Phun Tech Issues

oh shit.. I forgot I activated that again, my bad this time.. that explains that. Thanks

 

While traveling for Xmas I'm stuck on an old laptop running Linux and noticed a bug. The "thanked" stat in the userinfo section of a post will overflow the container when there isn't enough room.



It may not be noticeable to you depending on your OS and the fonts available. But, when a font wider than "Arial" ends up getting used, it's quite noticeable.

I'm guessing the plugin author didn't like the look of that line wrapping so they added a rule making sure it wouldn't wrap. That isn't a problem when the default Arial font is available and used. In that case, it technically overflows the container. But, visibly, it still looks like it is within the section with the blue background (barely).

But, personally, I would remove that 'white-space' rule and let the line wrap when too long because when it does overflow visually (ex. when using the default 'sans-serif' font in Ubuntu) it can cover up text in the actual post making it hard to read.

Also, it doesn't matter much, but the plugin author also used some weird markup that breaks the existing convention. Instead of using a dt and a dd element, they mashed both into a dd element:



Fixes

I don't know if any admins listening have access to change templates or css, but here are a couple fixes if you do:

1) Find the template (or in plugin) where that markup is added and remove that inline 'white-space' style (or all of the inline styles on that dd element). If you have that access, you might as well change the markup to be separate dt and dd elements for completeness.

2) If you can only add CSS or would prefer not to edit templates or plugins, you can add a css rule to the end your stylesheet:

Code:

.userinfo_extra dd {
    white-space: normal !important;
}

3) Or, you could let it go since most people will have Arial installed.

 

I'm sure most people (but me until today) are very familiar with the "leave the page" popup that occurs sometimes as well as the double posting that can occur when the server is slow. It's nothing new, but I thought I'd quote a conversation here for the sake of keeping a list of all bugs in one place:

To summarize, when the server is slow, the quick reply form

1. sometimes causes double posts
2. sometimes causes a "are you sure you want to leave the page" popup when you've typed a reply and click submit

 

a small thing I discovered, when I logged in on my phone (using the default mobile style) I couldn't find the poll to see the result, so I had to switch to a pc theme in order to see the results of the poll. Am I missing some strange button on the phone or is polls disabled in that theme?

 

You aren't missing anything, it appears that both voting on and the creation of polls is disabled in the mobile theme. Hiding things like that on "mobile" is pretty bad design, but there's not much you can do about it. It's not even Phun's fault, really. They are just using mobile theme provided by vBulletin which is several years out of date as far as best practices.

You could switch for polls, or if you always want the standard theme, do you have a theme preference set in your options? I haven't tried it yet, but I'm wondering if setting the preference explicitly to "vBulletin Default Style" (the normal skin) rather than "use forum default" might override the automatic theme switching on mobile?

 

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrggggggggggggggh

I did switch to be able to see who won, and it seemed to stay that way (had to switch back in order to get it back).

it's one thing if voting wasn't allowed... but just seeing the result could have helped .. stupid fuckers

 

Scratch that. I tried it and the preference doesn't seem to override what theme vB was already going to serve you.

Yeah, it's bad altogether. It's one thing to hide ads or extraneous things in the sidebars of sites (like "popular posts" lists, etc). But to take away core content and features on mobile is a big no-no.

 

When I do a search, the further I go (pages) the less pages exist. For instance, if I search and get 10 pages of results as I click next page the amount of results gets smaller. So, by the time I get to page 3 the system is now only showing there is 8 or 7 pages of results, then by page 4 there is only 6 pages of results. What is happening with the other results?

 

Yeah that's definitely weird.

I don't have an answer, but I know where I'd start looking for one. Phun uses a Sphinx search plugin (see link in footer). Basically, Sphinx is a search implementation that sites use when their databases get large because the default MySQL full text search starts to get really slow with big dbs.

So, I would try to narrow things down by disabling (on an offline or staging version of the site, not the live one) the Spinx search and reverting back to the default MySQL-based search. If switching back changes that behavior, you know it's related to that and can dive deeper. At this point, you could also try a different Sphinx plugin to test if it's the plugin or Sphinx itself.

If that doesn't fix it, I'd move on to disabling all plugins temporarily again to narrow it down. If this fixes it, start re-enabling one by one to find the culprit starting with anything related to search or pagination.

vBulletin also has some other things you could try in the maintenance section like rebuilding search indexes, etc. But, I find it best to start with just toggling things on and off to narrow the problem before anything else. Also, maybe look at what's going on in the template where the search pagination exists. Has it been changed at all? You can use a default, completely unmodified vB theme to rule out template modifications.

I know you guys don't have the access to do this stuff, but that's where I'd start.

 

for some reasons (fee is one of those) Cayne likes to get rid of Shpinx anyway. not a big deal except the reindexing...

 

Ok, I wasn't suggesting to get rid of Sphinx entirely. Only to try the default search on a test site to see if that bug goes away.

 

Odd thing has been happening to me, sometimes when I thank a post I will get redirected to this:

 

Odd. A few questions:

• Is this happening when the server is also slow?
• Does it work sometimes and sometimes it doesn't? Or is this something that broke for you recently and now you get this error every time you thank a post?
• When it does happen next, take note of the URL that it redirects you and copy it down somewhere. Then go back to the thread before you thanked the post and get that url too, preferably with the back button to get the exact url (hold the button down if you need to skip an intermediate page from being redirected). Then post those urls here if you can.
• When you do go back to the thread, refresh the page. Is the thread still there or has it been deleted or something in the meantime while you were viewing it?
• Are you using AdBlock, NoScript or any similar addons? See here if so.

 

It happens randomly, maybe once ever thirty or so thanks. When it happens I normally hit the back button and it takes me back to the thread I was in. The next time it happens I'll copy the URL down and post it in here. I am using Adblock, but have had it turned off at Phun the last week.

 

I've run into this a couple times as well. It's pretty random.

 

It's hard to say, but my best guess given the info is that the request (the one that posts your "thanks" to the server in the background) is being mangled in a way that the server-side part of the thanks plugin can't make the connection between the data it's sent and the post you are trying to thank. It could be something to do with the "security token" that needs to be sent with asynchronous requests like that. Not sure.

As an unrelated side note, it looks there is something wrong in Phun's language/phrase settings. That $bbuserinfo[username] part should have been replaced with "HeavyToka". I've seen it many times before on deleted threads, but figured I might as well add to the list while we have a screenshot.

 

Happened again, here is the link http://forum.phun.org/post_thanks.p...7642-f90c3b8480583a0e15dd66fe48403bbb99f21f57

 

And, what was the original post?

 

http://forum.phun.org/showthread.php?t=1236445

 

One thing I noticed is the post number on the error page:

Code:

http://forum.phun.org/post_thanks.php?do=post_thanks_add&p=[B][COLOR="#FF0000"]7698189[/COLOR][/B]

Seems to lead elsewhere rather than:

Code:

http://forum.phun.org/showthread.php?t=1236445&p=[B][COLOR="#FF0000"]7698165[/COLOR][/B]&viewfull=1#post7698165

That "p=" part indicates a unique post number (row) in the db. So the post number in error url should match the post number that you were trying to thank. As for why it doesn't, I don't know. But that's the mismatch I was wondering about.