Good morning!
The first two threads this morning were a good reminder that the current site continues to be a source of frustration at times and that it’s been 2 weeks since the last update.
So here’s another Site Update / Ask Me Anything combo thread.
For anyone who missed the last one, or for anyone who would like a refresher, these two paragraphs from last week will likely be useful:
“The site rebuild project continues apace. The new Balloon Juice site is in place and pretty much fully functional on the Development site. And by that I mean that the design is done and the coding is pretty much complete. I’d say we are down to details there, like the auto publishing of new posts to John’s twitter, and working on bug fixes.”
“Even as we complete that, we are now in the phase [GoLive] of combining the new design/programming with 18 years of balloon juice posts, a zillion images, the 5 million comments, and the entire contents of the WordPress database, merging it with the newly developed site. That takes time. To avoid surprises when we go live, we are doing this merging and the database conversion on the actual infrastructure where the new site will reside when it’s live.”
Last week we started our second test run of the GoLive server – which I call GoLive v2 – and I was quite pleased with how well it went. The build of GoLive v3 should be complete sometime tomorrow or Tuesday.
Until last week, the only access to the new site was with a WordPress login. As of last Monday, I have finally been able to test the site without a login, so it’s been great to get in that way and be able to determine what worked when logged in but doesn’t work the way most everyone accesses the blog.
I was very pleased to find that nearly everything that worked when logged in also worked when not logged in. The one exception was the new On the Road submission form – which I love, by the way! The developers are of course working on changes to resolve that issue.
So I’d say we are a lot closer (to rollout) this week than we were last week, but what I wrote last week still applies here:
“At this stage of the game – in this second phase where we’re converting the database and merging all the data – it’s not possible to accurately predict how long all of that will take, because you never know exactly what you are going to run into. I wish I could tell you that testing will start within a certain timeframe, but that prediction would be worthless. Could testing start in a week? It’s within the realm of possibility. Could testing start in 3 weeks? Quite possibly.”
So – Ask Me Anything – and in the meantime, I will share details in the comments that I think might be of interest. If you prefer to ask questions by email, you can send email to my nym at balloon-juice.com.
WaterGirl
Fun fact: On the new site, we are using completely different software for moderation than is being used on the current Balloon Juice site.
Baud
Will I be able to say penis?
WaterGirl
Fun fact: On the new site, we are using completely different software for editing comments than is being used on the current Balloon Juice site.
WaterGirl
@Baud: Yes you will. Just this morning I tested pe*nis, fu*ck, co*cksu*cker and ci*alis, all without the extra characters I included here.
edit: Darn it, the answer should have been Yes You Can.
Everything Obama dreamed of – the ability to say fuck and cocksucker on Balloon Juice.
JPL
@WaterGirl: We’ve always been allowed to say fuck. Not sure about the other won. Gam-bl-ing used to be banned though.
Thank you Water Girl for tackling this project.
WaterGirl
Last week, Another Scott asked:
Fun fact: The developers have signed on to a Data Protection Agreement, which John is also welcome to sign. It says they will protect our data and our privacy and that they will let us know if there are any issues.
Amir Khalid
@WaterGirl:
I look forward to the lively post-update usage of profanity. Also, if I dare hope, to no more images failing to load for me on the desktop.
WaterGirl
@JPL: You are so welcome. Last week I tested po*ker and ca*sino, and they worked also.
WaterGirl
@Amir Khalid: I hope so, too! I don’t recall you being on the list of people who signed up for testing?
Amir Khalid
@WaterGirl:
I didn’t. I access BJ solely on my Win7 laptop with Firefox.
Rand Careaga
When you mentioned GoLive I thought for a moment you were referring to the German web authoring software by that name, later acquired by (and ultimately killed by) Adobe Systems. It wrote some eccentric, not to say questionable HTML to produce its WYSIWYG. I gather that the name has since been repurposed.
WaterGirl
Someone on the thread two weeks ago asked about the blogroll, and I had to report that John had decided there would be no blogroll on the new site.
Fun fact: I asked John about the blogroll one last time, and he decided that there will, indeed, be a blogroll on the new site.
There will be one section for “Readers and Friends of Balloon Juice” and another section for other blogs on the blogroll. There has been no discussion yet of how John will determine who is on the Readers portion, but if you have a blog and would like to be included, please sound off on this thread and include a link to your blog.
Amir Khalid
@WaterGirl:
Will we be allowed to refer to our feline friends as pus*sies?
WaterGirl
@Amir Khalid: Is there anyone here who uses that same combination that could tell us whether they get the same result? That would help us determine whether it’s an issue of where you log in from vs. your computer and software combination.
If you can point me to a link that won’t work for you, I could test that on the new site.
Yarrow
Several months ago I was looking through old posts (when Schlemazel died and people had asked about his original nyms). I noticed that in several of the old posts images or videos were missing. I can’t say for sure if those had been uploaded to the B-J site or were linked outside, but it looked like they were uploaded to the site so should be available.
Do you know if those images missing was some FYWP snafu and they’ll appear on the new site or does it mean they’re gone forever? The posts didn’t make a lot of sense because the front pager would comment on the picture/video but it wasn’t there.
WaterGirl
@Rand Careaga: Adobe. Ugh. They used to be so great and then they made some very wrong turns, in my opinion. Now that you mention it, I do recall seeing their GoLive product coming up when I used to use their software.
No relation, obviously.
GoLive is just our shorthand. The development server is Dev. The next phase where we piece everything together on the actual server environment it will run in is GoLive. We keep doing GoLive and working out any kinks, until we get to LIVE – which will replace the current Balloon Juice.
WaterGirl
@Amir Khalid: I had forgotten to try that! I will try that this week and get back to you!
Feebog
Which will be ready first, the new Balloon Juice site or George R. R. Martin’s sixth Game of Thrones novel?
Martin
@Rand Careaga: GoLive (the software) kind of repurposed it from it’s generic form. Looks like watergirl is simply referring to the generic form, but with Jesus Caps.
Last night I dreamt that during a military ceremony of some sort, a general shot Trump in the head, carried his body to a dump (I don’t know why there was a dump there) and just tossed him in, cameras rolling through the whole thing. Nobody seemed to care, until hours later when they evacuated every building in the entire country and I went outside my office and took a nap under a rather nice jacaranda tree.
Will the new site make my dreams real?
WaterGirl
@Yarrow:
Good question, and boy am I sad to hear that happened with Schlemazel threads.
The short answer is that if they are gone from the current site, they will be gone from the new site. Another Scott and maybe Steep had discovered months and months ago that a lot of efgoldman’s comments were missing from balloon juice. I spent a lot of time tracking down examples of this and comparing what shows up in the current live Balloon Juice vs. what shows up in the “snapshots in time” that you can find for those same posts on The Wayback Machine.
It’s heartbreaking, but here’s what I found:
– If efgoldman posted to say “It’s a lovely day.”, that comment is gone.
– if you replied to efgoldman and put part or all of his comment in a blockquote, that is still there in YOUR comment.
– If you replied to efgoldman to say “no it isn’t a lovely day at all, it’s raining cats and dogs”, your comment is there with an @efgoldman, but it’s not clickable, so you can’t go back to the original comment.
it’s the same thing that used to happen if someone with the nym “Some Troll” was banned, and you would see someone reference Some Troll at comment #5, and there would be an @SomeTroll in their comment, but it wasn’t clickable.
I checked everything I could. Since it behaved just like a nym that had been banned, I made sure he wan’t on the ban list with either IP address or nym. I checked with Alain to make sure that he hadn’t made some sort of change to efgoldman’s nym after he passed away. (He had not.)
I checked with the hosting people for old backups that might still have those comments, depending on when the hiccup/corruption would have occurred. I discovered that the oldest backup the hosting company had was from one month before, and that that was the only backup they had for Balloon Juice. Needless to say, beginning that very day, the new developers started backing up the wordpress database on the current live server every single day.
