MGOBLOG 3.0 sticky for bugs

Submitted by Seth on

We are using this thread to collect all the (fixable) feedback for the new site in one spot, and if you're seeing it on the main page it means I've updated the OP content.

If you've noticed any bugs in the site post them here and if you have constructive criticism we very much appreciate it. The developers are also going to be in this thread. Even if we can't always respond, you're being heard.

UPDATE 8/23/2018:

We met at HUEL HQ today and worked through a lot of things.

THINGS THAT GOT FIXED

1. You are now able to edit your account info (and your avatar) by clicking on your account name while logged in. Eventually your history and more (see below) will be tabbed from a single user page but this was the quick fix for now.

2. The points issue is still the top priority that they're working on. We're one step further and testing a possible fix in a test environment right now.

3. Next week or so we'll have the ability to vote on Diaries and Board posts (the OPs) themselves. Could have launched today but we wanted to move it from where they were appearing but it works on the dev environment.

THINGS WE ARE FIXING

Please note that while this is a priority tree it's not necessarily the order things will get fixed. We have multiple developers who have their different skills and as each comes free from a project they grab the next highest one they can handle.

1. Points problems

The issue seems to be in the module we wrote for counting points:

Voting module.PNG

Now that they've narrowed it down we have high hopes of getting to the root of the situation.

Lastly IF YOUR POINTS WERE RESET TO ZERO please post in here and let us know 1) A little bit about your points history, 2) When you lost them (was it during the transition), and anything else that can help us track down whatever behavior is creating this. We can't fix this because we don't know why or to what class it's happening to.

(new) 2. User permission issues.

So right now at 100 points you should be able to vote and post new threads, and at 500 points you should be able to post diaries and edit wikis.

THIS IS NOT WORKING because of an issue with the core module. We are trying a fix that might make everything work right away.

It's a permissions issue. What's supposed to happen is once you hit a points threshold you are automatically bumped up to the next user level. It's not doing the bumping because of the "Actions" module, which comes with Drupal. Now that we've identified where the problem is we're working on a patch.

2. Embedding youtubes and tweets automatically by posting a link

So because of site security we have to use Oembeds. There is a module for Drupal 8 for this but it's a paid service, which with our volume is cost-prohibitive (like they want tens of thousands of dollars per month so screw those guys).

So we're going to develop something. We would prefer to have a system that automatically turns a link you post into an image or youtube or twitter embed. That's a better long-term solution and putting something in place in the meantime would cost us time and resources we'd rather put toward more permanent changes. It's a high priority so we just ask for patience now to be paid off with a better final product than the old site had.

For now you can still post these with regular html tags and most sites will give you the source code if you can't remember how to write <img> tags in html language. We had the option to change the post-a-picture box in the comment editor with the ability to post a link instead of upload an image to our site, but we didn't want to lose that ability to post to our site since it's a feature we really wanted for the new site.

3. Side rail becoming unglued. 

I've seen it and several users have as well but we haven't had a developer get into it yet because it doesn't happen too often.

4. "Continue Reading" links on front page will jump to the break tag, not the top of the article.

Another thing on the list for a dev to get to.

5. Comments bubble should link to comments

Right now it goes to the top of the article in article view.

6. Voting shows totals not aggregate

We have to rewrite the module ourselves.

7. (new) Latest post timestamp behavior

Haven't looked into it yet but it's a known issue that the latest post says there's something from a few minutes ago and there isn't. It may be bots causing this behavior.

8. (new) Clicking on a comment in a readers' post history should take you to that post.

Moderators need this.

9. (new) Some content is breaking containers

Design issue. When designer gets back from maternity leave we'll get an estimate.

10. (new) We are developing a "User Page" that will be tabbed thusly:

  • Change your user info (name, email, avatar, password)
  • See your recent post history
  • See replies to your posts
  • Your points history

Most excited about the second-to-last one, which is one of many new properties we plan to add that the old site missed.

Things Over the Horizon

1. Showing New comments in a thread as "New"

We got an estimate of big money to rent a specialist in order to build out this module. This is the next big project after we get the points figured out. Personally I wanted to address it sooner but more people complained about points so that got moved ahead. Be mad at the people who complained about points because it's all their fault.

