Recent changes

[Salem]

I've noticed a few recent changes, which are of course somewhat annoying.

1. Sometime overnight, my option "Disable Clientside Scripting Enhancements" got reset, so this morning, everything is popping up like crazy. It's all right now, but I had to remember which box I ticked some time ago.

2. Double clicking on a folder to mark that forum as read now causes a page refresh. Very annoying if you're trying to mark several forums as read in quick succession.

3. Having gotten used to the "Forum tools" at the top of the page just bringing up a menu, I now have to deal with a jump to the other end of the page. Is the top link actually worth anything any more?

[cscgal]

Hi,

1.

If you remember, the option to disable the various JavaScript style elements was temporarily added to help debug all of the extremely slow page rendering and JavaScript timeouts that were being spit out when I updated the look of DaniWeb a couple of months ago.

Narue and others were experiencing timeouts where their web browsers would seemingly hang, but I didn't know what was causing them. So to help figure it out, I added the option to turn off each of the JS elements one at a time:
Turn off rounded corners
Turn off dropdown menu
Turn off hover tooltips

It turns out that, for all members who were complaining, it was the rounded corners that were the culpreit. The hover tooltips and dropdown menu don't cause any browser slowness.

In doing a quick run through the database, I noticed that the vast majority of members had disabled "rounded corners". Very, very few (fewer than 10) disabled one, or both, of the other two options.

Therefore, I went ahead and permanently turned off the rounded corners option yesterday, and so there was no reason to have this option in the control panel anymore. I don't feel there is a need to clutter up the control panel for just 10 out of 200,000 members.

However, in its place, I did add an option to disable ALL JavaScript, DHTML, and AJAX on the site in one massive swoop. This is useful to those with slower computers who just want quick forum browsing without all of the dynamic bells and whistles that slow down their web browsers. Not only does it disable the dropdown menu and hover tooltips, but it also disables all of the other dynamic-like forum features, such as AJAX quick reply (when things change without having to refresh the page), etc. It is nearly exact to the way that CProgramming is currently set up.

2.

Without AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), JavaScript is no longer used to let you interact with the server without having to refresh the page. Therefore, you can no longer double click on a folder icon and have something be changed in the database without reloading the page.

3.

Without DHTML dropdowns, the links are located at the bottom of the page. Clicking on the Forum Tools link at the top now scrolls you down the page to where they're located. This is the same way that CProgramming does it.

Cheers,

Dani

[The Dude]

Very good Dani :)

[~s.o.s~]

Damn it, my spellchecker has got disabled again. I don't know why but any changes made to anything related to Javascript messes up with the spellchecker big time.

I guess the three options being merged into one is the cause of this.

[cscgal]

I'm sorry, but I'm still incredibly confused how the SpellChecker is related to anything. I don't have any suggestions for you at this time.

[John A]

~s.o.s~ is right, the spellchecker is now automatically disabled within the WYSIWYG editor. If you switch to plaintext mode, however, it comes back. I'm using Firefox.

[cscgal]

I believe this is the problem that people were experiencing in the past. I'm not sure, as I don't use Firefox or a spell checker.

[tgreer]

I don't post anymore... but I do occasionally browse. The floating popups are very annoying, like having tape stuck to your fingers. Please reinstate the option to disable popups.

[WaltP]

Yeah. Popups bad. Me no like. Gross!

[MidiMagic]

Hi, 1. If you remember, the option to disable the various JavaScript style elements was temporarily added to help debug all of the extremely slow page rendering and JavaScript timeouts that were being spit out when I updated the look of DaniWeb a couple of months ago.

Part of it was also there to get rid of that maddening bumble box that follows the cursor around. It is now annoyingly BACK!

I want the hover tooltips GONE!!!!!Narue and others were experiencing timeouts where their web browsers would seemingly hang, but I didn't know what was causing them. So to help figure it out, I added the option to turn off each of the JS elements one at a time:
Turn off rounded corners
Turn off dropdown menu
Turn off hover tooltips

It turns out that, for all members who were complaining, it was the rounded corners that were the culpreit. The hover tooltips and dropdown menu don't cause any browser slowness.

No, but the hover tooltips just drive you crazy with visual interrupts.[In doing a quick run through the database, I noticed that the vast majority of members had disabled "rounded corners". Very, very few (fewer than 10) disabled one, or both, of the other two options.

Therefore, I went ahead and permanently turned off the rounded corners option yesterday, and so there was no reason to have this option in the control panel anymore. I don't feel there is a need to clutter up the control panel for just 10 out of 200,000 members.

Dani

I want the dropdowns, but hate the tooltips.

[MidiMagic]

Firefox has a built in spellchecker. But it won't work with the whizzywig editor. And somehow my account keeps getting changed back to whizzywig without my permisssion.

And I detest the bumbling tooltips.

[Ancient Dragon]

by tooltips do you mean the thread preview that follows the cursor around on the menu page ? Yes I don't like that either and find it not at all useful when there is more than 1 post in the thread. Its just annoying.

[MidiMagic]

I think Dani is the only one who likes it.

To turn that stupid annoying thing off, I had to disable the dropdowns, which I liked. It made the site much harder to navigate.