But that doesn’t help us get back anything that was lost.
Alain had a 2-year old copy of the balloon juice database on his testing server. The developers have a copy of that database, and I have asked them – AFTER the new site has been rolled out – to see if they can find any of the old efgoldman comments and could at least export those comments into some format where we could at least have access to them even though they can’t be pieced into the Balloon Juice database, if there are even any comments found.
WaterGirl
@Feebog: Okay, initial response: I laughed out loud. Second thought: man, that’s harsh! :-) But very funny.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Can you please include my blog? It’s very generous to do that.
J R in WV
I now have an older laptop with reinstalled Windows 10, and new laptop with Ubuntu 18.whatever and a tablet with Android all of which I will test with at least some.
I won’t enter as much text with the Tablet, because I don’t have a keyboard with it, just the touchscreen photo of a keyboard, which you can’t type very fast on.
One of the reasons I adopted Balloon-Juice as my home away from home was that I could say fuck. Over and over if deemed necessary. Esp very late at night when insomnia was afflicting me and others got my goat to barking.
Baud
@WaterGirl:
Good. I have a feeling we’re going to need those words more and more in our political discourse.
WaterGirl
@Martin:
I wish it were so! That was not on the original spec list, and it’s too late in the game to add that now. Sigh. And I tried so hard to think of everything.
WaterGirl
@Dorothy A. Winsor: John is nothing if not generous!
If you guys with blogs are inclined toward making this really simple for me, put your link in the name of your blog so I an do a simple copy and past into a list.
edit: I am making a list, and you are now on it.
WaterGirl
You guys have hardly asked me anything. Does that mean you are all perfectly sanguine about the upcoming site?
Baud
@WaterGirl:
We have confidence in you.
Yarrow
@WaterGirl: Thanks for all that. So sorry to hear many of efgoldman’s comments have been lost.
To be clear about what I posted, I don’t know if comments were missing. What I did notice missing was in the front page posts. Images or videos or whatever was there was missing. The front pager would write something about that item in the front page post but you couldn’t see the item so you didn’t know what they were talking about.
Ruckus
@J R in WV:
Goats bark? Is that like the dogs on the end of my legs barking after a long day? The other end of my legs you perverts.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@WaterGirl: Thanks, Water Girl
WaterGirl
@Yarrow: I think I understood what you were asking, and the short answer really is that if it’s not there in the current site, it won’t be there in the new site.
And that reminded me that I hadn’t yet shared the information about efgoldman which I figured most everyone would care about.
Having said that, if you can provide me with a link or two or three, I would be able to see first-hand what you are talking about, and I could certainly search for those posts on the new site and determine/confirm whether the images are there or not.
J R in WV
@Ruckus:
Yes, kinda. Got my goat, which made me bark?
Does anyone else remember Tommy? You know, that guy who went to LSU, the best U in the land?
I shouldn’t josh, he was a pretty good guy, I wish he was still hanging around late at night.
Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman)
@WaterGirl:
Somehow I doubt that. ?
Donald Trump, OTOH…
On a more serious note, will there be an emoji guide or popup?
Right now, the only ways I can get them to work is using the ones on my phone or Windows visual keyboard.
Just doing a :) with characters doesn’t seem to work.
WaterGirl
@J R in WV: Back in the day, with a question like that, you would have been labelled as an Outside Agitator or a rabble-rouser. :-)
I know that was well intentioned, or at least intended in a light hearted, but I hope we don’t turn this thread into Tommy bashing or reliving anything from that hideous time.
So in this case, I’m of a mind to go with Obama’s “let’s look forward, not backwards”. But for Trump and all the awful people who in government who have supported and enabled Trump… I’m with Beto: Hell, yes! We’re coming for
your gunsyou.WaterGirl
@Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman):
I had not thought of that! Unless it would be a 5-minute thing to implement, it’s probably too late to ask for that.
WaterGirl
Fun fact: Now that I can get into the new site without a WordPress login, I can now say that I have seen with my own eyes that my nym was still there after a day and a half of not commenting.
WaterGirl
I also verified that BillinGlendaleCA’s nym with paw prints works on the new site.
Baud
@WaterGirl:
We should probably have an out of office indicator so people don’t worry about where other people are.
Yarrow
@WaterGirl: I will put it on the list to do when I get some time.
To find them I was on a hunt for what his old nyms were. I just noticed that along the way. It was a lot of work. Maybe there are still links I put in some threads and I could look at those and go from there. I’ll let you know if I find anything.
WaterGirl
@Baud: That is a most awesome idea!
Yesterday I added a “Balloon Juice News” item that I thought could include things like:
– upcoming meetup dates that have been floated but not confirmed
– posts you can pretty much expect to see on a schedule (garden chat, Tamara’s recipes, weekdays on the road, etc.
– upcoming guest posts
– jackal news (assuming people are okay with being in there) someone’s surgery went well, SD talked to efgoldman, like not to worry, baud is away for 2 weeks, but he’s coming back.
– etc
WaterGirl
@Yarrow: Thanks. The new site will have searchable comments as well as searchable posts, so that may help people as they are looking for things.
Yarrow
@J R in WV: Completely disagree with you on that individual. A lot of things happened and people left the site because of what he did and how it was handled. So, no.
That being said, I’m going to follow WaterGirl‘s preference that we don’t rehash that painful era.
Rand Careaga
@WaterGirl:
Concur. I made my living on Adobe products for the latter three decades of my career, beginning with Illustrator 1.0, but the history of the firm is a cautionary tale of what happens when an enterprise founded by a couple of visionary engineers falls into the hands of marketers. Many years ago, when Adobe acquired Macromedia, Jon Gruber (“Daring Fireball”) wrote a hilarious translation of Adobe’s press release, rendering the corporate weaselese into English.
Baud
@WaterGirl:
Or not. We haven’t had a good GBCW in a while.
WaterGirl
@Baud: I’m sorry, Baud, but you can never leave Balloon Juice.
(picture this in the voice of “I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”)
trollhattan
@Rand Careaga:
Adobe squeezed their last nickle out of me (okay, sizeable sack of nickels) upon going to the subscription-only model. The next new model camera I buy will force me to find another platform, for now I’m holding pat but they’ve lost me and presumably, thousands of others who would stretch to buy CS so we could have the pro-level tools even those we’d use a few times/year. It no longer makes financial sense.
How long before we’re “subscribing” to Windows?
JaySinWA
I assume you haven’t notified us testy people yet? When can we expect to trash the new joint?
Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman)
@WaterGirl:
“You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave!”
Major Major Major Major
@WaterGirl:
Any chance we could see it? I at least have some experience in this domain that might be helpful.
WaterGirl
@Yarrow: My suggestion: on the new site, search for his nym, making sure to use the proper spelling. It should bring up all posts with his nym, from latest to earlier. Go directly to the last page (by clicking on it) and that should take you to the fist thread where his new nym was ever used.
I know for a fact that in one of those very early threads I talked with him about his old nym, and I have always been WaterGirl. So even if his old nym doesn’t show up in the very last one, which would really be the earliest one, if you go through a few of the early threads and use Command-F (or whatever the PC equivalent is) on WaterGirl, you are sure to find a thread that will say what his previous nym was.
That’s how I would approach it anyway, others may have better ideas.
Baud
@WaterGirl:
Balloon Juice left me!
Sister Golden Bear
@WaterGirl: @WaterGirl:
FWIW, at my company we refer to the two server environments as “Stage” (as in staging area), and “Prod” (for “in production”) when the site is live.
WaterGirl
@JaySinWA: You are correct! Wider testing has not yet begun. I do hope to have a better sense of timing by the end of this week, after seeing GoLive v3 and (hopefully) completion or near completion of the few remaining items for the site.
Again: weasel words from above:
WaterGirl
@Sister Golden Bear: Yep. The one consistent thing is that there is always a shorthand that makes what you are talking about very clear
Me? I have 3 iterations of BJ open all the time: Balloon Juice (which we call “the current live site”), Dev version and GoLive version. Fun times!