2. Changing Scroll Behavior

We had a specialist look at this and what's happening is a problem with the order things are loaded. When you post a new comment the page DOES take you to your just-posted comment, but then it loads other comments and that pushes your screen down. If you use the up or down arrows it should take you right back to your comment. This is a problem buried deep and got another big expensive estimate to fix. So we have to wait.

(updated) 3. Apps

The process has begun. We might have a couple of light ones first then more developed ones later. FYI the problem with the old apps is they were not built to play nice with the site. If they worked great on your phone that was because they were downloading the whole site before you went to read it, and that was placing a huge drain on our resources and causing the site crashes. We will have apps and I hope to have a timeline in a few weeks. The latest is there's a drupal module we're going to try. Maybe it'll work the first time with no kinks.

(updated) 4. Saving User Preferences

We want comment settings to stick permanently for each user. Right now it resets when you post a comment. This is a BIG fix so it comes after we get other things done.

 

Also they're working on a bunch of functions we need internally, like the process for creating breaks, windows live writer issues, and lightbox for UFRs.

chatster

June 27th, 2018 at 6:22 PM ^

MGoBlog Glitch Switch – Has This Site Become MGoBlah?

Using Chrome from a PC desktop.

No Bug-Extermination Priority Lists posted since June 19.
Suddenly, the poster’s name and points total box has disappeared.
Suddenly, no way to start threads.
Suddenly, no way to log in without replying to a post.
Suddenly, no way to log out.
Suddenly, no way to know whether points totals have been updated since I last posted over a week ago.
Still no way to link to your account without posting a comment.
Still can’t paste text in the comments box without hitting CTRL + V.
Still no way to edit posts after posts have been saved.
Still having line breaks inserted while typing in the comments box and hitting the enter key, even though no line break is intended.
Still no way to edit account information.
Still no clue as to how to embed videos.
Still difficult, though not impossible, to insert images in posts.
Still no underlining button in comments box.
Still no highlighting feature for new posts.
Still way too much white space.
Still no reference to the numbers for both up votes and down votes for individual posts.
Still no way of knowing whether you’ve previously voted on a post.
Still way no to vote on the original post.
The “thread jumps” still don’t take you where you where you want to go in a thread.

Unfortunately, navigating through MGoBlog 3.0 is like being stuck in a leaky boat, lost at sea without a functioning GPS system.

I get it.  The site is free to users and a successful upgrade might cost far too much money for the moderators to underwrite from their own funds.  There’s still some interesting content being added and made available from the oversized images at the top of the page, and posters’ comments usually are good. Be grateful for the small things, right?

Still hoping that MGoBlog 4.0 will be a success.

grbradt

June 28th, 2018 at 12:06 PM ^

I know this isn't a bug but since I can't start a thread I will post this here. All the white on this site is really bothering my eyes so I have created and posted a small userstyle on https://userstyles.org called "mgoblog - not so blinding". This is for desktop, and you need the Stylish addon installed. Search the userstyles website for mgoblog. It changes the background colour of the sidebar to "bisque" and threads and content to "whitesmoke". Hopefully this is of help to others.

Its me Dave

July 5th, 2018 at 11:26 AM ^

Your userstyle probably is an improvement, but should have some caveats.  Google and Mozilla have pulled the Stylish extension from their respositories.  Stylish/userstyles.org hoovers up the URL's to all the sites you visit, and well, does what ever it damn well pleases with the data.  Sells it, loses it, whatever.

Relevant link with longer explanation.

The Granddaddy

June 29th, 2018 at 1:35 PM ^

I just feel like you don't introduce a new car to the market before testing how likely you are to die in every type of potential crash. Why not just keep the old way until everything here was functioning and perfected on some beta site? 

