Banana mania

[IanB]

I wish you guys would do some debugging before you throw a new skin and code update on this site. Is that too much to ask from a technical website that should have competent programmers on it?

Right now it's impossible to read the News section because in this new skin you've removed the highlighting around quote boxes, so the replies are indistinguishable from the (many) quoted sections.

And the Banana filter has gone into overdrive, not just removing naughty words but also corrupting words that innocently contain them: like br.a.s.s and a.s.sumption, so they are unreadable. Frankly that level of filtering (on such silly words, not even obscene ones) and the clumsiness of the implementation makes you look like d.i.c.k.s, it's no wonder everyone is jumping ship from this site.

SERIOUSLY, check things out before you do updates unseen.

And just look at my sig to see the other long-term problem that's gone unfixed - you've messed up the encoding of the site by mismatching what's in the database and what you are telling the server to output. The accent in my sig is showing an incorrect UTF output instead of an acute e. This is VERY basic web stuff that just shouldn't happen on a technical site.

[Charles Wirth]

I wasn't aware we had programmers on staff.
I try but its 10x the reason to kick me in the teeth.
Ill do more googling on UTF, thanks for the point in some direction as I am not a web developer but I can fix it if I can figure out how.

[Sparky]

Little harsh there aren't we?

[IanB]

Fugger, it wasn't meant as a kick-you. But you have had programmers "on staff" previously (mods/admin, whatever) who have made their own forum tweaks for you so were clearly capable of fixing this stuff. I've even offered to help out in the past but was ignored. There's enough pool of talent in this community that it cannot be hard to find someone you can trust who can tweak some PHP. I run my own forum and make my own mods on phpBB, and I have a big PHP/MySQL site all hand-coded (not third party). It's not rocket science to tweak this stuff, it just requires a little patience... and perhaps testing before going live.

Sometimes the maxim of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" is the best. Change for the sake of change is usually bad. Accepting board updates wholescale from whoever writes your software without checking their impact on the usability of such a popular board is dubious. You may have a swanky new skin, but if the technical side has been compromised and the readability is worse, then the end sum is not an improvement and is not going to impress new readers, let alone old ones.

Little harsh there aren't we?

Sorry, I come here to read the news. If it hadn't been all but impossible to do so today due to the quotes running into the replies so the threads couldn't be followed, and every third word obliterated by bananas, I wouldn't have said anything. My worry is actually that this looks so bad that it affects the credibility of the site. Would you rather we all accepted that silently?

[Charles Wirth]

Ian,

No offense taken. You caught me making changes and pointed out that I needed to adjust the filters.

As far as the quotes, everything looks correct on my screen/browser. I don't understand the problem.

UTF change is a bit more of a task that I have not tackled, it requires exporting the database changing the UTF and re importing it, not as easy as it sounds with this database.

[Buckeye]

Quotes seem to be working for me

Ian,

No offense taken. You caught me making changes and pointed out that I needed to adjust the filters.

As far as the quotes, everything looks correct on my screen/browser. I don't understand the problem.

UTF change is a bit more of a task that I have not tackled, it requires exporting the database changing the UTF and re importing it, not as easy as it sounds with this database.

[Don_Dan]

They are now, they were indeed broken ( white box around the quote was not showing ).

[Buckeye]

They are now, they were indeed broken ( white box around the quote was not showing ).

Unless he fixed it yesterday its working fine here.