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?)

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.

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.

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

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]

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

🤔

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

Nice find.

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...)

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.

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.)

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.

- 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)

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

- 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.

>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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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....