I could have sworn the Amazon affiliate thing was done in JavaScript client-side because movabletype doesn’t have proper pre-processing parsing support. But there’s also a Discourse plugin available that does the affiliate link morphing serverside at time of topic request by a visitior…
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It doesn’t surprise me that some websites are still http. Up until a few years ago, you had to pay extra for an SSL certificate, it was extra complexity, you had to keep renewing it, it was said to slow down your servers, etc. Times have changed, all of that’s in the past, but a lot of old sites are still running. I use HTTPS Everywhere extension but still hit an http site or two per day. Mostly old ones that just haven’t needed updating.
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Who here was not previously aware that Canada had secretly invaded Elsewhere?
Explanation: I absentmindedly came here while in Private mode, so I wasn’t automatically logged in, and discovered a bevy of recent threads created by @newsfeed_bot, all tagged Canadaland-podcast. These are readily accessible when I’m not logged in, but hidden away when I’m logged in. I can still find them if I specifically search for them, so the bot isn’t ignoring me. What gives?
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Interesting, it appears to be default muted (at least it’s muted for me in Preferences - Notifications - Categories, and I don’t remember muting it). However, mute apparently does not apply to anonymous:
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That’s on me.
To avoid bump floods every time a source site added or removed a banner, I set threads in RSS Feeds to surpressed by default. What the bot needed was a rewrite but I didn’t want to spend the time doing that.
Didn’t realize suppression only hid it in latest for logged in.
Updated category permissions. Disabling two of the feed sources for now.
EDIT: in classic Jeff fashion, the discourse team removed the setting for supprssing a category’s threads. For archival purposes, the RSS archives can be accessed via Categories - Elsewhere Cafe
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I’m still hazy on the purpose of these “secret” threads. Was there a memo that I missed about signing up? Or forgot about? I’m not complaining because I feel left out. I just get the impression that almost everyone was essentially left out (unless they accidentally stumbled across them) and am curious why, if so.
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I had an RSS plugin installed in… 2019? to auto-post interesting articles and then I added imports of a podcast, and then at the request of a regular, imports of an NPR column.
this was manageable until the plugin started bumping topics every time the site a RSS feed changed a banner. then it reset the date on topics, bumping thirty or forty past threads in one go.
… so I set the category it posted to as suppressed, meaning it wasn’t supposed to show up in latest, as a stopgap until i could fix the RSS plugin. It still showed up in Categories view.
The RSS plugin settings panel broke in 2020 but by then I was busy IRL. And the settings panel to enable/disable thread suppression was removed in a Discourse update at somepoint that year, too.
There were probably tweaks I could have done to enhance visibility of these Tuesday without intruding on existing topics. There was a neat Blog View plugin that I played with for a personal project that could have worked nicely, with effort.
The board isn’t really my baby. LockeCJ keeps the server paid for and patched. ChickieD handles most of the moderation load. (There were maybe… eight? flags in the entirity of 2020). I kinda just float around and once every two years put together a terribly half-baked solution to problems that usually don’t exist.
I apologize for the confusion. I half-assed enabled a feature and didn’t follow through on it. The community deserves much better than the mess the RSS fiasco is.
EDIT:
I want to be clear that the entire fault of the RSS debacle is mine. Code isn’t a one-off you send into the world. It requires ongoing commitment to keep running. And I did not commit.
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I’ve noticed that some parts of this site, such as like and reply buttons, may not show up on e-ink or other monochrome screens.
hey! sorry for the late reply – I swear I occasionally read the site.
Readability is definitely something I want to address in the near future with some theme updates. If I can track down my Kindle, I’ll have a much easier time testing changes. Thank you so much for bringing this to my attention.
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It occurs to me I’ve kinda just accepted this as a glitch and got used to it and now it’s been a long time (over a year). Everything else seems to show up fine in onebox mode, but twitter oneboxes are always broken. I have to click through to see it. Does anyone else see it like this?
Fair enough - I hadn’t tried different browsers and extension settings etc. I suppose I should. Aaand, it works just fine on Chrome. So I tried turning off all my extensions in Firefox one by one and that doesn’t appear to make a difference.
Possibly a Firefox-specific bug? Or maybe something else in my settings.
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I get that too. I assumed it was uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger or No-script.
ETA: If so, I’m not savvy enough to figure out to undo it. I just go to the twitter page if I want to see it.
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fwiw, ffx on ios oneboxes tweets fine
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I have that too, though in my case I think it’s my browser not playing well with Discourse. Still images may or may not show up in Twitter oneboxes, videos never do. (This also happens at TOS.) I typically use Samsung Browser (a Chromium mod); if I go to Chrome I have better results… but I’m not too fond of Chrome, so I usually put up with the extra clicks.
I’d be tempted to try a new mobile browser if it allows extensions, as Android Chrome won’t use them at all and Samsung’s support seems limited at best. I’m still doing research on that one.
Edit to add: Firefox mobile doesn’t give me many options either, at least few I’m interested in, and AFAIK I don’t think regular Firefox extensions are compatible. >sigh< Guess tablet-users are second-class citizens in the digital world.
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weirdly, couldn’t replicate on Edge and Brave, so I’m guessing it might be something specific to a combinations of browser addons.
android phones older than 4 years old using the default browser may experience issues, since Discourse is a “rolling release” that targets only the newest browsers for compatibility.
=(
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BTW, I use Firefox.
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Probably because firefox on ios uses Webkit, rather than Gecko.
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Ah. fwiw not much.
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If I click on certain images, the site animates zooming them in. I have a neurological condition where migraine triggers can give me awful migraines.
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I think these image zooms are done via CSS-transitions. My apologies for the delay; it has been awfully busy at work, but I will get right on fixing this.
Is there a particular image/message link that displays this unwanted zooming behaviour?
I think it’s possible to override the zoom transition by patching the site themes, which is relatively straightforward.
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I don’t remember which, sorry.
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