Bugs and Suggestions for Metabunk.org

FatPhil said:
I think I've only loaded the front page a few times, and all of those times were accidents. Is that really how people get into the site? You might be optimising the unimportant.
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FWIW, it is how I do. Not by any choice, really, it's just what my browser opens when I type "Metabunk." At which point I make it show me what's new since I was here last. I don't really look at the headlines/stories featured on the front page -- I land on it, but don't really pay attention to it.

Is that where a first-time visitor or curious new friend would land when just entering "metabunk.org?" If so, the page may be more for them than for us?
 
JMartJr said:
FWIW, it is how I do. Not by any choice, really, it's just what my browser opens when I type "Metabunk." At which point I make it show me what's new since I was here last. I don't really look at the headlines/stories featured on the front page -- I land on it, but don't really pay attention to it.
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Yeah, my Metabunk bookmark is https://www.metabunk.org/whats-new/posts/

The front page is intended to be a quick visual set of links to current interesting content. It could be a lot better, but I've not really had time or motivation to do much with it.
 
yoshy said:
I believe XenForo is closed source, but is the code for the frontend of metabunk open source? Like the css and all that. Just curious because if it is, users with HTML/CSS/JavaScript experience might be able to more easily help out with testing some of these suggestions. I have no experience with XenForo and not a whole bunch with website frontends in general, so I'm open to the possibility my question is silly right off the bat :p
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As Mick noted, I used Dev Tools in the browser to test the styling of what you see now on the front page. HTML/CSS/Javascript is all client-side code and can be changed by the client. This probably seems like a security risk and it can be, so you have to be careful as a developer not to create vulnerabilities on the client. The server-side application must be setup to mitigate these risks.

To your main point though, there are limitations to using Dev Tools, so any app that is open-source and the code can be downloaded and executed locally is a better way to develop and test things.
 
I can't access the site in my usual firefox browser anymore. I get the error message below when opening my usual bookmark to the forums (https://www.metabunk.org/forums/) and on https://www.metabunk.org/.

Firefox 128.13.0esr (64-bit) on Debian/testing.

It's not blocking chromium so far.

External Quote:

Sorry, you have been blocked

You are unable to access metabunk.org

Why have I been blocked?

This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. The action you just performed triggered the security solution. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data.

What can I do to resolve this?

You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked. Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page.

Cloudflare Ray ID: 968be07fa9eecd3c
Edit: After logging in on Chromium to post this, it has stopped blocking firefox.
 
Mick West said:
Hmm, hopefully just a glitch. The Cloudflare security is all automatic, but I can tweak the settings a bit. It thought the request came from a bot. Likely the issue is the older version of FF you are using.
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It did the same again last night but I forgot to go back and retest it.

Today it did it again. I tried with chromium which worked, then went back to firefox and it was still blocked. Then created a new profile so there were no plugins enabled but that was blocked too. Then went back to the main profile and it let me in.
 
@Mick West Sorry, I forgot to save it this time and it has let me back in again.

But I just tried on another machine with the same versions and that was blocked: Cloudflare Ray ID: 96972861ad3c3c7f
 
boguesuser said:
Any chance we can get Rust Code tags for the code blocks?
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Done
Rust: 
    for i in 1..=871 { // Assuming 871 is the max for blue as well, adjust if needed
        let image_id = format!("XO{:03}", i);
        let download_url = format!("https://irsa.ipac.caltech.edu/data/DSS/images/dss1blue/dss1blue_{}.fits", image_id);
        let download_dest = format!("poss_1_raw/poss_blue_raw/dss1blue_{}.fits", image_id);

        match downloader::download_file(&download_url, &download_dest).await {
            Ok(_) => {
                println!("Blue image download process completed (downloaded or already exists) for {}", download_dest);
            }
            Err(e) => eprintln!("Error during blue image download process for {}: {}", download_url, e),
        }
        println!(""); // Add blank line after each blue image download attempt
    }
 
I don't know if this is possible, but it'd be cool to be able to add a remark to a 'like'. In this way one (if one so wishes) can explain why the 'like' was given and manage in-between cases.
 
Mauro said:
I don't know if this is possible, but it'd be cool to be able to add a remark to a 'like'. In this way one (if one so wishes) can explain why the 'like' was given and manage in-between cases.
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That's what the "Reply" link is for—or the "Send direct message" on the profile. ;)
 
Mendel said:
That's what the "Reply" link is for—or the "Send direct message" on the profile. ;)
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Also, that's what the range of positive feedback options are for. If you liked it because it's useful, useful, if you liked it because it's informative, informative, etc.
I would like a slightly wider range, as I feel we're missing at least a 'face palm' - sometimes both funny and wow are both very wide of the mark.
 
