xmb1.10 smalltalk (formerly "minor caveats thread")

flushedpancake - 4-5-2025 at 12:50 AM

Minor crap I can think of that doesn't need a thread.

1) polls are currently broken when logged in on the testboard. (Also, no options show up when logged out.)

2) we should probably not count spiders/crawlers as actual guests, nor allow them to artificially increment view counters...

3) the strikethrough BBCode has no selector in the post helper.

4) if I remember right, the "Custom Title" can only ever be edited if you modify another user's profile as an admin - the option doesn't appear in your own Member CP editor even if you're an admin. (also, isn't it possible to ban yourself using that?)

miqrogroove - 4-5-2025 at 05:55 PM

1) polls are currently broken when logged in on the testboard.

This is likely several bugs. i will try to iron out the obvious ones today.

2) we should probably not count spiders/crawlers as actual guests, nor allow them to artificially increment view counters...

I'd rather not deal with trying to guess who is human for every hit. I don't think it accomplishes anything.

3) the strikethrough BBCode has no selector in the post helper.

~~We have a strikethrough BBCode?~~

Has it gone missing or was that never a feature? And would anyone use it even if it was a feature?

4) if I remember right, the "Custom Title" can only ever be edited if you modify another user's profile as an admin

Yes, you remember correctly.

miqrogroove - 4-5-2025 at 06:20 PM

Here are the repairs to the poll system where I had clearly broken it.

https://github.com/miqrogroove/xmb/commit/2853f681b75a9e7deb...

Please test more, it's helpful.

miqrogroove - 4-5-2025 at 06:33 PM

I checked more about the strike BBCode. It was added in XMB v1.6 and never had an implementation in the post editor.

flushedpancake - 4-5-2025 at 08:46 PM

I only realised it existed when I looked in the code. I always assumed it was a hack.

Apparently, typing test test messes with the parser for some bizarre reason.

Code:

[font=Gill Sans]test[/font] [font=sans-serif]test[/font]

miqrogroove - 4-5-2025 at 09:17 PM

Hyphens have been excluded from the font pattern since v1.9.

🤔

https://bugs.xmbforum2.com/view.php?id=773

Nice find.

dorp

flushedpancake - 4-5-2025 at 09:44 PM

Is the additional line break in the JavaScript post helper's quote button intentional? None of the other buttons generate an extra linebreak.

Also, the "Netscape colour names" like these aren't allowed for some reason with the colour tag, despite hex colours being allowed. They're still supported in basically every browser, and it's easier to remember, for instance, "lavenderblush" than #FFF0F5, so...)

miqrogroove - 4-5-2025 at 10:44 PM

Named color values were restricted to the set of basic keywords in v1.9.11 as part of the BBCode improvements. The only exceptions were Beige, Brown, LimeGreen, Orange, and Pink, which were already hardcoded in XMB.

If you'd like to suggest a feature change, I think it would be more appropriate to reference the Extended color keywords specification.

flushedpancake - 4-6-2025 at 03:05 AM

Sure, that'll do. The dropdown box should remain as-is to avoid clutter, however.

Also, you can make the online users page display random crap that may or may not be desirable. This is trivial, but a bored troll/spammer could use this to unwanted effects.

(There's a couple good reasons to separate bot/scraper/etc traffic from guest traffic based on user agent (and in some cases, IP blocks). It isn't so much as to tell the difference between the two as much as it is to prevent certain pages being spammed, like the one for searching forums, even if robots.txt is missing and/or being ignored.)

flushedpancake - 4-6-2025 at 07:58 AM

A couple minor posting woes:

- Quoting multiple posts requires you to go back to the thread, quote the post in a new tab, and then copy and paste the quote box into the reply you were writing. This is cumbersome at best: irritating at worst. (Not even the recent posts thing on the newreply page has a convenient quote button.)

- Post IDs aren't shown anywhere in plain sight, so you need to hover over the post date, or (if you're on a phone) copy and paste the URL of that into the quick reply box or address bar to see what the post ID is. This makes using the "pid" tag relatively annoying.

- The email BBCode is really not necessary and should be removed. The URL tag works fine for the same thing.

-

marquee

generates W3C validation errors, and blink doesn't even work on modern browsers. However, their functionality is ****ing epic, so we should keep them around and reimplement them in CSS.

- Maybe integrate the spoiler tag hack?

Somewhat more importantly.

- The "Today's Posts" thing has no limit as to how far it goes back. In theory you could likely coordinate a server overload by spamming requests and setting your topics/posts per page to 32768, the highest it can go up to (which is absurd), if the website has a high enough amount of posts/threads.

- There's no option (unless it's just not clear enough) to search exact words on the Search Page. It also suffers from the same issues as above - try searching for "the" (no quote marks) in all forums with the aforementioned settings.