Major Major Major Major
@Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman): @Baud: I vote we replace this site with a Slack instance!
WaterGirl
@Baud: I appreciate that!
@Baud: Balloon Juice will never leave you.
JaySinWA
@WaterGirl: Okay, I managed to read right over that. Saw the first sentence and went into yada yada yada mode. Sorry.
Amir Khalid
@WaterGirl:
How can anyone take that much Balloon Juice? I am impressed.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Feebog: The new Balloon Juice site.
JaySinWA
@Major Major Major Major: We are mostly slackers now. No love for MS Teams? :-) Actually its been I while since I looked at Slack licensing. Is there a per seat cost after a certain number of users?
Another Scott
@WaterGirl: Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman)
@trollhattan:
Rumor in certain circles has it that Windows subscriptions are among MS’s long term plans.
Dunno how true those rumors are, though.
That said, the Office 365 subscription model doesn’t have me dismissing the rumors as just MS hate.
WaterGirl
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: Two votes of confidence in one thread!
Or one vote of confidence and one complete lack of confidence in the likelihood of George R. R. Martin’s 6th GOT novel coming out in our lifetimes. :-)
WaterGirl
@JaySinWA: Sorry for overlooking that? Or sorry for referring to my update up top as yada yada yada? :-)
Major Major Major Major
@JaySinWA: the main limit on the free tier is that it’ll only store 10k messages of history. AFAIK
Another Scott
@WaterGirl: Unpossible!!11
:-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Rand Careaga
@trollhattan: I resented it when Adobe started “bundling” their products (the “Creative Suites”), but grumbled and went along. I hate the subscription model with the heat of a thousand suns, and was prepared to stick with CS5, but then, for reasons I have never understood (and the few details regarding which I might make semi-informed speculations I certainly don’t propose to discuss publicly), I came in the way, all unsought, of a feral package of the CC apps just around the time I retired. Gift horses, and all that…
JaySinWA
@WaterGirl: Yes.
SiubhanDuinne
@J R in WV:
I liked Tommy, and thought a number of commenters here treated him abysmally. I don’t blame him for leaving.
SiubhanDuinne
@Baud:
That’s going to play merry hell with Steve in the WTF’s travel schedule.
Omnes Omnibus
@SiubhanDuinne: We are either going to abide by WaterGirl’s request or we aren’t.
WaterGirl
Fun fact: On the new site, we are using completely different software for Recent Comments than is being used on the current Balloon Juice site.
WaterGirl
@SiubhanDuinne:
For Steve in Wherever, that would be like the In-Out board that is perpetually incorrect!
Amir Khalid
@WaterGirl:
I hope it works better than the old software. I do miss that feature.
WaterGirl
Fun fact: On the new site, we can set the # of minutes for the Edit window. I am thinking 7 minutes, might be good, but I will be happy to hear any thoughts you guys might have on that.
Another Scott
@WaterGirl: Oh, that reminds me.
1) Will Search be case-sensitive, or at least have the option? One of the things that was very confusing when I was a newbie here was that “aimai” and “Aimai” were allegedly different people. :-/
2) Also, some people here use different logins on different devices – that’s fine, RAVEN, Raven, raven, rAvEn, ;-) – but it can be difficult when a troll shows up with similar but different nyms.
I imagine the later is more difficult to handle than the former. I’m not advocating breaking anything.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Amir Khalid
@WaterGirl:
If the extra edit time is not a drag on site performance or memory requirement, go for it.
WaterGirl
@Amir Khalid: We tried that plugin on the new site – the plugin we use now on Balloon Juice – and it was abysmal on the new site. As were the current plugins for moderation and editing.
Hence the replacement of all three!
JaySinWA
@Major Major Major Major: Ah yes, I think that’s right. … I went back and see they add features in their paid model. Their per user per month costs struck me as rather steep. Is BJ worth Hulu level pricing?
SiubhanDuinne
@Omnes Omnibus:
I responded to J R in WV’s comment before I saw WaterGirl’s request.
Another Scott
@WaterGirl: Longer is better. (Another site I frequent has an infinitely long edit window, but the old version is kept and there’s an indication on the new version that it has been edited so you can click on it and see the original if you want. There’s no (practical) limit on how many times you can edit it either.)
If the edit time window can’t be increased beyond a few minutes, please make it possible to edit the comment many, many times (more than 2? 3?) so that posts don’t get thrown in the dungeon for being edited too many times. Sometimes one doesn’t catch all the HTML errors or weird brain-keyboard disconnect issues in just 2 edits.
Thanks for anything that can be done.
Cheers,
Scott.
Major Major Major Major
@JaySinWA: I thought we just wanted emoji completion and OOO notifications ?
joel hanes
it’s not possible to accurately predict how long all of that will take, because you never know exactly what you are going to run into
In my nearly forty years as a programmer, less than half of my managers were able to acknowledge that this is a real state of affairs and act accordingly.
The others divided into two camps:
“OK, I understand, but I still need you to commit to a date and keep that commitment.”
“But when do you think you’ll be done?”
Some of those managers could be put off with a date for a date : In X amount of time, I’ll be able to tell you when it’ll be done. Some of those demanded that X be unreasonably short, in which case it became necessary to repeatedly slip the date for a date.
Little of this charade would have been necessary if they’d been willing to accept a reasonable + padded estimate in the first place.
JaySinWA
@Another Scott: You want grep?
WaterGirl
@Another Scott:
I just hopped over to GoLive to test that out with your example, and immediately remembered that while we had indexed the original GoLive, we are not indexing GoLive v2 or any other GoLive until the final site that will be live, so I cannot test and give you a definitive answer.
WaterGirl
@Another Scott:
I get your point about the different nym versions for the same person on different devices, but I am not sure what you are asking here. Can you please clarify?
JaySinWA
@Major Major Major Major: So free Slack as a front end for live comments and an archive and viewer for older stuff? Make it so!
Another Scott
@JaySinWA: I want Search to find what I’m looking for even if I don’t have the exact search terms in mind, yes.
“There was a comment a couple of years ago by someone in Oregon, I think, talking about an article on gut bacteria in elephants or rhinoceroses or something that was really interesting. I’d like to find that…”
>:-)
Seriously, whatever new flexibility can be provided in a site search here would be great.
Cheers,
Scott.
Ohio Mom
Nothing to ask, just wanted to once again offer eternal thanks.
WaterGirl
@Another Scott:
That sounds like a great addition, but that is not an option on the software we are using for the new site.
WaterGirl
@Another Scott:
I am off to test this on the new site. Be back in a couple of minutes.
MobiusKlein
@JaySinWA: At the office, we have to use Slack AND MS Teams, depending on various things.
At least no more Polycom
Major Major Major Major
@JaySinWA: I should note that Cole is hell-bent against having any sort of chat feature, or was last I heard.
Another Scott
@WaterGirl: It’s more of a general observation than a request. If I were king, FYWP never would have allowed different people to have similar logins. So if we saw a comment from “RAVEN” we would know that it was from “raven” and not some troll pretending to be him. If “aimai” and “Aimai” really were different people, that’s bad, but it’s too late to fix now.
And if “aimai” and “Aimai” really were different people, and we only wanted to search for “aimai”, it would be good if Search were smart enough to distinguish between them. (I’m not sure how Search could determine whether they were actually different people or not even if it had access to their login information as we all can have several e-mail addresses that change over time. But it should be able to do case-sensitive searching without too much difficulty. I hope.)
So, just kinda stream-of-consciousness grumbling.
Carry on.
Cheers,
Scott.
WaterGirl
@WaterGirl: @Another Scott:
Another Scott
@WaterGirl: Excellent. Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
WaterGirl
@JaySinWA: No chatting options on the new site.
I can think of a million reasons why chatting would likely lead to the demise or downfall of Balloon Juice. That was not even considered as an option. Off-line conversations will surely continue in email as they always have.
