Problems with the new site?

Älphämönkëy

Lews_Therin wrote:

Alpha:

I'll give you a cookie if you can change the wrapping for the <span> and <a> elements on the navigation bar buttons:

eg, from:

<span id="navcomic">[url="/comic"][img]/images/navigation/comic.png[/img][/url]</span>

To:

[url="/comic"]<span id="navcomic">[img]/images/navigation/comic.png[/img]</span>[/url]

This will let me change the nav buttons and logo. Right now, if I change them the links won't carry over to the new ones

I wrapped the <span><a> so the link would travel with the image. You should be able to use the existing code when retheming

The Far Side

Alpha, you're fucking incredible. You know that, right?

Bionic Monkey

I see you fixed the reload bug for most of the forums too. I am still getting it when I go to post a reply to something though.

I know you're loaded down with a lot of work right now though, and I appreciate everything you do for this forum Alpha.

Älphämönkëy

Lews_Therin wrote:

It deals with apostrophies in a retarded way. I had to run a big search/replace to get it to validate. Every apostrophy seems to become either "'" (an invalid sequence) or the hexidecimal code 0x92.

The hex code is bad, the ' is perfectly legal though. I would like to see it sent as ' but that is a regex for later

I also added "

"s to the beginning of every newspost after the <div>, since the software doesn't crate those. Instead, the first </p> in the newspost would cause an error. The software made up for this by appending

s to the newsposts, with no closer.

This isn't the software, it is the newsposts themselves.

Furthermore, it does not properly encode ampersands. It simply sends them through as "&", when it should change them to "&"

The "software" is simply a form. The more I think about it, the more I realize firu's idea of having a bunch of HTML guys iterate through the newsposts is a good idea.

I don't know what Tycho and Gabe use to make newsposts, but there's an editor for the web browser named FCKEditor (demo). FCKEditor outputs valid markup, so getting them to use that instead of whatever it is now will make keeping newsposts correct easier. Should also make them easy to write.

It will be, I just haven't enabled it yet. I actually need to thank you as I forgot the name of the package and so I was googling and coming up with HTML Area, which is nice, but no FCKEditor.

If you don't want to use FCKEditor, or they use something else to write their posts, run them through a validation perl script or something. Replace characters according to what I had above.

The eventual solution will be FCKEditor, it is best for all parties involved.

Älphämönkëy

Toast wrote:

RSS fixed!

Älphämönkëy

Trillinon wrote:

The newspost headers don't scale properly when I increase text size in Firefox. The fix for thijs would be to change the .fullpostheader class from "height: 60px;" to "min-height: 60px;". This should work properly in IE 6, Opera, and Firefox, but I'm not certain about anything else.

The effect of the change would mean that when I increase font size, the title bar will increase in height to hold the Title, Date, and Author of the post.

min-height isn't universally supported was the last thing I heard... I am willing to try it if it is though

Älphämönkëy

Pifman wrote:

I can't search for text used in a comic. Only the name of the comic. I think.

That would be a lot of hand entering of text. We are going to use a list of keywords to populate the searches. We will be importing these keywords over the weekend.

Älphämönkëy

Framling wrote:

I'm actually getting a different problem when posting. I keep getting a "connection closed" error message at the entered successfully screen. Gimme a sec and I'll see what it says when I post this and then edit.

EDIT: It says

Connection closed by remote server

http://www.penny-arcade.com/forums/posting.php

EDIT EDIT: It also does this on editing. It still loads the page fine, and then redirects back to the thread fine.

Ramius wrote:

t Alpha -
Another possible cause of the Opera reload bug could be the strangeness in the headers the server is returning:

HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Connection: keep-alive
Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2005 02:13:13 GMT
Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2005 02:13:13 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.34 (Unix)
Set-Cookie: phpbb2mysql_data=o%3Aa%3A%7B%7D; expires=Wed, 15 Nov 2006 02:13:13 GMT; path=/; domain=www.penny-arcade.com
Set-Cookie: phpbb2mysql_sid=91f6dbb9cf78f5789395d7b175b530d2; path=/; domain=www.penny-arcade.com
Cache-Control: private, pre-check=0, post-check=0, max-age=0
Expires: 0
Pragma: no-cache
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 27248
Server: kitchen_sink 2.0/'yo-mama 3.0/FreeBSD 6.0/PostgreSQL 8.1

Why is the date being sent twice? More relevently, why is Connection set to both keep-alive and close?

Ah. There is your refresh problem. Something is broken with lighttpd's proxying and that is why the forums are all goofed up. When Jan @ lighttpd fixes the fastcgi bug this won't become an issue anymore.

Älphämönkëy

john fechon wrote:

I'm using IE 6 at home and mozilla at school, and both are reloading randomly when viewing the forums.

