I'll update the lists below as people let me know of things they want to see or bugs they find. It's my todo/done lists to make the forum easier to use (IMHO).
TODO:
Embedded YouTube videos.
Some way of showing what threads someone is subscribed to/has responded in within the list of posts (change the icon on the left?).
Create a mobile version of the forum.
Fix redirect after post/edit to go right to the post in question instead of to top of thread (this one's more complex than it sounds). Note: it may actually work right. Need to investigate futher.
Printer friendly view doesn't seem to always work right with really big threads. Investigate...
Upgrade club membership software to warn people when memberships are about to end. The newer version has auto-emailing.
Add some auto-emailing features such as: Send emails to users who haven't visited in some time, users who signed up but never followed though with their activation, maybe sending a monthly "popular forum topics' newsletter? Etc...
Add a new user selectable skin for mobile users (ie: simplified, text only version) ?
Add ignore lists ?
Add sub-forums ?
RSS feed?
DONE:
RECAPTCHA (better CAPTCHA).
Disable PM until X posts to avoid spammers sending PMs after initial registration.
Delete User MOD (add delete to viewtopic, userprofile and memberlist for moderators for quicker way to delete spammers).
Hide memberlist, websites, etc. from guests (to discourage spammers from registering).
Oops Database down (nice error message plus notify admin).
Installed bbAntiSpam Textual Confirmation (Questions during registration that only humans can answer).
Removed COPPA (options during registration that ask if you're at least 13 years old).
Added lifetime club memberships.
Removed the CAPTCHA with letters and numbers used during registration as too many people are emailing me that they don't know how to read the letters/numbers. I've instead added an extra random question shown during registration that only a humans can answer. Example: "What colour is a red apple?"
Added the ability to do strikethroughs in posts like this: TEST
User name search in memberlist page added.
Jump to forum drop-down doesn't work - fixed!
Added a forum quick search.
Added a count to show how many users are in each of the forums (includes guests and registered users).
Added a feature so that people can subscribe to entire forums to be notified of new threads.
CLUB MEMBERS ONLY: Add a printer friendly option so that people can print out threads in one shot.
Added little online/offline icons to posts so that people can see if someone's online quickly.
Increased number of personal photo album pics from 30 to 45.
Increased avatar size from 150x150 to 150x200 (width x height).
Added a better CAPTCHA to stop spammers from auto-registering.
Added complete set of forum stats for all to see.
Added a few extra fields to a user's profile page for all to, including Last Visit Time, Last Post Time, and Signature. Also added Last Visit Time to the memberlist page (sortable).
Posting, editing posts, or voting now redirects you back to thread. Confirmation page is skipped.
Log on automatically checkbox now checked by default.
Display forum description in the view forum page.
Thread email notification now defaults to on for new users.
Completely automated Club Membership feature with payment through PayPal. See here for a complete list of special features.
Advanced backup features.
Added a (somewhat useless, hardly used) chat room!
A Spel Cheker has bean instaled.
A bunch of SEO (search engine optimization) stuff so that Google and other robots can crawl this forum correctly & more efficiently.
Replying to PM's now automatically quotes the last PM by default. No need to click the "quote" button (which has been removed).
Removed forum name (Curt Palme CRT Projectors) from page title tag so that post or forum name in obvious in taskbar with window minimized.
Dynamic signatures. I thought that signatures were are posted as part of the post itself so that changing your sig only affects future posts, but this is not true. Problem closed.
A photo album area where users can post photos/info on their setups. Comments can be left about photos.
Avatars are not seen at all by guest users. You must register and log in to see avatars.
Per user setting to allow people to turn the display of avatars and sigs on/off.
Rotating Banner ads (for Curt).
Security fix for AOL users that have problems staying logged on...
Redirect back to thread after editing/posting instead of the confirmation screen. There is currently no good mod for this that doesn't screw up something else. Instead, the wait time's been reduced from 3 sections to 0 on the confirmation screen.