WaterGirl
@Another Scott: I have no idea whether searching will be case sensitive, or whether there might even be a setting to that effect. But if there was a setting, I am confident that some people would prefer that it be sent one way, and others would prefer it the other way. :-)
I personally think that if I had tried to use WaterGirl after there was already a “watergirl” that WP should have told me to go jump in a lake, letting me know that there was already a watergirl.
Remember Chris and chris? I thought of them as good chris and bad chris – one was a good guy and the other was kind of an ass. My memory is fuzzy but I think good chris might have been the lower case spelling.
I can say that searching will be literal – it won’t have the Google “did you mean this?”.
OzarkHillbilly
What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?
WaterGirl
Apparently so!
Amir Khalid
@WaterGirl:
Luckily for me, I was the first (and apparently still the only) Amir Khalid to comment on Balloon Juice.
Another Scott
@Amir Khalid: Don’t tempt the FYWP gods!!1
:-)
Cheers,
Scott.
WaterGirl
@OzarkHillbilly:
I just happen to know that!:-)According to Estimating the Airspeed Velocity of an Unladen Swallow the “average cruising airspeed velocity of an unladen European Swallow is roughly 11 meters per second.”Mar 16, 2018
OzarkHillbilly
@WaterGirl: My bad, I was speaking of an African swallow.
WaterGirl
@OzarkHillbilly: hahaha
SiubhanDuinne
@WaterGirl:
It’s exactly the opposite with good SiubhanDuinne and bad suibhanduinne.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Amir Khalid: It’s all hot air.
WaterGirl
@SiubhanDuinne: Well your “bad” SD must be bad in a naughty, fun sort of way, and bad chris was just an ass. :-)
debbie
@WaterGirl:
FWIW, I’ve never had trouble editing multiple times (more than 5).
?BillinGlendaleCA
@SiubhanDuinne: Which one is the “Mob Enforcer”?
2liberal
this is a moderation test post
i’ve never been moderated before
penis cialis gambling casino socialism
Another Scott
@debbie: Interesting. I remember on multiple occasions being sent to Moderation because of (something like) “too many edits” and I think the number was 3.
Given the rickety state of the code here, it could have been for an unrelated reason.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
WaterGirl
@Amir Khalid: What kind of makes me go a little bit mad is when I am unconsciously expecting the old BJ to do something that you can only do on the new balloon juice site.
Like today, I did a find for “17” because I wanted to go back to comment 17, and it took me to 12:17 and 1:17 in the date/time stamps and I thought “darn it, I asked for the comment number to have a period “17.” for just these situations! Only to stop and think, no, I’m in the old BJ. So then I went to check in GoLive, and sure enough, the comment numbers have a period, so if I try to find “17.” it takes me exactly where I want to go.
I may be looking forward to the new site more than anyone. :-)
?BillinGlendaleCA
@WaterGirl: This means that Emoji work in nyms(the pawprint is an emoji).
WaterGirl
@debbie:
I have. But then you never knew for sure if it was because you had tried to edit one too many times or whether it was a random FYWP.
I hated WordPress before I started on this project, and now I have pretty much done a 180 on that.
JWR
Thank you, WaterGirl, for all of your hard work!
My question: Will the new site have HTML buttons in the comment editing window? Sure would beat manually inserting the proper code. (I understand that the new site will have a Preview Comment feature, which would minimize errors, but I’d still prefer not dealing with code, esp. if I don’t gotsta.)
Elizabelle
Sounds like Balloon Juice After Dark is going to be easier.
WaterGirl: thank you for all that you and your team are doing.
WaterGirl
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Yes, absolutely. Sorry if I wasn’t clear in what I said.
It does do something weird, though, when I edit a comment I have created as ?BillinGlendaleCA on the new site. The pawprints get absolutely HUGE in the edit box, but it still lets you edit and save, so I am not too concerned about that.
SiubhanDuinne
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
That’s the fucking imposter “Subaru Diane.”
WaterGirl
@JWR: You are very welcome!
This is what you get from the menu. You will not be able to insert your own HTML code unless you are a front pager, I believe.
Bold
Italics
Strikethrough
Quote
Links
Bulleted lists
Numbered lists
Text color
joel hanes
@WaterGirl:
You will not be able to insert your own HTML code unless you are a front pager
AAAAAAAARRRRRGGGHHHH
WaterGirl
@JWR:
For instance:
This is copied from a test comment on the new site, but on the new site red shows as red, orange as orange, etc.
You see the same thing while you are composing as you do after you press submit.
Red
Orange
Yellow
Green
Blue
Violet
WaterGirl
@joel hanes: Tell me what you want to put in there that isn’t on the list above.
Another Scott
@joel hanes: I assume she meant that you won’t be able to use any (fancy?) HTML that isn’t part of that list.
Surely we’ll be able to use [p] and [em] and [b] and [a href=””][/a] and all the standard stuff on our own. I can’t imagine why Son of FYWP would care about those standard things in the Comment window…
Cheers,
Scott.
Omnes Omnibus
@WaterGirl: NotMax will not like this.
WaterGirl
@SiubhanDuinne: At least I can spell her name! :-)
WaterGirl
@Another Scott:
I am not so sure about that. Off to test before I speak to that more definitively.
edit: Nope, when I save, what you see are the open and close tags for html along with the word “bold”. Not what you see below.
WaterGirl
SEPTEMBER 15, 2019 AT 2:51 PM
[bold]
Click to Edit – 4 minutes and 49 seconds
?BillinGlendaleCA
@SiubhanDuinne: You’ll have to check and see if there’s a Subaru emoji.
Baud
@WaterGirl:
YOU’VE RUINED EVERYTHING!!
Another Scott
@WaterGirl: Just to be clear, I didn’t mean using the square brackets, but the equivalent HTML angle brackets.
If we really can’t write our own HTML in the edit window for reasonably standard thing (not blink, not embedded tables, not our own CSS) then several people might be very upset. :-(
None of the testers have tried this yet??
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
WaterGirl
@Omnes Omnibus: I feel fairly confident that many people will love the new site and that some people will hate it.
What I am about to say may be a harsh reality, but it is a reality. You simply cannot build a website (almost) 2020 that caters to the oldest functioning hardware, to have all the features work on Internet Explorer, which isn’t even supported by Microsoft anymore, or to have all the features work without JavaScript, or to have all the features work in an environment that has images and other things turned off or disabled.
NotMax
@WaterGirl
Say what now?
Not good, not good at all. Using HTML which does the same thing as the buttons (which don’t appear here in any case), please. Can understand nixing HTML for something which is not permissible (everyone wave to [blink]) as is the current site practice but not throwing out the ability to mimic what the buttons are intended to do.
@Omnes Omnibus
Understatement of the day, that.
WaterGirl
@Another Scott: I know what you mean. I had just put in the [ ] to see if that would make the editor here not turn the code into bold.
I have two questions:
1. What is it that you would want in terms of formatting that you cannot get from the list of formatting options:
Bold
Italics
Strikethrough
Quote
Links
Bulleted lists
Numbered lists
Text color
2. If you can get the result you want – bold or italics or color, etc – can you explain why is it concerning that you can’t type the codes yourself?
Yarrow
@WaterGirl: That doesn’t sound good. Can you clarify if we can see the actual HTML markup code in the comment, or is it already in preview form and the HTML is invisible?
If it’s the latter that is not going to go down well. People like to be able to edit code when that’s where the mistakes lie and some people prefer to manually do the code. So long as we can manually do the code for the HTML items offered in your list, that should be okay.
Omnes Omnibus
@WaterGirl: I am not a techie, so if it works as well or better than the current site (and does not have threaded comments or personal icons/emojis/whatever the fuck they are) I should be more or less okay with it.
Thank you and the rest of the implementation team.
JaySinWA
@WaterGirl:
Geez, you tell one (or so) Slack jokes and all of a sudden your responsible for the fall of Balloon Juice.