Zenogias

June 29th, 2018 at 3:46 PM ^

Having been using the new site for a while now, I think the two big design things that bother me are:

  1. The banner and tiles at the top of the main page take up WAY too much space. I'd halve the size of both. I think the tiles themselves are fine, but I'd like to see them deemphasized. Here's what it looks like when I hit the main page:

    main mgoblog page.PNG

    I can't even see the headline for the newest article. That really rubs me the wrong way. Ideally, I'd like to see the headline above the lead image instead of below it. A front page that is tightened up like this:

    main mgoblog page_0.PNG

    Just reads sooooooooooooooooooooo much nicer to me. As soon as I hit the main page, I see the most recent relevant content in the titles, the main banner and menus, and also the title, lead image, and date of the most recent post. Yay.
  2. I know this is the dumbest thing ever but: I really, really, really like having the tags lead the article instead of following it after the jump. The goofy tags were one of the things that give MGoBlog its character, and now I basically never see them. The tags served as a funny little preview of what the post was going to contain. They had a nice priming effect. You could often tell the attitude of the post just from them alone. Priming is pretty important in presenting material to people; it frames things for us, and allows us to anticipate what's coming. Anyway, mostly I just liked laughing at the tags as my introduction to the article, and that never happens now.

Its me Dave

June 30th, 2018 at 6:08 PM ^

Hitting F5/refresh on seems to return the user to page 1 from whatever board page they were on.  When the game threads start again, this is going to be a real PITA.  (also, I really miss the "new comment" identification.

Goggles Paisano

July 4th, 2018 at 6:52 AM ^

  1. Fixed the user points issue

Not quite sure what that means, but my points have not changed in 3 weeks.  I have been stuck on 15,583 since the 2nd week of June.  

MGoStrength

July 4th, 2018 at 8:56 AM ^

How about a link in our profile so that we can access our most recent posts quickly and continue to interact with threads that folks are responding to us?

BornInA2

July 6th, 2018 at 10:40 PM ^

Yeah, I wrote a long list of stuff that has been lost to history in some other thread. I'm sure it's all been covered in the nearly 300 posts here.

Points/voting are important for self-moderation. That they aren't working greatly degrades the signal to noise ratio here.

Not hearing from the insiders in weeks about what's been done to get this derailed train of flaming tires extinguished and back on the tracks is frustrating.

PLEASE get someone with some UI skill to fix this mess of tiny type on massive white space. Fix it so it works well on computer screens (as noted, so the dumb MySpace-like title bar and the stuff immediately under doesn't consume all the vertical space on a 1920x1080 screen). Then make an app for a better mobile experience. As-is it just sucks for both, so we have only losers.

Less clicks to get to the board. It's more now than it was unless you want scroll wayyyy down to get to the link (see item above).

Editing posts. Seriously, this is a basic feature of any webboard- even free/open source stuff.

This seems like basic stuff that gets caught in months of testing. Really has me wondering WTF happened, and glad I'm not on the hook to try to fix a live site that is broken all over.

PS- If ever there was a poster child site for not crow-baring Drupal into something it isn't...

Mr. Elbel

July 7th, 2018 at 7:14 PM ^

Not really a bug but idk how else to ask... how on earth do I start a new thread on the board? Can't figure it out. Points shouldn't be an issue for me. Just can't find where to do it from.

M-GO-Beek

July 9th, 2018 at 3:14 PM ^

Just to re-iterate what was said a few days ago, I am still not able to up or down vote anything.  I am concerned that this has not even made the list of things to take care of.  

MGoCali

July 10th, 2018 at 12:48 AM ^

The user points issue is not fixed. I've been at 352 for weeks, and I'm trying to get above whatever threshold I need now to up/down vote. Not being able to do this is driving me away. 

Maize.Blue Wagner

July 10th, 2018 at 10:56 PM ^

I apologize ahead of time, I haven't read through this thread, so these might have already been mentioned. First thing is that it would be nice if diaries were easier to access. Especially on mobile, but even on the website, I'm not sure how to find diaries past the first three that are listed on the front page. Google helped though. 

The second is probably pretty specific to my "This Month in..." diary, but it's difficult to go back into the previous pages of front page content. Before each page of ten or so articles was given it's own unique URL, so you could change the number in the URL and get to where you needed to be without too much difficulty. Now every time you click to another page of older articles the URL stays the same (additional stories). To get to July 2008, I had to go back to December 2004 and click through enough times to get where I needed to be. 