[The Dude]

I don't post anymore..

Hmmmm it must have been a ghost that made this post with your account then :D

[Salem]

I turned everything off a long time ago. It seemed like the safest ploy.

Somehow, each "nice" new feature also comes with some "nasty" elsewhere. The "ooh ahh" crowd might be able to take the pain, but I can't.

No other forum I visit has this constant churn in the user interface experience. This is a site to enable people to communicate, not some continual beta site to test the admin's web programming skills. If this were a downloaded program, and the UI was changing with each patch, you'd be losing customers faster than you could patch it.

I get into a mode where I know where everything is (eg. how to mark a forum read). Along comes a change, and I have to re-learn the UI sequence.

Every time I detect a change, I seem to spend (aka waste) a few hours wondering what else has changed.

Yet another example of what I would regard as useless tinkering.
http://www.daniweb.com/forums/forum6.html
Now some threads are labelled "Multi Page Thread", as if "1 2 3 4 5" wasn't bleedingly obvious enough.

Personally, I think it's about time there was a lot more transparency from the admins. For example, each change which might affect the UI experience of ANY member (no matter what options they've ticked), the change should be announced in a forum message with due notice.

All this "well the majority won't notice anything" argument doesn't wash, because the majority still have the options given to them. It's only the people who've been here a while (coincidentally, all the people who provide all the help) who've figured out that such options exist and have chosen to make some changes.

Oh, and FYI, I have all these things turned off, yet I still get a regular crop of "The server at www.daniweb.com is taking too long to respond." I even got one composing this missive.

[Ancient Dragon]

>>Now some threads are labelled "Multi Page Thread",
I don't see that. Maybe its the way you have it set up in Control Panel ? I have Thread Display Mode set up as "Linear - Oldest First"

[Salem]

Actually, neither do I any more.

It seems that because DW was being so damn sluggish that by browser was displaying the "alt" text for the little graphic symbol immediately to the left of the numbers.

I withdraw that particular observation as being down to server lag.

[hollystyles]

Firefox has a built in spellchecker. But it won't work with the whizzywig editor. And somehow my account keeps getting changed back to whizzywig without my permisssion.

And I detest the bumbling tooltips.

I installed firefox 2.0 and the spell checker works with the editor for me.

[MidiMagic]

It works now, because the whizzywig editor is now gone.

But to get rid of the bumbles, I had to get rid of the dropdown menus, so I have to scroll to the links, so the no-scroll bug stops me until the ad stops moving. And there are some ads that don't stop moving.

And now I can't tell which smiley I am getting, because the menu shows the text, instead of the smiley. Then the wrong one shows up.

[cscgal]

Salem,

Thank you for your comments. I'm going to quickly respond to some of the points which you brought up.

(1)

If I didn't work to continually improve upon DaniWeb, we would still be the small technical support forum for just Windows and Mac that we started as. If it wasn't for all of the evolutions and new innovations of the site, the C and C++ forums, where you spend most of your time, and the entire software development category, for that matter, wouldn't even exist. To highlight some of the most recent changes, the reputation system would still be in its default buggy behaviour and there would be no way to browse through threads in a forum without having to hit the back button continuously.

In fact, all of the changes that have been made within the past months have certainly not been done just to "test my web programming skills" but instead come as either a direct request or need from the community, based in large part from feedback here in this forum. The changes made this month, for example, which include the similar threads feature, the behaviour of tooltips, the reputation system, the redesign of the blogs pages to more prominently feature member usernames and the blogs the entries belong to, the addition of syndication buttons, have ALL come as a result of feedback passed to me by members.

It's important to note that there are 200,000 members. Even if you only look at members who post on a regular basis, that's still over 2,000. Of course not everyone is going to like all of the changes or hate all of the changes. There might be a new feature that you like and someone else might hate. And then there might be a different new feature that you hate but someone else likes. My goal is to make the majority feel that, when looking at the overall picture, there are more things you like about the site than you dislike.

(2)

You mentioned receiving a "This server is taking too long to respond" message on a regular basis, in addition to sluggish behaviour in general (such as with the 'Multi-post' icon not being displayed).

One of the recent problems that we've been faced with is that of MySQL table locking. What this means is that, while lots of people can all read from a single table at one time, the table has to be temporarily locked each time a change is made to it. As DaniWeb grows, this causes problems because while, on average, we will have 2,000 people at once trying to read from the post table, everytime someone wants to make a new post, the INSERT sql query has to wait in line for all of the existing reads to finish up so it can gain temporary sole access to the post table to insert a new post. This is why it's been taking a long time when posting lately.

Another problem we've been faced with lately is a Denial Of Service attack over the last couple of days / week.

To combat these problems, just yesterday we upgraded to four brand new servers after nearly a month of planning and a week of setup. The problems you experienced yesterday were most likely due to you trying to access DaniWeb in the middle of the migration. Because this was meant to be an uneventful migration with very limited downtime (there was about a half hour in total when the website was replaced with a 'site currently unavailable' message while the database was being moved to its new home), the messages about the move were confined to Area 51 instead of publically.


That being said, do many of you agree with Salem regarding changes to DaniWeb being far too constant and making the UI have a steeper learning curve than it should?