Forum upgrade - what was done and what's remaining

[gravy]

As you are clearly enjoying playing, is it possible it could just parse YouTube links or have a better way of inserting them?

Or a rich text editor, that would presumably do this? I don't know how new this version of phpBB is, but surely it has a proper editor these days?

And let it upload images rather than reference them?

I can't believe it woul take much storage with the level of traffic these days...

I'm investigating whether we can auto-embed YT and other sources without requiring users to enclose those links in tags; more news soon.

TBH, I'm going to pass on letting users upload files. It would be nice, but I don't want the hassle of hosting/backing them up. Sozzles.

[gravy]

Test

[gravy]

YouTube links now embed automatically

You can now paste a YouTube link into a post, and it will appear as a video player. No need to extract the video ID or add tags.

Short youtu.be links, Shorts links and links with a start time are supported too.

Old YouTube tags still work

Existing posts using [youtube] tags remain supported, so there's no need to change them.

Other supported links

We've also enabled Vimeo, SoundCloud, Spotify, Bandcamp, Mixcloud, Twitch, Dailymotion and Steam store links. Music services show their players; Steam links can show a game card.

Playback availability depends on the provider and the particular item.

Useful details

• Works with both the original theme and Pastures.
• New automatic embeds resize for smaller screens.
• Use Preview to check your post before submitting.
• Want a normal link? Use the URL button and give it a label.
• Links inside code blocks stay as text.
• Automatic embeds are disabled in signatures.
• Existing plain links aren't being changed in bulk; this applies when posting or editing.

Tested locally before deployment and implemented through extensions to keep future forum upgrades easier.

Please report any troublesome links, mentioning your browser/device.

[Misfit]

Nice.

Didn't expect the image upload, but it was worth asking.

[grue]

The profile info is displayed like this:

[gravy]

The profile info is displayed like this:

Fixed

[KlaxonCow]

Excellent stuff. Thanks for the hard work.

One glitch I've noticed with the Pastures Dark Mode is that private messages defy the dark mode theme, with a low contrast "light mode" theme that makes the text very difficult to read:



(Chose a PM that was literally sent to everyone, bar piku, to avoid betraying anyone's confidence that private messages will always remain private in my hands.)

[gravy]

Excellent stuff. Thanks for the hard work.

One glitch I've noticed with the Pastures Dark Mode is that private messages defy the dark mode theme, with a low contrast "light mode" theme that makes the text very difficult to read:



(Chose a PM that was literally sent to everyone, bar piku, to avoid betraying anyone's confidence that private messages will always remain private in my hands.)

Should be fixed; can you test?

Cheers

[Istar]

Well, this is just awesome. It's like Christmas came early.

I'm sufficiently ancient that a theme change has no appeal for me - tried it, but prefer the blue tint I've been looking at for nearly a quarter of a century.

However a snappier, more robust YY with those new-software bells and whistles is very welcome. So well done Gaz (and anyone else involved) for getting us back on a solid footing.

[test]

New user test

[gravy]

Forum email and new registrations are back

We've restored outgoing email from YakYak. Forum messages now come from noreply@yakyak.org, including account activation emails and any email notifications you've chosen to receive.

New members can sign up again. New accounts need to confirm their email address before logging in. To help keep spam down, a new member's first post may be held for moderator approval.

If you have an existing account, please check that its email address is current and review your notification preferences in the User Control Panel. If an expected email doesn't arrive, check your spam folder and let the moderators know.

We also fixed an old email restriction that was rejecting some legitimate signup addresses. Thanks for bearing with us while we got this working again.

[rowan]

Many thanks for all the hard work!

As a mostly lurker, one thing I do notice is clicking almost anything results in a "The forum is busy. Please wait a moment and retry." message.
Logging in gets rid of all that.

It's probably mostly configured how you want it but it feels a bit restrictive on request frequency or whatever it is when anonymous.


Thanks again.

[gravy]

Many thanks for all the hard work!

As a mostly lurker, one thing I do notice is clicking almost anything results in a "The forum is busy. Please wait a moment and retry." message.
Logging in gets rid of all that.

It's probably mostly configured how you want it but it feels a bit restrictive on request frequency or whatever it is when anonymous.


Thanks again.

Improved browsing when logged out

Some visitors were seeing “The forum is busy. Please wait a moment and retry.” too often. The forum's protection against heavy automated traffic gave all logged-out visitors one shared allowance, which crawlers often used up.

We've adjusted that protection so ordinary logged-out browsing has its own capacity, while traffic without a forum session remains limited. You do not need to log in to benefit.

We successfully tested a logged-out visit after the change. If you still see the busy message repeatedly, please tell us roughly when it happened and which page you were opening.

[tufty]

Simples! Change the message to "log in ya lazy sod" ;)

I mentioned this in anothere thread but a lot of forums these days seem to be relying on cloudflare etc anti-bot front ends. That has its own annoyances, with the bloody "checking you're a human" screen for one and all, but at least the forums stay up rather than getting hammered into the ground by fucking ai scrapers. I guess it costs though.

New theme works well on mobile. Thanks again.

[VNVObit]

Thanks for all the updates and new theme Gaz

got the “The forum is busy. Please wait a moment and retry.” when I tried my active topics link
though suspect that's due to me not being logged in (tried it again after logging in and went straight to active topics page)