Fever Tech Team Outreach (Whine + Congratulate Nik Here)

Any chance you can add Tapatalk support to this forum by registering it on Tapatalk? It means you don't need to maintain an app for the forum as Tapatalk will do that and would keep us smartphone users happy

I've also heard some annoying things with tapatalk for tablets and integration, so I'm not absolutely pro it (though I should change my sig). Just trying to figure an easier way for mobile devices but it may end up being more work than doing a mobile web version of the forum. 

Would love to have the app back, I still use it on my old iPad and it is so much easier than the iPhone. I find I have to zoom right in and then scroll left and right to read a post. 

Also, it seems every forum page I read, when I click on the last page, it takes me to the last empty page. It used to only happen to a few pages, but now they all seem to be stuck with the same error... 

Any fixes would be great. 

Still love the forum tho, muchos love to you all for continuing to run this. 

The page thing is related to deleted/hidden posts. If we had less shark cods it would happen less.

Yer, I remember someone saying that the last time I asked about it. 

The issue is, when more pages get longer and longer, it increases the chances of it happening to all the pages you visit... 

I'm sure the technology exists to rid us of this bug??

It may but resourcing is an issue. Patrick is snowed and Nik is sitting on a beach in Corfu getting hammered with Mrs Nik.

I'd like to have a go (both at updating the iOS App, and resolving the website issue with correct links to new posts).

Is it hard to make this site have a mobile mode aswell ?

There's a bit of a workaround for the page thing. This link (to what is currently the last post in the New Merch thread):

"www.yellowfever.co.nz/categories/wellington-phoenix-discussion/topics/new-merch-preorder-your-scarf-now?page=4#post_1294423"

for example, takes you to a blank page with links to the 3 pages of the "New merch" topic, but looking at the parameters in the link, it is trying to point to a non-existent page 4. If you click on the link to page 3, it loads to the top of page 3. But, if you edit the link to point to page 3:

"www.yellowfever.co.nz/categories/wellington-phoenix-discussion/topics/new-merch-preorder-your-scarf-now?page=3#post_1294423"

and submit that link, it takes you to the right post! (If it doesn't, try subtracting another 1 from the page.) Sometimes, a link will take you to the top of a page with a few entries, but not as many as you were expecting - in these cases edit the link by subtracting 1 from the page parameter.

Can all these new song threads be moved into the "Chants" thread?

What are you on about?

there is a specific thread for any proposed chants or songs. Each one doesn't get it's own thread.

I wasn't sure where to put this but this thread seems to fit my question best. 

Is the app still a thing? if so is it available on android? (I can't seem to find it) 

[quote=Wolverhampton Phoenix

Is the app still a thing? if so is it available on android? (I can't seem to find it) 

[/quote]

While the app still works in limited form for those who have it already installed, it is not maintained and i understand it is no longer available via Play Store.

I use it for browsing active forum threads, and am replying to this thread via the app, but i can't recall last time i used any other features.

It still has bugs (browsing threads with 30 unread posts, zooming images etc), but i continue to use it knowing these bugs won't be addressed.

If you accept those limitations, and have confidence in sideloading apps, and ask nicely, someone might be able to send you a link to a file. But I don't have one sorry.

I use it for downloading podcasts and the active forums, works well enough for me.

With all of these blank pages appearing in threads now (there are more and more of them now) is it time to re-set in some way? Going forward is it possible to have a “placeholder” inserted when a post is deleted rather than it just disappearing? You see that in other forums, that would possibly fix the problem. These placeholders say something along  the lines of “this post has been removed because it breached the terms etc etc).

I think that would be more annoying than the odd blank page. 

The posts also don’t get deleted, just hidden. So I’m not sure if that is the cause of the blank page. 

It is, because it's still counting those posts when calculating the page numbers if the posts were deleted I'd imagine it wouldn't be an issue. The better option would be just to modify the query that's doing the count to exclude hidden posts.

It's more than the odd plank page, it's about half the threads these days. 

I'd be quite happy with the "this post has been deleted because user 'xxx' is a dickwad who can't follow forum rules" dummy post.

It would ;

a) be better than going back to the previous page which might have thirty posts you've already read nad having to scroll past them to see the few new ones, and

b) maybe encourage dickwads to not being dickwads.

But modifying the query to ignore hidden would work for me too.

Can’t speak for the rest (not a tech nerd). But hidden posts are mostly people accidentally posting twice, and occasionally spam. 

How can it be spam? I have to log in to post here.

Hi everyone. Essentially, we hear you, but it's hard.

Short answer: It's a fudging annoying bug in the custom forum software that we've tried to solve but can't.

Long answer: At the moment, when a post gets hidden, we don't delete it from the database. The 'count' that you see on the topics list pages reflect the number of unhidden posts, and the software is written to adjust for this when you click through to the last page on a topic where there are hidden posts. It _should_ work properly and take you to the last page where there are actual posts, but there's a bug that Nik and I have both tried to solve that takes you to the blank pages that you are seeing. It's not as simple to solve as some of you are suggesting because hidden posts still show up for mods (for modding purposes) so we can't just ignore them completely. It's a complex bug that I can't solve. 

In regards to spam, we obviously require people to sign up for an account to post to the forum, but spambots occasionally make it through the spam checking we have and post shark into the forums. We don't want to tighten that up because it will only make it harder for actual users to join the forum, and spambots will find a way through no matter what. You just don't see it most of the time because people like Matt W-S and Tegal are very good at catching it and hiding it early. 

Now that the app has been abandoned as such. Would moving to another platform be of help Patrick? Proboards or something similar. I do miss the old Grass surrounding background but thats just me I guess.

Keep going. Are you back from the UK temp or permanent now?

It's a massive pain in the ass, and would love it fixed, but second best to that is a good honest explanation of the problem so people know they aren't shouting their frustrations into a void.  Cheers!

The good news is our head of tech is going to be back in NZ soon (our whole tech department being in London was not ideal) and doesn't have a job yet so maybe he'll do something useful.

JK.

Like learning to play a drum?

He'd be even worse than Patrick.

No one can be that bad....But credit where it is due - Patrick gave it a go.

If you end up looking at a blank page where the page index is something like this: "« First ‹ Prev …58 59 60 61", note that none of these page numbers is bolded as none of them is the page the link is trying to take you to. The page display code knows that 61 is the last page with visible posts on it, but the link you clicked on is: "https://www.yellowfever.co.nz/categories/straya-a-league-and-state-leagues/topics/general-a-league-discussion?page=62#post_1320105" The anchor "#post_1320105" is entirely correct for the first unread post to be displayed, it's just that it's looking for it on the wrong page. If you click in the address bar, and edit the link to: "https://www.yellowfever.co.nz/categories/straya-a-league-and-state-leagues/topics/general-a-league-discussion?page=61#post_1320105", then load the edited link, you should be at the right place on the right page.

In general, if you see fewer unread posts than the link suggested there would be, keep subtracting 1 from the page number in the link until it takes you to the page with the post anchor on it.

This is probably a dumb question but the stars under names,what are they based on (age of account, karma, posts?)

Number of posts. 

Hitting the post actually counts for something then!

Which I guess brings the next question?

what are the star levels for posts

That's a closely guarded secret. By which I mean, don't think that anyone remembers. Maybe Patrick or Nick.

Getting back to the page index issue, which is still very irritating, what about archiving long threads and restarting them with the first post being a link to the back end of the old thread?