For the record I didn’t mention chat. One board I am on uses Skype group chat as a form of post / comment entry, So I am not chatting, you are chatting! :)
WaterGirl
@NotMax: Hey, NotMax, I am truly trying to understand. I have the same question questions for you, – and for anyone else who has this concern – as I posed to Scott at #133.
WaterGirl
@Yarrow:
If I type the word “Red”, highlight it and click on the COLOR button to add a color, then as soon as I do that, you see the word “Red” in red – you do not see the code for red. So it’s already red text in preview form and the HTML is invisible.
To use my example from above, I would think there wouldn’t be mistakes to correct if you type your words and then highlight and choose the color red – there is no margin for error there. You choose the red color and then your text turns red.
What am I missing?
edit: to be perfectly clear, the way it is set up you will not be able to enter the codes for the items in that list.
JWR
@WaterGirl:
Oh joy! (can’t wait!) But just to be clear, are you saying that all of these things will be there in the regular ‘post a comment’ place, or will they be available both there, and in the ‘edit comment’ window? (I hope my question makes clear what I’m getting at.)
joel hanes
@WaterGirl:
I’m a forty-year programmer who mastered markup languages a decade before there was such a thing as WSYIWYG.
I want to enter the HTML tags myself, manually, with my keyboard.
I have an unreasonable and entirely personal hatred for formatting buttons (see the formatting options on the WaPo site for a good example of how to do it Wrong: they’re unidirectional — you cannot turn off a format and go back to plain text once you’ve turned it on, you can only switch to another formatting option.)
If you have any experience with the built-in editor in Atalassian’s “teamware” product Confluence, that’s another example of something that’s worse than nothing.
I know I will not prevail in this, and I will use whatever is offered (just so long as it’s not Coral), but I had to vent.
WaterGirl
@JaySinWA: I see to have taken you too literally! :-)
Major Major Major Major
@WaterGirl: @JaySinWA: I guess somebody will just have to set up a rogue Discord channel ?
…he joked
WaterGirl
@JWR:
That’s a good question. One that I asked the web developers last week, as a matter of fact.
Any normal person would expect the creation of a comment – and the editing of that very same comment – to be integrated. But they are not!
So if i am understanding your question correctly, no, the formatting options are not available when you edit, they are only available before you post your comment. That’s the same as it works now on the current balloon juice. I never understood why those options weren’t available as you edited, and now i understand why. As ridiculous as it seems, comment creating and comment editing are two separate things.
Yarrow
@WaterGirl: Oh, Lord. I foresee problems. And text color? WHYYYYYYYY????? Ugh. Too hard to read.
JaySinWA
@WaterGirl: Is there a way to undo a code entered by mistake. Say I made two large an area bold? Do I have to select text to use the buttons or can a start red and end red by pushing a button. Highlighting on a phone or touch pad is very haphazard for me.
Omnes Omnibus
@joel hanes: Today’s automatic transmissions are so much better than manuals, and, with the high end performance ones, the computer almost always picks and holds the perfect gear. I still prefer a manual.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Major Major Major Major: You’re just trying to sow discord here. //
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Omnes Omnibus: My Jetta was a manual transmission, I miss it.
JaySinWA
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Let the games begin!
ETA I am sure John wouldn’t mind a WOW plugin//
Bill Arnold
@WaterGirl:
Are you serious??? I often compose/edit comments offline in the limited markup language allowed. This way I have a record of them including links etc, and can use a sensible text editor.
Will we be able to edit comments in markup source mode?
Major Major Major Major
@?BillinGlendaleCA: golf clap
joel hanes
@Omnes Omnibus:
No automatic transmission I have ever driven looks ahead to choose the gear I’m going to need five or ten seconds from now.
This becomes an issue in mountain driving.
I now drive an automatic, but wish I had held out for the manua..
WaterGirl
@joel hanes:
Joel, I really appreciate your reply. This is my understanding of what you wrote. You are a tech person who wants to enter the HTML tags yourself, manually. Formatting buttons frustrate you because they are built to make it easier for people who don’t know what they are doing, but they just hold back someone like you who actually does know what they are doing. So it’s not that you particularly want to be able to use a code that is not on the list; it’s more that you want to get to the end result the way you want to do it, which is manual entry.
Is that about right? I didn’t expect this response and I am truly trying to understand why this is unnerving to some of you, so please correct anything I did not get right.
WaterGirl
@joel hanes:
I doubt that this will speak to your major concerns, but on a practical level, I can say that there is an option to remove all formatting and return to plain text. Small consolation, no doubt.
JaySinWA
@Yarrow:
Yes text color is not helpful, Highlighter background can be useful, but text color can make for difficult reading. And a dark mode would be nice, now that I think of it.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@joel hanes: I drive a hybrid now, so no manual transmission. I still reach for the shift every so often, even after 2 years and change.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@JaySinWA: We can now have a snark color…think of the possibilities.
Bill Arnold
@WaterGirl:
Will there be any way (besides doing a site crawl) of obtaining the html for comments?
WaterGirl
@Bill Arnold:
Not the way it is currently set up, no.
Major Major Major Major
@JaySinWA:
I do enjoy writing lua…
WaterGirl
For anyone who is upset about this, can you please tell me where you land on the artist pain scale at this link?
https://twitter.com/simontanner/status/1004280940884000768?lang=en
No, I am not being snarky here. I am trying to determine how widespread the concern about entering your own HTML manually in comments is, and what the level of concern is. And by concern I mean anything in the concerned, annoyed, mad, frustrated, upset, seriously disappointed family.
So sound off here, please, if you this matters to you. Or if it doesn’t.
JWR
@WaterGirl:
Well, from what I gather, the new site is in the final design phase and will be far more difficult to add or remove features demanded by us, of you, and so think that I’ll just kick back, wait, and love it, or not. ;-)
And once more, many thanks!
WaterGirl
@Yarrow: The developers have been told that we will keep color options until or unless it starts being abused and making the site difficult to read.
Major Major Major Major
@WaterGirl: so one day, then ?
When I’m doing web development, my main issue with WYSIWYG editors is that they usually make bad HTML, which is probably why a lot of folks prefer to do it by hand.
West of the Rockies
@SiubhanDuinne:
I LOVE that alias! Who gets credit for Subaru Diane? And to what DOES your nym refer? Is that Gaelic mythological character? I’ve always wondered.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@WaterGirl: Well, there goes the concept of using one color for snark…
WaterGirl
@Major Major Major Major:
Ha! I have more faith in the Jackals than you do.
From all my testing on that front, so far so good.
WaterGirl
@?BillinGlendaleCA: That’s funny. We could make an exception for the snark color, as long as we pick one that is easy on the eyes.
MattF
1) I agree with the ‘I want my own HTML’ gang. I learned it the hard way, by learning the XML spec, back in the day. No blink, promise.
2) Unicode? Now that I’ve got a Unicode keyboard…
3) Are there any ‘magic’ codes, like for the trademark symbol or accented letters? Do copy/pasted accents survive? Or is it necessary to learn some arcane incantation?
NotMax
@WaterGirl
Underline.
@WaterGirl
The gist of what @joel hanes said. Removing a feature/option from the current site which (a) a not insignificant percentage find very convenient and make frequent use of and (b) does not break anything when it is done – even on this rickety platform – would seem a step backwards.
Bill Arnold
Seriously concerned, annoyed, disappointed.
Lack of ability to copy/paste comments from another editor will make it hard and painful to craft (or edit) any complex comments, or keep a record of what has been written. (What happens if select-all in an edit window and copy/paste to a text editor? If that copies something sensible then I’d be happier.)
A site-specific editor is always a pain in my experience. (It can be helpful on a limited device like a phone without a proper keyboard, granted.)
prostratedragon
Interesting. I also prefer to do my own mark-up, though I don’t mind disregarding the buttons if some like to have them. Haven’t been missing color fonts, but on occasions of great bemusement or exasperation have wished for the proper archaic font in which to write the name “The New York Times.”