MH20

July 11th, 2018 at 8:49 AM ^

The URL in the address bar stays the same but when you hover over the numbers at the bottom of the Secondary Articles screen (after clicking "More Articles") you will see that each page number has its own unique URL. From there, just right-click one of the numbers, select "Copy link address" (I'm in Chrome, other browsers will have something similar) and paste that URL into your address bar. From there you can change the "page=X" variable to hone in on your desired time period.

For example: July 2008 stories start on the 939th page (URL of https://mgoblog.com/additional-stories?page=938 -- the first page is really the "0th" entry).

buddha

July 11th, 2018 at 10:59 PM ^

Long time member of the site and love the work you guys do. But - with today's "Best plays at each position" post, I had to log into the site on my laptop just to post my frustration about the mobile experience with this page. A couple of immediate pieces of feedback:

  • The entire UI for me - whether vertical or landscape would not optimize the videos. They dragged way "off the edge" and were non-responsive
  • The videos wouldn't close out. Meaning, if and when I would close a video window, it would re-open at least 1x or 2x (and - in some cases - displayed previous videos that I had already closed out)
  • The scrolling for a page this long was just a bad UX
  • When I would watch a video, and close the frame successfully, I was taken back to the top of the article (rather than being taken back to the same position I had been on the page...more scrolling)
  • Since I am on an iPhone X, each time I closed a video out, I would be re-prompted for my Face ID...kinda annoying
  • A few others but those were the main ones. I love this site, and I love the hard work you guys put into the content, but these types of posts (which are great on desktop) are truly brutal on a mobile device

MH20

July 12th, 2018 at 4:53 PM ^

In the upper-right corner of the screen, it should say "Welcome ____" along with your point total (static for the past three weeks) and links to create a diary entry or create an mgoboard thread.

Here's a link in case that isn't showing up for you. For about a week it wasn't showing up for anyone so maybe you're one of the unlucky ones who still is having issues.

Post to MGoBoard

UMProud

July 12th, 2018 at 7:24 PM ^

There are web forum hosting companies that specialize in forums and offer all kinds of customizing.  Why not just use one of them and link/use that while retaining the MGOBLOG top header?  Shit you can make it look  like the old forum if you wanted to.

OldDad67

July 17th, 2018 at 3:25 PM ^

I noticed on my latest thread responses to that when I was negged my points went down but when I was upvoted my points stayed the same. Not a big deal for me, but I didn't know if it was a universal bug for everyone  

xtramelanin

July 17th, 2018 at 3:42 PM ^

Seth,

you are a champ to deal with all of this and the only reason i have started visiting again is because it appears you (read: pushing HUEL, blog killers, from behind) are really trying to make it right.  thank you.

XM

mGrowOld

July 17th, 2018 at 4:27 PM ^

FWIW we are in the same boat blog-wise.  And I took the step about 30 minutes ago of emailing and URGING Seth to bump this update to the front page.  If they actually do get the stuff fixed as he outlined they will address about 90% of the stuff people on this side of the void hate about the site right now.  This update, if accurate, is very, very good news.

And only us hard-core optimists are reading these sticky updates - the vast majority of the board doesnt even seem to know it exists.

redwhiteandMGOBLUE

July 17th, 2018 at 5:55 PM ^

Very interesting that it took "URGING" to get this info posted to the main board so that it could be seen by the masses.  Many of us know where this thread resides but I'm quite certain the casual user had no idea this thread exists.  For the life of me I cannot figure out why they should have to be prompted to front page this info so their consumers are updated on the happenings of reported issues and the progress toward resolution.

stephenrjking

July 17th, 2018 at 6:25 PM ^

One of the things the new site has fixed is the ability to go to the main board page and see multiple pages of posts. On that page this is a "sticky," stuck right at the top. It gets bumped every few weeks to the front page. I'm not sure what else you want them to do. Bump it every day? Clog up the front page, permanently, with a few sticky threads so that you can barely see others? I don't think those are better options.