See above

Älphämönkëy

psu_13 wrote:

is someone going to fix the site so "old style" view.php urls to archived comics redirect to the correct "new" style url?

it's very annoying that every single link to a comic in the entire universe is now broken

Should be fixed now. We had code to support this but didn't use the routes :oops: (I should be shot for using that emoticon)

Älphämönkëy

Grayman222 wrote:

I skipped from page 1 to 5 because it is a lot to read but are the forums going to ever match the front page?

...

Älphämönkëy

Triple B wrote:

Searching via keyword through the comic archive is b0rked for me. It just basically reloads the page, yielding no results.

Nothing was found and for some reason it isn't flashing the "Nothing found" box to you, can you clear your cache first and then try again?

Älphämönkëy

radiac wrote:

The following article on how to get Alpha PNG's to display correctly in multiple browsers helped me out immensely.

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/pngopacity/

Hope it helps you too.

A List Apart was one of the first places I went to when I ran into road blocks. Bar none they are one of my favorite sites out there, unfortunatly, the code they have in that article is ten kinds of ugly.

Älphämönkëy

Ramius wrote:

I'm not sure what the criteria was for choosing high-res over low-res comics for inclusion in the new single-res interface, but this one:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2003/11/12

is the high-res one, and is busted. The low res one is still fine:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2003/20031112l.gif


EDIT:
Here's another. This one, it chose to use the mobil comic for some reason:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2003/11/26

if it had picked either the low or high res version, we'd be fine.

Yeah, I think we really do need a big list of broken things that I can just iterate through over the weekend. Do you have time \ want to spearhead this Ramius?

Älphämönkëy

EvilBadman wrote:

The site was loading random images the first time I opened it today. Funny parts included Gabe's Av on Tycho's newspost and on Gabe's post? A giant <- Back button. Also happened on the forums when I opened Games and Technology, and every topic had a lock on it. Oh I wish I had hit print screen on that one.

Heh. Sounds like you hit the site at the exact time I was bouncing the server and it just flushed its buffers to you.

Älphämönkëy

TheFarSide wrote:

Alpha, you're fucking incredible. You know that, right?

Bionic Monkey wrote:

I see you fixed the reload bug for most of the forums too. I am still getting it when I go to post a reply to something though.

I know you're loaded down with a lot of work right now though, and I appreciate everything you do for this forum Alpha.

Thanks guys. That means a lot to me. With the rough launch I've been a little sad because, regardless of the design gripes you have with the site, the code behind it is fairly solid and very fast but I hadn't heard anyone mention the speed increase. It doesn't bother me that much, but it makes your compliments even more appreciated.

Ramius

alphamonkey wrote:

Ramius wrote:

One thing I'm noticing is that while the page-text is loading super duper fast, the entire page (graphics and everything) is feeling like it loads slower than before.

For some reason I notice it more in IE than in Firefox. I don't know if that has to do with the way it handles caching, or if it is just more noticiable because the png's take a moment to snap into transparent mode, or what.

When doing a shift-reload, so as to force it to reload all the graphics, I'm counting slowly to about 5 or 8 before everything loads.

The ads might be a bit slow (3rd party servers for the lose), but the rest should all be very snappy. We just changed the kernel buffer size for the OS from 64Mb to 512Mb (and we will move it to 1Gb tommorow) the results should be noticible immediately (the server load has dropped in half) we are running at 78% CPU free right now with a load average of 0.31.

I'm definitely still seeing the slowness, and I'm concerned that the PNG hack has something to do with it (although I haven't actually looked at the code behind the PNG hack yet.) This is my old crappy P3-450 so I don't know if that has anything to do with it. But the first time I hit the page in IE every day, it takes literally 8 seconds for the images to pop in. While they are loading, my window is unresponsive. It has a similar feeling to when you hit a site using java and the virtual machine has to load up for the first time.

Ramius

alphamonkey wrote:

Ramius wrote:

I've been thinking about the [*] problem, and something you might do as a pretty straightforward interim fix is this:

div.postbody > li { margin-left:14px;}

I only tested it in Firefox and IE, though. I couldn't tell you if it will work for Safari and Opera.

EDIT:
while you're in the css file. You should sneak this into the .newspost .postbody:
line-height: 1.3em;

It should be a subtle difference, nobody needs to know except you and me.

The li css hack breaks for semantically correct html, I am trying to not introduce fixes like that right now.

That there CSS hack should NOT break semantically correct html. ">" is a CHILD selector. It should only match when div.postbody is the immediate parent of the li. Which should not be the case in sematically correct html, in that case the li's parent will be an ol or ul.