Ruckus
@WaterGirl:
Does that last line mean the edit window is only open for 2 1/2 minutes? I think that is too short, should be maybe 10 minutes, there are times when something comes up, a phone call etc that just takes some time.
Also how long does the edit option stay available? Right now it’s 5 minutes and that seems OK.
WaterGirl
@JaySinWA:I
Yes. Let’s say you accidentally bolded way too much text, but you had blue and teal colors and other formatting elsewhere – that you want to keep. You highlight the part you screwed up, and then choose the clear formatting option. That clears the formatting in just the area you highlighted, keeping your blue and teal colors and the test of your formatting elsewhere.
edit: I tried to see if i could clear formatting without having to select an area. if I don’t select an area, it clears formatting word by word.
You do not have to select the text – that’s how i always do it, but you can hit the bold button, type everything you want to be bolded, and then hit the bold button again to turn off bold.
I have so not mastered the art of selecting on a phone or iPad, so I share your pain on that.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@MattF:
A special characters button would be nice for those that get used alot(©, ®, ¢, º…).
Yarrow
@WaterGirl: Let’s just pick a dumbass color and make it orange. More seriously, colors are hard to read. Do not like colored text. Especially when people start yelling at each other and post everything in red. Ugh.
@WaterGirl: Van Gogh.
If HTML is available for front pagers then it’s available. How about making the buttons a default option but viewing the HTML code an option you can click to see. It could remember that option along with your nym/email and default to whichever one you last used. Probably way too hard but maybe?
JWR
@WaterGirl:
Okay, that’s what I was getting at, and what I’m still a bit confused about is this “no manual HTML allowed” business, and whether that applies only to the original Post Comment space, or to the Edit Comment space as well.
In short, will manual HTML be accepted in the Edit Comment box? (I think not, which will makes me has big sad.)
prostratedragon
@WaterGirl: Wrote mine before I saw this. I am/would try to hang at Rembrandt, since past that we seem to be getting a bit pathological. Bear in mind, one would be confronted with the system on potentially every comment.
J R in WV
@WaterGirl:
I think that the timer should restart when you complete an edit, That gives you time to read your comment edits and make sure you didn’t sound like an idiot in the edit. Otherwise 8 or 10 would be OK.
WaterGirl
@Ruckus:
No, that just means that there were 2.5 minutes of the original 5 minute edit window left by the time I had done my 5 edits. The edit clock does not restart after you edit; it keeps running as you make your edits. I think that’s why some people might prefer it to be longer, for cases when you edit and then catch something else and then something else, you can end up racing the clock.
It’s set for 5 minutes on the new site, but I am halfway thinking of making it 7, and I was asking for input.
MattF
@J R in WV: A ‘not sound like an idiot’ button would be useful.
WaterGirl
@J R in WV:
That is not an option; I know this because I asked about that a couple of months ago. So our only option is to increase the # of minutes for the edit window.
J R in WV
@SiubhanDuinne:
I certainly didn’t mean to start anything — trying to make a funny, oops!
Ruckus
@Yarrow:
With the new options in normal commenting I don’t see any reason to accept direct entry of HTML code, except for in editing. Sometimes I’d like to change or add something, say italics for a word or words and now I can. So if the HTML buttons are available in editing then maybe I don’t see an issue.
Bill Arnold
@JWR:
I just realized, a common thing people do here is get the embed code for a tweet from the twitter ui (web ui for me) and paste it into a comment. Will that be broken? (It has the interesting side effect of driving new traffic to the site, since people search for their names and this site’s comment section is indexed very frequently due to all the connectivity. That’s one reason I almost always include bylines with links.)
NotMax
@WaterGirl
7 beats 5. Thinking specifically of those instances when someone comes fresh to a thread and replies to early comments before reading all the way down.
satby
OMIFUCKINGGOD! I understand many of you do your own HTML tags (I do too on the rare occasions when I want to strike something) but seriously try to remember the great majority of people don’t. Designs are developed for the 80% of users, not the 20%. And most of the HTML I’ve seen on this site is captured in the buttons on the new site (which work great, btw). Give it a chance before you do a preemptive dismissal.
NotMax
@satby
No one is suggesting doing away with the buttons (for those for whom they appear). What is being said is there is no reason intrinsic to the site operation why we cannot have vanilla and chocolate, as it were.
WaterGirl
@?BillinGlendaleCA: @MattF:
There is a special characters option, which I had asked them to remove because it sometimes acts a little weird, but I just removed that from the developers to do list and we can keep it in. but, please, no complaints when it has trouble with greek letters, etc.
WaterGirl
SEPTEMBER 15, 2019 AT 4:10 PM
ß ™ © ®
Yarrow
@Ruckus: But I think WaterGirl said the HTML buttons will NOT be available in editing. Is that correct?
Ruckus
@joel hanes:
I have the best of both worlds. A double clutch manual.
Put it in auto and it acts just like a hydraulic auto trans.
Put it in manual and you have to shift it yourself, but you use buttons. So if you think you are racing and want a different gear, you got it. It’s not an H pattern, just buttons but it works well. And the clutch is coordinated with the shift so you don’t have to think about it. It’s smooth, proper shifting every time. And the concept works even in semi trucks with 600 HP and lots and lots of torque.
WaterGirl
@MattF:
Last week I tested entering the umlaut and the asset and other german by just using the appropriate keys on my keyboard with the option key, etc. and it worked fine.
Another Scott
@WaterGirl: I was out cutting the grass for a while, so this may have already been addressed, but…
I’m a touch typist and do almost all of my commenting here on a PC or MBP with a decent keyboard. When I’m typing, I don’t want to mess around with a mouse/touchpad and click some button to do simple formatting. We’ve all seen the HTML-Anchor-Tag-Continues-Until-The-End-Of-The-Comment links here because the commenter didn’t hit the magic button again.
I almost never comment on my phone because copy/paste of a link is such a pain, I hate hunt-and-peck-typing, and even there I write my own HTML because I don’t want to wait for the keyboard to scroll out of the way, have to scroll the edit screen up to see the buttons, etc., etc.
Buttons are a convenience feature, and they’re a simple way to show users what HTML is allowed. But they’re not faster for touch typists and they can invite errors (are nested tags allowed? will closing anchor tags require two clicks? Will it be possible for someone to close a Red Text tag with a Bold tag by mistake?)
To be clear, if necessary, I’ll adjust. But some people take their HTML very seriously. I remember someone on another site who would go ballistic because the HTML parser would mess with his hard-coded paragraph breaks and the like. He eventually left (not exclusively because of that, but camel’s back, etc.).
I hope this gives you a better idea of where I’m coming from. Thank you (and Cole and the coders) for keeping us in the loop and trying to keep us happy.
Cheers,
Scott.
satby
@NotMax: and people have yet to describe a need for any html formatting not captured by the buttons (except underline) that doesn’t amount to “but that’s what I’m used to ?).
Change comes to everything.
WaterGirl
@Bill Arnold:
I do not understand what you are asking here. Can you please elaborate?
Ruckus
@WaterGirl:
I think it will work fine for the vast majority, now that I read that one can revert to plain text and the buttons will be available in both original and edit.
I did read that right didn’t I?
satby
@Another Scott: ok, that’s at least understandable as a reason, and probably the same reason as many of the other HTML advocates.
edit: Don’t think it’s a deal breaker but everyone’s mileage varies. And I type on a tablet screen keyboard hunt and peck style.
NotMax
@WaterGirl
If for no other reason, would seem a necessity for many in order to say ¿Por qué no los dos?
;)
Also too, some have said in the past that the current FYWP succumbs to an attack of the vapors when they attempt using Cyrillic characters. Maybe a test on the new site for that?
frosty
@WaterGirl: Not being able to enter HTML doesn’t bother me in the least. I occasionally fixed a mistake while editing but for me it’s a PITA.
