New feature: improved Personal Message Index

General Discussions
#1

Dear folks,

It’s probably just me, but I hate the seperation between Inbox and Outbox for mail. Technically it makes sense, but practically you split out your discussions in two seperate archives - try that with your bills. As a result you lose track of the context of the message, so everybody starts quoting the entire ‘original message’ in their reply.

(You’re welcome to derail this thread pointing out how wrong I am!)

Anyway, I wrote a new and improved Personal Messages Index, which (attempts to) keep track of dialogs. Once you sent or receive a personal message, the entire dialog will move to the top of the index. It shows messages from the last three months, and will highlight messages that you haven’t read yet, which is awesome. I could easily give a visual clue of whether the recipient has read your personal message yet, but that is disabled at the moment for good measure.

Please give me your honest feedback and bug reports.

The first 10 replies will be the first that I read!

Your cute fluffy overlord,

  • Riven
#2

Thank you Riven. I’d like to know where you find all the extra time to do this stuff.

Cas :slight_smile:

#3

Not having a family has its perks. You should try it.

#4

Yeah you’re wrong about being wrong. I don’t need PMs on this site, but on any other forum where I have some more PM traffic, it has always struck me as idiotic design if I may be so blunt - the result of a programmer taking Object Oriented design just a step too far. Yes I know many people have an inbox and an outbox, but that just goes to prove that you shouldn’t model EVERYTHING after the real world :wink: PMs are a simpler form of a forum thread - in stead of open to the world its a personal thread between a select group of people. It should be displayed as such too IMO.

#5

Our great cute fluffy overlord, thank you for such a useful feature. I hated the old PM system, this new system makes a lot of sense :slight_smile:

I hate how sadly true this is :frowning:

#6

Two things:

  1. Clicking on any message I sent gives me a nice blue page without any message. This is because I didn’t save it in my outbox I assume, but then dispay something that doesn’t look like a bug for people not knowing SMF :slight_smile:
  2. It should be “You sent …:” and not “you sent …:” :slight_smile:

Mike

#7

Picky picky picky… ::slight_smile:

#8

  1. Opening a message still leaves the title as “Personal Messages Index - Java-Gaming.org”. It’s not the index anymore.

  2. (unrelated to the new features?) SkyAphid sent me a PM with an embedded screenshot (http://img207.imageshack.us/img207/761/newbitmapimageqj.png), which came out on my end as http://user-generated-content.java-gaming.org/img-vault/61498ca4b7f1bc89245c18d224e7ff37ed4b3638ea8be1cec9e8583d8c338c8d.jpg, which 404’s. What gives???

  3. I hate how I keep on clicking on sender’s name instead of the topic name in the list (the " replied" column). Can you at least make that column smaller so the Subject column is more to the left?

  4. (also unrelated?) code tags ARE broken in previews:

    http://img155.imageshack.us/img155/3779/previewbroken.png

EDIT: The message looks fine after sending it though:

http://img269.imageshack.us/img269/6768/messagefine.png

#9

I have also noticed that sometimes code tags don’t work in previews only. This seems to happen to all code after an initial code or quote block.

#10

It’s odd, because the preview and the final message ought to follow the same codepath.

Regarding the ‘/img-vault/’, well, while browsing older posts, I noticed that a lot of the images had vanished from the internet. Then I did some querying and testing, and found that about 80% of all images in posts over 3 years old were gone. I put an image cache into place that downloads the images in posts, and rewrites the URLs. Having said that, it might need some work. I can reproduce the 404, and will look into it later today.

#11

The odd thing of this is that the filename in the cache is basically: sha256($url).’.’.$ext

The sha256 of the string ‘http://img207.imageshack.us/img207/761/newbitmapimageqj.png’ equals:
673aba38452f7d7b536cf30a77da57e883fc49e85a5230624fe76854253f7166
not
61498ca4b7f1bc89245c18d224e7ff37ed4b3638ea8be1cec9e8583d8c338c8d
as the filename in the URL you mentioned, that 404s.

And as you can see, http://user-generated-content.java-gaming.org/img-vault/673aba38452f7d7b536cf30a77da57e883fc49e85a5230624fe76854253f7166.png
resolves just fine.

:persecutioncomplex:

#12

An applaud for that feature. That’s pretty much the biggest problem on forums, that screenshots 404’s. Well, it’s apparently giving the wrong hash for the link… >_<

#13

I changed the feature that rewrites the URLs, to not do it when the resulting file doesn’t exist. This should never happen, but at least it doesn’t degrade the user experience.