Ramius

alphamonkey wrote:

TheFarSide wrote:

Alpha, you're fucking incredible. You know that, right?

Bionic Monkey wrote:

I see you fixed the reload bug for most of the forums too. I am still getting it when I go to post a reply to something though.

I know you're loaded down with a lot of work right now though, and I appreciate everything you do for this forum Alpha.

Thanks guys. That means a lot to me. With the rough launch I've been a little sad because, regardless of the design gripes you have with the site, the code behind it is fairly solid and very fast but I hadn't heard anyone mention the speed increase. It doesn't bother me that much, but it makes your compliments even more appreciated.

With all the bug reports I've been filing, you probably feel I'm your biggest critic. Not so. I'm a huge fan of what you've done, and more than anybody I think I have a sense of what was involved in pulling it off. If anything I'd say I'm a bit jealous that you got to follow through on so many plans that I never got around to. Kudos to you, Alpha. You deserve it.

autono-wally, erotibot300

alphamonkey wrote:

Ah. There is your refresh problem. Something is broken with lighttpd's proxying and that is why the forums are all goofed up. When Jan @ lighttpd fixes the fastcgi bug this won't become an issue anymore.

Any idea when this will be? I really appreciate your hard work for the site, but I also really hate having to use firefox :P

Ramius

alphamonkey wrote:

Ramius wrote:

Alpha, Do you actually want a list of all the missing comics? Like, I just found one here: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/02/11

I'm sure that put to the task, the forumers could find all of them within a day, but I don't know if that is pointless, if you have some better way of identifying them.

Actually, if I could have a list of comics that are broken by the weekend, I could probably manually fix the database entries by Thanksgiving.

OK. I will spearhead getting this list together. Just for the comics. I'm not going to look at the newsposts unless I have time. They will probably get looked at under firu's idea, anyways.



p.s. Alpha - look for my email regarding the old newsposts.

Ramius

Here's a new bug that I noticed for the first time today.

In IE, there is a bit of blank space at the top of the page, between the swoosh image and the top of the document body.

It appears to be due to this code here:

<div class="preload">
	[img]/images/swoosh.png[/img]
</div>

IE is seing the carriage returns as whitespace and so the div is getting layout even though it has no visible content.

There are two ways you could fix this.

1) add div.preload {display:none} to the CSS file
or
2) take the whitespace out of that line, so it is:

<div class="preload">[img]/images/swoosh.png[/img]</div>

I think the first one is more elegant, and less prone to being accidently reintroduced later. But you might NEED to do the second one. I'm not certain if you will get the preload of the image or not if you place it inside a block that is display:none.

stigweard

I'm getting this error when hitting the pink icon to start from the latest post.



Also, the topic review pane isn't always loading when making a reply.

Toast

There's a new comic in the RSS feed but it's just sending me to a redirect (in the folder you'd expect given the date). Is this intended functionality.

I'm an RSS whore



Also, people never bother to express thanks on the internet, because they're all assholes who believe that any free consistent service should be taken for granted.






Thanks alpha

Ramius

yeah, new content seems to be buggy at the moment. I'm assuming you are aware of it, Alpha, but just to be safe, here is the description of the bug:

/comic works while /comic/2005/11/16 does not. Also, if you click the news button from /comic it points you at /2005/11/16 which says: "You are being redirected" But it doesn't actually bounce/redirect. And that link is wrong. It is pointing to Friday, 11/18. When you click it you get ANOTHER "you are being redirected" which points to the root page, which of course works.

Dog

Ramius wrote:

yeah, new content seems to be buggy at the moment. I'm assuming you are aware of it, Alpha, but just to be safe, here is the description of the bug:

/comic works while /comic/2005/11/16 does not. Also, if you click the news button from /comic it points you at /2005/11/16 which says: "You are being redirected" But it doesn't actually bounce/redirect. And that link is wrong. It is pointing to Friday, 11/18. When you click it you get ANOTHER "you are being redirected" which points to the root page, which of course works.

In addition to the above, if you click on the link in the newspost for todays comic it takes you to yesterdays one, and to the image itself rather than the page it is on.
And if you click on "comic", and then use previous to get back to yesterdays comic, next doesn't work but takes you to the redirected screen instead.

Bionic Monkey

The reloading is back for me.

nozdormu

As far as searching the webcomics goes... what about something like Oh No Robot? You probably wouldn't be able to use Oh No Robot itself because PA would kill it, but something similar might work.

Lews_Therin

alphamonkey wrote:

Lews_Therin wrote:

It deals with apostrophies in a retarded way. I had to run a big search/replace to get it to validate. Every apostrophy seems to become either "'" (an invalid sequence) or the hexidecimal code 0x92.