- Why, exactly, are the "topics/posts per page" integers stored as signed integers rather than unsigned ones? (At least there's a failsafe if it's been set below 0 by the user, though not sure if the admin panel allows you to set it to a negative number)

miqrogroove - 4-6-2025 at 01:11 PM

I'll work on the BBCode colors. In the meantime, could you list all these other things in the bug tracker?

miqrogroove - 4-6-2025 at 05:30 PM

- Quoting multiple posts requires you to go back to the thread

Yes it does. Make a feature request if desired.

- the "pid" tag relatively annoying.

If by annoying you mean it doesn't exist in the post editor then make a feature request if desired.

- The email BBCode is really not necessary and should be removed.

Why?

- marquee generates W3C validation errors, and blink doesn't even work

Please report as bugs.

- Maybe integrate the spoiler tag hack?

Maybe submit a feature request?

- setting your topics/posts per page to 32768

Please report as a bug.

- There's no option (unless it's just not clear enough) to search exact words on the Search Page.

Make a feature request if desired.

- Why, exactly, are the "topics/posts per page" integers stored as signed integers rather than unsigned ones?

Because it doesn't matter.

flushedpancake - 4-7-2025 at 01:56 PM

>pid
By "annoying", I meant that actually looking for whatever post ID you need is somewhat cumbersome, because there's nothing saying the post ID anywhere on the board unless you hover over a very specific part of the page. The actual thing is fine as it is.

>email bbcode
Now you mention it, I could see it being useful if it helped obfuscate email addresses from guests or something to prevent spam/harvesters from seeing things. Other than that, I'm really not sure what the difference between it and the normal url code is other than the protocol really

(As for why I made that long post instead of mentioning things on the bug tracker straight away: I was honestly too shy to make a fuss on the bug tracker, especially regarding feature requests (and felt like you'd have already implemented at least some of those things long ago if you personally felt them necessary)... In other words, I felt like I was being really overdemanding, especially given I haven't actually done anything directly with the codebase myself... thanks for the directions, I suppose

miqrogroove - 4-7-2025 at 03:05 PM

Whether it's me or other future developers looking for feedback, the bug tracker is the right place for it.

Out of all of those, the validation errors and the missing page limits would be the highest priority. I can copy those to the bug tracker later if it helps.

Regarding the email bbcode again, there is a larger picture to the usefulness of that feature. It has been baked into XMB for decades, which means removing it would be a breaking change for every email tag unless the upgrade script is expanded to rewrite every instance of the tags.

flushedpancake - 4-8-2025 at 05:27 AM

Already submitted, as you probably saw. I haven't checked yet, just about to. Fair enough about the bbcode thing, I didn't realise it was used for other functionality tbf.

miqrogroove - 4-19-2025 at 09:57 AM

What is your skill level with CSS? I have a project in mind for the templates and themes but it needs a lot of CSS.

flushedpancake - 4-19-2025 at 08:44 PM

Quote: Originally posted by miqrogroove

What is your skill level with CSS? I have a project in mind for the templates and themes but it needs a lot of CSS.

Probably not enough to do a massive visual overhaul that brings the board to look like something "a social media user who never used a traditional forum before" would not spew disgust and hate towards, if that's the intended goal. (I find modern UIs clunkier and often do things that make you click things unintentionally...)

I'm still interested in hearing the idea out though, just because I think there's some work that could be done too - making the forums scale properly on mobile being the obvious one, for instance, and using CSS classes instead of hardcoded background colours where possible. We already have theme.css, so utilising this more is certainly possible. ~~Scarlet's~~ My port of the default acmlmboard2 theme for 1.9.11 (which I based on the ABXD version of the theme) from way back in late 2017 uses CSS selectors in some places as a hacky replacement for classes, but this is far from ideal.

(Personally I'm all for keeping faithful - for the most part - to the overall feel of the forums and not going too far over the top with chasing trends in the way of say, XenForo/IPS/vB5, because too many "drastic" changes that destroy the vibe makes accustoming to the changes harder for existing communities.

It's interesting how modern-day "minimalism" isn't even anywhere near lightweight. I could probably load this board in the middle of nowhere in a third world country though within a second at worst.

What I do wonder is whether hacks will be replaced with a plugin hook system for 1.10, or whether we're sticking to the old way of adding/changing the code in manually.

miqrogroove - 4-20-2025 at 03:03 AM

The visual overhaul would be a whole separate project.

One thing that might be interesting is replacing all the XHTML with reasonable HTML 5 and CSS substitutes. I wonder, but I'm uncertain, if it's worth trying to re-create all of the old table elements with CSS tables. In that sense, the current layout could be one theme, and then a visual overhaul might be mostly done in CSS alone. This would need a bit more flexibility of the theme system so that we aren't tied to the same CSS template for every theme.