Quick reply for posting quick followups. Regular reply needs to be used if you want to get fancy...
Better email notification. You now see who posted and the contents of the post in the email.
Fix the bug that causes people to appear to have to log in twice if they go to http://curtpalme.com/forum instead of the more correct http://www.curtpalme.com/forum.If you're having problems logging in, delete your curtpalme.com cookies or better yet, all cookies.
Joined: 06 Mar 2006 Posts: 16916 Location: Ottawa, Canada
TV/Projector: JVC DLA-RS56
Link Posted: Thu Jun 19, 2008 7:10 pm Post subject:
Removed the CAPTCHA with letters and numbers used during registration as too many people are emailing me that they don't know how to read the letters/numbers. I've instead added an extra random question shown during registration that only a humans can answer. Example: "What colour is a red apple?" _________________ Support our site by using our affiliate links. We thank you! My basement/HT/bar/brewery build 2.0
Joined: 06 Mar 2006 Posts: 16916 Location: Ottawa, Canada
TV/Projector: JVC DLA-RS56
Link Posted: Sat Jan 16, 2021 3:24 pm Post subject:
Writing this mostly just for my own understanding/to have a record as I had to learn a few things... (there may be errors here as my understanding of this isn't 100%):
On Jan 14, 2021 our hosting company upgraded PHP and the default character set used was (inadvertently ?) changed from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8 (probably because UTF-8 is more prevalent these days).
After this was done, high ASCII (128-255) characters, what are sometimes called "extended" control characters, sometimes did not show up correctly in the forum for content that was entered before Jan 14, 2021. Characters like » (right double angle quote or guillemet), some quotes, and accented letters were showing up as question marks in black diamonds. That's because above 127 these are no standards and different character sets will map things differently.
This change to UTF-8 is proved by launching Chrome in developer view (CTRL-shift-I) and viewing the HTTP heaters sent out by the server (under network -> header view) to see that the server was telling the browser to use utf-8: Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
But viewing the actual content response (under network -> response) shows that the content actually sent out by the forum uses iso-8859-1:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
Facts:
The two have to match for this to work. Since they no longer did on Jan 14, 2021, some high ASCII chars started showing up incorrectly. EDIT: Not true that they have to match. While they should match, content-Type heading sent by your web server (the HTTP header) will take precedence over a <meta> element.
New posts with high ASCII content entered after Jan 14, 2021 showed up fine. It only affects previously entered content.
The server HTTP headers should be iso-8859-1 for the forum as this is how content has been entered since we first launched the forum in 2006.
The issue is minor and most people will not have noticed as most content is low ASCII (1-127) which includes regular letters/numbers, etc. Characters from 1-127 match between iso-8859-1 and utf-8 so there's no issue there. It's only above 127 that things are different.
The fix:
Add a php.ini file to the forum root directory (/public_html/forum) that has one line in it to override the default utf-8 charset setting: default_charset = "iso-8859-1";
All other applications/websites/etc on the server are left as is to send out response headers with UTF-8 charset as (a) it's more commonly used these days, and (b) appears to be how the other apps (Drupal, phplist, etc) were set up in the first place which means for years these apps have actually been mismatched,but since they don't appear to use any high ASCII content from what I can tell, the problem was never noticed (?).
Using UTF-8 for the forum is not recommended as for nearly 15 years people have been entering content that's been saved as iso-8859-1. It appears that some tools (possibly some smartphone browsers?) will use high ASCII chars more often so some user posts are more affected than others, and it appears to have happened more often in later posts (since people are using phones more and more?). For example, like a curly single quote (’) instead of a straight single quote ('). Many of the affected posts were where single quotes showed up incorrectly.
UTF-8 has many advantages over ISO 8859-1, especially that it can natively represent every Unicode character. You don't have to mess around with entity references like – any more, and you can easily mix the Latin alphabet with texts in Hebrew, Arabic, Devanāgarī, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, etc.
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