The hex code is bad, the ' is perfectly legal though. I would like to see it sent as ' but that is a regex for later

Sorry, I thought the validator had not liked '

alphamonkey wrote:

The "software" is simply a form. The more I think about it, the more I realize firu's idea of having a bunch of HTML guys iterate through the newsposts is a good idea.

Oh, I thought the newspost thing was some sort of external program, or in-page one like FCK.

Älphämönkëy

Lews_Therin wrote:

alphamonkey wrote:

Lews_Therin wrote:

It deals with apostrophies in a retarded way. I had to run a big search/replace to get it to validate. Every apostrophy seems to become either "'" (an invalid sequence) or the hexidecimal code 0x92.

The hex code is bad, the ' is perfectly legal though. I would like to see it sent as ' but that is a regex for later

Sorry, I thought the validator had not liked '

alphamonkey wrote:

The "software" is simply a form. The more I think about it, the more I realize firu's idea of having a bunch of HTML guys iterate through the newsposts is a good idea.

Oh, I thought the newspost thing was some sort of external program, or in-page one like FCK.

We are using FCK now.

Lews_Therin

alphamonkey wrote:

Lews_Therin wrote:

alphamonkey wrote:

Lews_Therin wrote:

It deals with apostrophies in a retarded way. I had to run a big search/replace to get it to validate. Every apostrophy seems to become either "'" (an invalid sequence) or the hexidecimal code 0x92.

The hex code is bad, the ' is perfectly legal though. I would like to see it sent as ' but that is a regex for later

Sorry, I thought the validator had not liked '

alphamonkey wrote:

The "software" is simply a form. The more I think about it, the more I realize firu's idea of having a bunch of HTML guys iterate through the newsposts is a good idea.

Oh, I thought the newspost thing was some sort of external program, or in-page one like FCK.

We are using FCK now.

Brilliant!

Dog

Ramius wrote:

alphamonkey wrote:

Ramius wrote:

I've been thinking about the [*] problem, and something you might do as a pretty straightforward interim fix is this:

div.postbody > li { margin-left:14px;}

I only tested it in Firefox and IE, though. I couldn't tell you if it will work for Safari and Opera.

EDIT:
while you're in the css file. You should sneak this into the .newspost .postbody:
line-height: 1.3em;

It should be a subtle difference, nobody needs to know except you and me.

The li css hack breaks for semantically correct html, I am trying to not introduce fixes like that right now.

That there CSS hack should NOT break semantically correct html. ">" is a CHILD selector. It should only match when div.postbody is the immediate parent of the li. Which should not be the case in sematically correct html, in that case the li's parent will be an ol or ul.

There's a problem with using the Child Selector Hack, because IE7 will support child selectors, thus breaking the page again. the IEBlog has an article on this subject that may prove useful.

Ramius

If IE7 is going to start supporting the child selector, they shouldn't continue to display LI elements without a containing UL element as indented. But maybe they will. In that case, the bulletpoints would be indented FURTHER in IE7 than any other browser. But at least they wouldn't be hanging off the side of their block container. And besides this is only meant to be a temporary fix until the old newsposts get cleaned up.

Lews_Therin

Well, here's my first attempt at theming. Not bad, but there is a bit of room for improvement...

Butler

Alpha, as soon as you fix the reloading-loop thing I'm buying you a new hat and giving you an unhygienically enthusiastic kiss.

Rohaq

Any chance of making bigger comic/newspost navigation buttons? They're way too small for me, especially since they only take up a third of the width that the comics themselves do.

Also, any comics that are wider than normal don't display properly; they overlap the edges of the table to the right. It's only a couple of old comics thoguh, so it isn't that serious, but it's definitely something Gabe should keep in mind for future comics.

Rohaq

Another note, I'm seeing all of the html tags in Tycho's latest newspost, from 8 minutes ago :P

firu

alphamonkey wrote:

We are using FCK now.

I am seeing all the coding for today's newspost. Every

, , and <a> is visible to me (and of course they are not doing their jobs). I am looking at this on a slightly old version of Mozilla on a slightly old Linux box, so it may not be universal...

Just saw it on a Win XP system using IE 6.0, so maybe it is...

BigDes

firu wrote:

alphamonkey wrote:

We are using FCK now.

I am seeing all the coding for today's newspost. Every

, , and <a> is visible to me (and of course they are not doing their jobs). I am looking at this on a slightly old version of Mozilla on a slightly old Linux box, so it may not be universal...

Just saw it on a Win XP system using IE 6.0, so maybe it is...

I'm seeing it too, on a XP system using Firefox.

DaySleeper

I've got it on win2k in firefox and in thunderbird.

Also, the comics don't show up in my in-box from the RSS feed.

Instead I get "You are being redirected"