivion… but in reality, so long as you're using the same user account to make your "tests", all you've accomplished in the end is to choose whether to upvote or downvote a post.

This is going to be addressed Soon®: we'll be showing a slightly different icon depending on which way you up/downvoted a post (even with JS disabled, obviously), and (while still allowing you to re-cast your vote anytime) the numbers should be quite a bit more clear in the end – as the JS will also be able to take into consideration whether you had or hadn't already up/downvoted a post – and it not being currently able to do so is the source of the "visual bug".

The other "bug" is that we don't currently have a way for you to reverse your vote choice, i.e. if you upvote somebody then you decided that you actually didn't want to either upvote nor downvote the post, you can't go back to "no vote preference given": once up- or down-voted a post, you can only pick which way to vote. We're unlikely to fix this anytime soon, to be honest. Little to gain for a very small corner case.