So… Vermeer.
ETA Not too wild about colored text. This could gwt real weird real fast.
WaterGirl
@NotMax:
I lost that argument with the developer a couple of months ago. They are adamant that underline universally means a clickable link and that it is a very poor idea. They pretty much said “no” on that, and they have only done that 2-3 times total for the entire project.
Yarrow
@Ruckus: Formatting options are NOT available in editing per
WaterGirl
Bill Arnold
@NotMax:
Likewise. They’re useful on limited function device like a phone, where finding keys used for markup means switching virtual keyboards. But on a full-function device, for a touch typist, writing via a pulldown menu slows things down by maybe a factor of 2 or 3, and if I’m reading correctly, one can’t copy the results without doing a site crawl. (Could WaterGirl test that? If a copy of the edit window copies markup tags, then e.g. one doesn’t lose source links because only the title is displayed.)
MattF
@Another Scott: Speaking of nested tags reminds me… I’ve noticed that quoted text loses its italics— not critical, but somewhat irritating.
JWR
As for the edit comment timer, 7 or 8 minutes would seem about right to me.
Yarrow
@satby: HTML coding is available for front pagers per WaterGirl:
If it’s available then it’s available. It’s just a matter of who’s allowed to have it.
I suggested a toggle button so you can see the HTML code if you want but no one commented on that. May be too hard to do.
prostratedragon
Character code experiment:
¡ ¡ £ £ ¥ ¥
For each, numeric followed by named code entered. Since I rarely use them and had mislaid my pocket guide (weak, I know), I’d only cut-and-pasted into this site. Some other sites accept one or both, other sites neither.
satby
@Yarrow: nope, they’re not, as WaterGirl said.
J R in WV
@Amir Khalid:
What about Amir Kha’lid ? Or Emir Khalid? Or…. I quit. No one likes my humor today anyhoo.
Bill Arnold
@WaterGirl:
So I’m composing a comment with a link, e.g.
All The Lies Brett Kavanaugh Told – The Supreme Court nominee fibbed throughout his entire confirmation hearing. Republicans don’t seem to care. (0/01/2018, Paul Blumenthal and Jennifer Bendery) (Link url was from Kay.)
I want a record of that that includes the https source url. Can I get it?
Or, for a twitter link (assuming we can still do those somehow), what happens if I do a copy (and paste to a text editor):
A site crawl is me being snarky. It involves creating a mirror of a section (could just be a day) of the site to obtain the html. (We were promised that this wouldn’t be broken by the way.)
satby
@NotMax: I seem to remember that was mentioned as working in a previous update thread.
NotMax
@satby
I think – and may be way off base – part of the difference stems from those who view HTML strictly as code (ooh, mysterious mumbo-jumbo) versus those who see it as a language (I can type in a phrase in Spanish or Swahili or whatever, why not this language too).
Yarrow
@satby: I don’t know how it will work on the new site but currently when I post tweets after I’ve copied from the Embed Tweet option I have to manually edit the HTML. For some reason our current comment system doesn’t recognize the break tag so I have to hunt for it and then manually add line breaks to make the tweet render properly.
I don’t know if commenters will be allowed to post tweets except in text form (like we currently do now) but if we still have text-only then we need to test tweets with br tags because they don’t work now.
Major Major Major Major
@WaterGirl: they are largely correct and probably have a great deal of experience saying no to that particular request, it my time as a freelancer was any indication.
satby
@Bill Arnold: why wouldn’t you just copy and paste straight into the comment window?
Ruckus
@Yarrow:
Yes I saw that and thought – haven’t looked back – that there was icon access in the editor. So I has a confuzzled here and is why I asked a second time.
I edit a lot because I can’t seem to type worth a shit any more and often say for example that when I mean than. And I seem to get confuzzled a lot easier these days. Being able to reasonably, closely approximate correct in edit, at least in some way, should help with reasonable communications. And that includes HTML info. So it should be in both or in neither. My vote is both.
WaterGirl
@NotMax:
I do not know whether it is a “not insignificant percentage” of people or not. That is what I am trying to determine.
WaterGirl
@Yarrow:
It’s more complicated than that, and if it wasn’t more complicated, we would have gone in that direction.
There are always competing requirements. Front pagers can do many, many things that commenters cannot, so it’s not as simple as if it’s available to them it can be available to us.
WaterGirl
@MattF:
I am pretty sure that would be cost prohibitive.
Ladyraxterinok
@WaterGirl: Some yrs ago there was the suggestion of posting and maybe compiling a cookbook that would supply inexpensive and nutritious recipes for people with very little money. Could maybe be shared with homeless shelters.
I could only read at the time, it was very difficult to try to post anything.
I don’t know if anything ever came of the suggestion.
Some people I think were supplying simple recipes in the comments, but I don’t recall any composite storage of recipes at the side.
Maybe someone else remembers that idea.
2liberal
if you would be so kind please release my bad word post from moderation (I want to see where it ends up in the post list)
Bill Arnold
@satby:
Copy/paste what, sorry? E.g. a tweet from Embed Tweet in the twitter UI is a bunch of html.
jeffreyw
Colored text is an abomination. I scroll past colored text while hissing through my teeth. This scares kitteh.
Another Scott
@WaterGirl: No editing of tags in the Edit window, and no user-HTML, means that if we post something with Red Bold text and decide that it conveys murderous emotion that we didn’t intend, we can’t change that Red Bold text tags after we hit the Submit/Post Comment button the first time??
Really?
If that’s the case, that’s broken. Either we can edit things reasonably well, or we can’t. If we can’t edit tags, then we shouldn’t be able to post any tags (buttons or no).
And if we can’t post any tags (buttons or no) then the site will have been destroyed for conversation about current events and the like.
I hope I’m misinterpreting what you’re saying, or if not, I hope that the developers reconsider.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
MobiusKlein
@WaterGirl:
UI guidelines and standards are there to make using web sites, apps, operating systems less confusing.
The developers are right here.
satby
@NotMax: well, it’s a language I know a bit, but like 80% of users, I just want to comment and move on. So it seems the breakdown is between touch typists who don’t want to have to scroll or use buttons, and people who customarily use both. Thing is, keyboards are going the way of the dinosaurs on most devices.
This whole discussion reminds me of an incident from way early in my IT career, when one of the lawyers was pissed that we were installing WordPerfect because he thought edlin was perfectly adequate and all anyone needed.
NotMax
@WaterGirl
Superscript? Would be handy when people want to use M⁴.
;)
I disagree with the developers as links here are not underlined unless and until one’s cursor hovers over them, as opposed to underlined text which is always underlined regardless of cursor placement.
More seriously, foresee a possible problem with colored text in that it can make that text look like a link (either visited or unvisited, depending on the color).
WaterGirl
@Bill Arnold:
On the current site, only front pagers have been able to actually embed tweets in a comment. But people have been able to post some of the text of a tweet, though it is not embedded, I believe. Can someone who does this on BJ clarify that for me?
Bill Arnold
I wonder when we’ll be seeing calls for video and audio comment capability.
satby
@Bill Arnold: rikyrah posts the most tweets of anyone and though I don’t know for sure, I think she copies/paste them, not embeds. I thought everyone did that, the first time I saw the embed tweet html I just deleted the whole thing.
WaterGirl asks my opinion occasionally and I’m a Luddite on balky Kindle, so I tell her not to trust my opinions.
Another Scott
@satby: He was clearly wrong.
Everyone knows that WordStar was the One True Editor.
Hehe. :-)
Cheers,
Scott.
WaterGirl
@NotMax:
As I said above, there are always competing requirements, and there are a number of reasons why it is not as simple as you have suggested.
Bill Arnold
@WaterGirl:
Go to a tweet in the web ui. In the upper right there is a pulldown (depending on new or old twitter ui the details are different). Select embed tweet. old ui, copy the code, new twitter ui there is a button to copy code to the clipboard.