While we're on the topic, I wish it were possible to indicate which bit you like, or dislike, etc.

I might even consider getting rid of "dislike" and "disagree" as "like" options. It would seem that they are sometimes used just as little aggressions, and they don't tell us anything about WHY. If we want to disagree with something, maybe we ought to have to say why? And maybe what we'd suggest instead?
 
JMartJr said:
If we want to disagree with something, maybe we ought to have to say why? And maybe what we'd suggest instead?
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When we're going in circles, often I've already explained why I think that [kind of] message does not contribute, or why I disagree. I'm happy to just put a red emoji there and leave it.
 
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Mendel said:
When we're going in circles, often I've already explained why I think that message does not contribute, or why I disagree. I'm happy to just put a red emoji there and leave it.
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Valid point, in that sort of circumstance.

PS... I struggled to prevent myself from just hitting "disagree" and not saying why, but folks might have missed the joke, and besides I dont really disagree...
 
JMartJr said:
Valid point, in that sort of circumstance.

PS... I struggled to prevent myself from just hitting "disagree" and not saying why, but folks might have missed the joke, and besides I dont really disagree...
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if you had done that, I'd have understood that to mean that you read my answer, but that it failed to change your mind.
 
My eyes find the style of the recently added labels (on sitrec related threads) very unpleasant:

z.jpg
(Although they do make a nice flag in the prefix selector)

The red and the green backgrounds are both distracting and severely clash with the cool, modestly saturated colors of the rest of metabunk.
(Saturated and bright colors generally don't go very well with longer text contents.)

I'd like to suggest an alternative look:
(left: current, middle: suggested with no background, right: suggested with subtle background)

[note: images contain modified page data for demonstration purposes]

'default' theme:
x.jpg


'blackened' theme:
y.jpg

(some of the subtle background got eaten by compression here, it looks better when rendered natively in a browser)

I think these offer a more consistent, cleaner and less distracting style and work reasonably well both on the 'default' and the 'blackened' themes.

The current styles use '.label.label--red', '.label.label--accent' and '.label.label--green', I guess from a futureproofing / maintenance point of view defining new styles would be preferable to overwriting these, as such the no background versions would look like this:

CSS: 
.label.label--bug {
    border-radius: 0px;
    color: #cf0000;
    border-color: #cf0000
}

.label.label--feature {
    border-radius: 0px;
    color: #0080d0;
    border-color: #0080d0
}

.label.label--fixed {
    border-radius: 0px;
    color: #008d00;
    border-color: #008d00
}

The versions with background would need separate styles for the 'default' and 'blackened' themes, if that is preferred I'll fetch those.
 
Currently images in quotes try to take up more space than available on narrow views (such as mobile devices), resulting in them being cut off:
(left: current, right: fixed)

x.jpg

(Original comment at: https://www.metabunk.org/threads/is...-palomar-transients-studies.14534/post-356555)

This is due to the override:

y.jpg


Since the change to '.bbCodeBlock.bbCodeBlock--quote img' is near the end of the stylesheet, I presume it's intentional and did / do have a purpose.
To fix this for cases when there's less space available while preserving the 640 pixel hard limit would be:

CSS: 
.bbCodeBlock.bbCodeBlock--quote img {
    max-width: min(100% , 640px);
}
 
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Convenient but not critical would be a "temporarily ignore thread"or "ignore thread for 30 days" or something, for use when a thread is off in the weeds but would put it back in the mix at a future date for a chance to see if it is back on track.If that is hard to do or impossible, it is not urgent and I can always just try to remember to look and see if any threads I might have ignored are of interest again. But I don't ignore a lot of threads, so it is likely that it will slip my mind to go back and check on them! :)
 
JMartJr said:
Convenient but not critical would be a "temporarily ignore thread"or "ignore thread for 30 days"
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I had a look, but I can't find any add-on that does that. And I'm afraid I won't have the time to write one. You'll have to add it to your calendar :)
 
@JMart if you dont "mark as read" the thread in pop up notifications you wont get anymore pop ups for that thread until you go back to it. it will still show on the latest activity wall and you'll have to scroll past them, but that happens when we get someone reading an old thread and they start liking posts too .. there's like two pages of latest activity that are just their "likes" :)
 
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