A plugin framework for XMB is still way down the road. It's already more than a few months since I started reorganizing the scripts and there are more immediate priorities for features like SMTP and CAPTCHA.

flushedpancake - 4-20-2025 at 03:07 PM

I see. I'll open a branch at some point and begin work, probably in the next few days. Depends on my mood and other things that are going on really.

As for the plugin system idea, at least it's something you considered doing, though I understand exactly why it's a long way off given the huge amount of work you've done.

miqrogroove - 5-25-2025 at 03:10 PM

Here's a long and boring article about one of the plugin components of Symfony. Something to think about.

https://symfony.com/doc/current/components/event_dispatcher....

flushedpancake - 5-25-2025 at 10:43 PM

Looks good! I think it's worth seeing about integration. (Also, what's been up? It's been a little while, hasn't it?)

And don't fret, it wasn't boring. It's nice to have my eyes actually opened up to coding standards that aren't from like 2007, lol.

miqrogroove - 5-27-2025 at 04:55 AM

Working a lot right now so had to put some things on pause.

Symfony has some great features but also some limits to its documentation. I already raised 3 issues with the EventDispatcher docs project.

flushedpancake - 6-1-2025 at 05:11 AM

That's okay, no worries. Take your time.

By the way, do you have an account on ycombinator/slashdot/etc? Might be worth putting out the news about XMB's redevelopment on those kind of programmer spaces - you never know quite who's lurking, and jogging once-thought-to-be-lost memories might actually be a decent shot.

Meanwhile, speaking of documentation, what's the XMB documentation like? I haven't looked into it much.

miqrogroove - 6-1-2025 at 01:55 PM

I maintain a few pages in the docs. Nobody has worked on the rest in a very long time.

https://docs.xmbforum2.com/index.php?title=Special:Contribut...

flushedpancake - 6-3-2025 at 01:08 AM

Huh, no signup page?
I was going to fix up the BBCode one.

miqrogroove - 6-3-2025 at 04:58 PM

This community is too small to justify anonymous (spam) wiki usage. I will setup an account and send it to your email today.

flushedpancake - 6-5-2025 at 05:52 AM

I don't think the email went through. Typical GMX moment I suppose.

Feel free to U2U the password or something.

(Also, there's a missing line break in the last section of the board rules on this very site.

)

miqrogroove - 6-6-2025 at 02:34 AM

Just got busy, sorry. I'll work on it now.

miqrogroove - 6-11-2025 at 05:21 PM

Nice first edit. I can see that BBCode page has a lot of old formatting issues. Based on the short history, my guess is it didn't import very well either from the old wiki or the old HTML files.

flushedpancake - 6-11-2025 at 07:29 PM

I did think it was a bit cumbersome. Still needs some work, but it's not as weird as it was.

miqrogroove - 6-16-2025 at 11:24 PM

Trying to untie a knot on the alpha site today. I tracked down a bug in a file I'm working on, with no errors thrown. When I stub an error_reporting() call it returns -10251 which... without some kind of binary calculator could mean just about anything. I'm also wondering if that level is invalid and where it's coming from.

https://github.com/php/php-src/issues/18867

miqrogroove - 6-17-2025 at 08:49 PM

Here's the problem with DreamHost: They wrote a proprietary PHP extension called dh_php_ext that forces a bit mask of ~2 & ~8 & ~2048 & ~8192 on the PHP error_reporting value.

The workaround is to add this to the .user.ini file in the site directory:

error_reporting_allow_deprecated = 1
error_reporting_allow_notice = 1
error_reporting_allow_strict = 1
error_reporting_allow_warning = 1

DreamHost recommends doing this in the phprc file, however those are version-specific and less convenient.

After that, it might be necessary to use an SSH login to kill the php processes.

killall -9 php84.cgi -u <username>

This implies you will have to create an SSH login if you don't already have one. Alternatively, it may be possible to wait several minutes for the PHP process to recycle on its own.

miqrogroove - 6-23-2025 at 02:18 PM

The Symfony Mailer is workable now. :cool:

The readme file is updated accordingly. The alpha site is still using PHP mail() so nothing fancy to see there. I need to find out if we can use Symfony's DKIM signing along with their Sendmail Transport. If I can make that work, I will definitely switch the alpha site to the Symfony mode.

flushedpancake - 6-28-2025 at 07:01 AM

Quote: Originally posted by miqrogroove

The Symfony Mailer is workable now. :cool:

Nice!

By the way, you broke redirecting after making a post, oops.
(And for some reason, it marks the thread as unread after I've made a post in it, which is kind of weird)

miqrogroove - 6-28-2025 at 12:34 PM

I've corrected that error.

This site is using Symfony and DKIM now.

miqrogroove - 7-3-2025 at 02:20 PM

I did a huge amount of work yesterday auditing and adjusting the HTML quote escaping in every file. The only major issues with the schema now are double-slashing of a few fields, and lack of UTF support. Those are going to be lower priorities because I still want to finish work on the captcha and member registration changes.