Site upgrade!

[roddy]

It's a minimum word length thing - search for  今天的我  and it shows results. I'll get that fixed*. However it won't find, eg,  名为共和党总  from here, as it's embedded in a sentence and the indexer doesn't parse Chinese words (basically the search index for the site's own search is a half gigabyte list of words), which is one of the reasons that we do actually need Google search back, so I'll move that into the 'do' column of my list.

 

*Actually maybe not. I'm not sure I can index  余华  without also indexing 'of' and 'in' and all other two-letter words, which would possibly break something. I'll need to consult. Can't actually recall how it worked before, as we just relied on Google Search.

[roddy]

Ok, the 'All Content' search in the search bar now defaults to Google Site Search, and is returning results for, eg,  余华 . The limitation of *that* is that it depends on how well Google indexes us, and there are some parts of the site (the News forum, for example) that it doesn't have access to. 

[Demonic_Duck]

For the native site search, can't you do something with regexes to disallow 2-char Latin alphabet searches?

[abcdefg]

I have a small suggestion -- Having post numbers helps in a long thread in which users have made more than one post. For example, it would let me say, "See Roddy's post #5 above for more on this subject."

 

Is there a reason why they were eliminated in the upgrade?

 

Not a big deal, but something to think about.

[roddy]

See the discussion from here - please note the easily clickable link, rather than having to go through 5 pages figuring out where post #54 is...

[roddy]

To get a link for a particular post, right click on the share icon as seen at top right on every post and 'copy link' (language may vary across browsers). OR click the icon, in the pop-up the link is already selected so you just need to hit CTRL+C to copy it and then CTRL+V to paste into your target post.

Example of share-alt at 

 

[roddy]

I'm getting some work done so that Google Search will work more like it did previously (ie, be a separate option, rather than overriding our own search engine). I'm going to see if there's a better option for Chinese search, but waiting until I have some of the currently open support tickets closed.

 

Next week should hopefully see some decent speed improvements (PHP upgrade and CDN), and the server's already a lot happier than it was previously. 

[Mati1]

I just noticed that the "Currently reading this thread" user list is gone. Can the upgraded forum show this as well? (Maybe even more accurate than before due to funky realtime transfers, as in the server wouldn't just be looking at last page call timestamps and timeout.)

[imron]

Any idea when links to old posts will be fixed?

[Shelley]

I have worked out that I am not receiving RSS feeds. I am getting email notifications. Have we lost RSS feeds or do I need to change my settings?

[roddy]

@imron they should be ok, but I've not had a chance to check fully. Are you seeing any not working?

 

@Shelley Someone still uses RSS feeds! I was wondering that today. The addresses might have changed but I can turn them back on. I'm not very keen as they seem to mostly get used to steal content for spammy blogs. 

[Shelley]

Its not a problem, with new notifications I am kept up to date with my topics and the landing page lets me see what's new. I don't mind not having them I just wondered if it was me or the site update.

 

Don't turn them on just for me, also if it helps keep the site safe its just not worth it.

 

[imron]

@roddy yes, quite a few.  See here and here for example.  The links in those posts go to the beginning of the thread rather than the actual linked to post.

[roddy]

That's a different issue, will raise that tomorrow. I was referring to old Vbulletin links, those are IPB ones. 

[roddy]

Filed a report for that, I can see the issue on their own site as well. @Mati1, I don't think that's coming back. 

 

Edit: If in the meantime anyone urgently wants to find one of those links, you can construct the url manually. Take the post number from the old url

https://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/44383-introducing-chinese-text-analyser/page-14#comment-368546

which here is 368546

Then append ?do=findComment&comment=368546 to the url of the topic

https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/topic/44383-introducing-chinese-text-analyser/?do=findComment&comment=368546

[imron]

1 hour ago, roddy said:

I don't think that's coming back.

I kind of liked it too.

 

On a similar note, can we get the list of online users to default to logged in members only?  And also display in a single column rather than multiple ones?

[roddy]

Done the default to logged in members. Why a single column?

[imron]

Easier to scan

[Mati1]

Hah! I just found the preview function - the last icon in the reply box icons line. Somehow I missed that one after the traditional preview function disappeared. Hmm, it looks an awful lot like a search button

 

(Only wanted to do some quick testing. Since there doesn't seem to be a dedicated subforum, should tests be posted in the upgrade forum or in the Forum Help forum (which is in annoucements ...)? Don't need it now though.)

[roddy]

Test posts should go somewhere they won't appear on the front page, so the help forum, or general discussion (or whatever it's called). 

 

Those older links should work now, but in some cases will only get to the right page and not find the correct link, as the anchors have changed from entry123456 to comment-123456. I'm pushing back on that as these are native IPB links and much less old than the VB ones. 

 

I think there's some posts I've yet to reply to - I will get there!