November Update

Hey all, hope you’re doing well. Yesterday I rolled out a bunch of new stuff for THP and it seemed to go mostly well, with only small things needing fixes in the hours after.

There’s a lot here that ought to provide a better user experience. First and foremost, the settings menu got a little overhaul with collapsible categories and a few new options there. You can expect to find a quick reply option that works on the desktop version of the site now as well; effort has been expended to reduce the disparities between the experiences between site versions.

I’m going to jump ahead and bring up the general fact that the site has been reworked to look decent no matter the size of the screen. Gone is the version switcher and static application of features that depending on how much screen real estate the user had. Things may look superficially similar but try resizing a window on a desktop—elements switch to their mobile-friendly state on smaller sizes. Things like the thread watcher and floating post box now transition back and forth without issue meaning that it’s safe to expose those settings no matter the device.

Some of this was already handled by CSS but a lot of it required a reworking of how scripts were written. This, in turn, required quite a few modifications to how pages are rendered. New elements were added, many modified and others still removed. And while I was at it, I overhauled some other bits of code generation… so all in all it required a significant time investment to make sure things went smoothly.

All those small new things like the new post deletion/report buttons on smaller screens (instead of checkboxes that aren’t really very intuitive or necessary most of the time) took some thought to get just right. It may not seem like much but when you’re playing around with code that is generated by php + templates, styled by various stylesheets and possibly then modified/made dynamic with javascript then changing one of those elements can often mean tweaks are needed in the other areas.

I’m pleased at the more consistent and simplified postbox that we have now as well as how well it goes with the new captcha. I removed the deletion password input from there and placed it in the settings menu because, let’s be honest: how many people actually set their post deletion password that often? Or at all? For most the randomly-generated default is fine or goes unnoticed. Getting rid of clutter (and a possible source of confusion for new users) outweighs the hypothetical annoyance of a dedicated poster (ha!) who frequently rotates his deletion password.

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t have the best sense of aesthetics but I generally try for consistency and legibility. Small tweaks like to the page switcher at the bottom of board pages, making sure that archived threads look the same as current threads and further limiting the “jumps” in pages when content is loaded are all things that I spend more time on than is probably healthy. That I consolidated several template files into one more easily-digested file only really for my own sanity than any strict technical reason.

Likewise, some of the under-the-hood stuff is strictly about making things slightly less stressful. I won’t detail the specifics for obvious reasons, but I set up new ways of intercepting spam and limiting some of the abuses we’ve seen in the past few weeks. I’m not sure if it’ll work yet but I can only hope that it does. In the never-ending war against spammers, though, I realize that it’ll only be a temporary victory. But hey, if that temporary victory can keep me from having to log in and delete stuff manually, then I welcome it.

It’s always a little odd to sum up many days of works, a plethora of commits (135 to be exact) and countless files and lines of code changes in these posts. I can’t say I’m certain of the appropriate amount of specificity that’ll keep your interest. Regardless, I’m erring on the side of caution and choose to keep it short for today.

Do make sure to explore the new settings and play around with the site if you like, there’s a lot there to like. Especially with our yearly nanowrimo celebration being in full swing.

I’ll tease that I’m working on a number of really cool things at the moment but don’t really have a set schedule for when all it’ll be done. I don’t really have a finalized scope either so if I opt for a smaller update, it might not take longer than until the end of the month. Anything more, and I think that sometime in December is a reasonable estimate. It’s an eclectic collection of features with some of it being for story reading and some for authors.

When I’m ready to share more, I’ll write another one of these posts. Until then, take it easy!