Paste into comment here, e.g.
WordPress strips out some of the html but leaves enough for it to work. I think wp doesn’t do the stripping for front pagers; not sure.
Ruckus
@Another Scott:
That wasn’t funny a thousand years ago. It wasn’t WordStar, it was mumble, mumble, something, something………
Yarrow
@WaterGirl: I do embed tweet for almost all my twitter posts. It’s super easy, copies all the links and whatnot. It pastes with blockquote tags already there. Like I said above, I have to edit it because of the br tags not rendering right but it’s the easiest way to copy tweets for sure. Links right back to the tweet, which is particularly useful if there is a thread.
From seeing rikyrah’s comments, it seems she uses various methods to copy/paste tweets. I think she uses the embed tweet option sometimes. Other times she posts something and there isn’t a usable link to the actual tweet, which is a pain if you want to understand more or you maybe don’t know who the twitter handle is.
Jay probably posts more tweets than anyone these days. It appears he uses the Embed Tweet option, from the appearance of what he posts.
NotMax
@WaterGirl
To be clear, I did not suggest it was (or was not) simple. I was suggesting it is not impossible.
Another Scott
@Ruckus: … EMACS! Just as Lord Richard Stallman intended!
:-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Yarrow
@satby:
Blogs are going the way of the dinosaurs too. Why are we bothering with this update?
WaterGirl
@Ruckus: @Yarrow: It all depends on how literal Ruckus was being with his use of the word “editing”. The buttons ARE there when creating a comment but are not there when EDITING a comment.
Major Major Major Major
@WaterGirl: if you provide the embed text as a plebe, it still correctly formats the blockquote, link to tweet, etc. If you’re unable to input raw html, that wouldn’t work.
Yarrow
@Major Major Major Major: Yep. And that is going to be a real pain. I think half the comments here are tweets these days and a whole bunch of them use the embed tweet feature.
NotMax
@Major Major Major Major
Hey, I remain disgruntled that I can still use the [b] [/b] but not [i] [/i].
;)
Spanky
If I can’t use html, then there needs to be a STRIKE button.
joel hanes
@WaterGirl:
you want to get to the end result the way you want to do it, which is manual entry.
This is exactly correct.
I don’t care about color, or emojis; I will never use either.
I just want to be able to manually enter the HTML tags I habitually use, which are :
em
b
a href=””
blockquote
strike
JWR
@WaterGirl:
This is true. There’s a big difference between a front pager posting/embedding a tweet, which looks all purty and stuff including pictures on the FP or in comments, and commenters posting just the content of a tweet, which works nearly as well. (Jay, and many others, I love your work!)
joel hanes
@WaterGirl:
I didn’t expect this response and I am truly trying to understand why
We currently have this ability.
People hate, to an unreasonable degree, any changes that forces them to alter their current practice without a large perceived benefit to themselves.
This is a universal truth of software maintenance.
I will live without HTML, but IMHO, the “strike” format is essential in any system that allows post-editing of comments.
Steve in the ATL
@Spanky: only if Cole gets a LOCKOUT button
/LaborLaw”Humor”
joel hanes
@NotMax:
but not [i] [/i]
Use [em] [/em]
NotMax
@joel hanes
Yea, yea and thrice yea.
Will add using numeric HTML for special characters (ellipsis, cent sign, etc., etc.)
Steve in the ATL
@WaterGirl: I have zero interest in typing my own html commands. Give me buttons!
NotMax
@joel hanes
Oh, I do (duh!) but still grumble under my breath every blasted time.
joel hanes
@satby:
keyboards are going the way of the dinosaurs on most devices
Which is why I never read blogs on a mobile device, despite having been employed making the chips for Apple’s iPhones from the iPhone 2 until two months ago.
Cold dead hands etc.
WaterGirl
Yarrow
@JWR:
But MANY other people use the Embed Tweet option because it’s the surest way of copying the entire tweet. It’s hard to copy the tweet correctly otherwise and it doesn’t paste properly and you have to add the blockquote tags or just leave them off. I love the Embed Tweet option and it is going to suck if I can’t post HTML and thus can’t use it anymore. I know I’m not the only one who uses it judging from how others’ tweets in comments render. And I’m not just talking about front pagers who get to do the whole thing that actually looks like a tweet.
satby
joel hanes
@Bill Arnold:
I want a record of that that includes the https source url.
Dunno if the new site will show it the way you want it, but
[CTRL] u
does “show HTML source” in many browsers.
J R in WV
@WaterGirl:
I may be around the Picasso mode. I’m used to fixing things in edit by, yes, editing the HTML as needed. Like others, I first used markup languages a very long time ago. IF no fixing things is needed, then I will drop down to Rembrant or so. No text colors, please! Except for bold/strong.
If there are effective markup options in edit mode, I’ll be OK, I guess. Really, I will. I’m OK. Thanks.
Yarrow
@WaterGirl: @satby: Why are you both posting that tweet?
joel hanes
@Major Major Major Major:
I agree that underline should be reserved for links.
When I want the same effect, I just _underline_.
Another Scott
@WaterGirl: I haven’t seen this answered for you.
I assume Bill meant showing the HTML code for the page in the browser – e.g. ctrl-U in Chrome. And then one gets to see the really, really ugly code that FYWP constructs to present our glorious thoughts to the world. ;-)
Seriously, not being able to do reasonable cut-and-paste into the Comment window would be another annoyance.
Cheers,
Scott.
Yarrow
@J R in WV: There will be no buttons in Edit mode. Also, you can’t see the HTML so if you fuck up the coding but don’t see it until you post the comment you’re out of luck.
NotMax
@NotMax
Will add the observation that in this case the developers are mired in the past and maybe ought to take a look at the site. Are any of the links underlined? No they are not, unless one moves the cursor over them.
WaterGirl
@Spanky:
There is a strike button.
joel hanes
@WaterGirl:
there is an option to remove all formatting and return to plain text
That’s good news.
As I said, I’ll manage to live with whatever’s delivered.
Hell, I wrote code for six or seven years using line editors.
WaterGirl
@Yarrow:
If the html is screwed up, it will be obvious before you post the comment.
That’s because white you are still creating the comment, you see EXACTLY what it will look like after it is posted.
NotMax
@WaterGirl
At least until Steve in the wherever negotiates a settlement.
:)
Planetjanet
In the last few weeks, a new ad technique has arisen. This anti-banner pops up across the bottom of the browser. It is always on Balloon Juice and sometimes on Washington Post. Looks like the source us named “Proper”. If you click the x to make it go away, it comes right back. Will the new site be able to kill this demon ad?
joel hanes
@NotMax:
Are any of the links underlined? No they are not
And this is one of the defects of the current site implementation.
They should have always been.
Text color is an unreliable way of indicating links (on the Mother Jones site, the color for links was long nearly indistinguishable from that for plain text, and hardly anyone recognized links, so many of us resorted to posting raw URLs, which are unambiguous.
Oh, hey, WaterGirl : what happens on the new site when one pastes in a raw URL ?
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@joel hanes: I read on a mobile device, but I rarely comment. I hate trying to type anything on a phone or tablet keyboard.
What I’m hearing is that ordinary commenters won’t be able to fix formatting issues themselves in edit. Is this correct? Because I can hear the screaming already. No one likes having to wait for a front pager to stop by to rescue something FYWP has decided is spam; they really won’t like having to wait for a front pager to turn off the red text.
Front pagers won’t like having that added to their job descriptions, either.
Another Scott
@joel hanes: I’m confused. I thought there were no HTML convenience buttons in the Edit window. How can one strike the HTML formatting in the Edit window if there aren’t any buttons and we can’t see or use raw HTML?
E.g. my RED BOLD murderous rage that was intended to be just good-natured-ribbing, for example, above.
I should just sign up to be a tester and see for myself, of course, but ….
Thanks WG, I appreciate your time explaining all this stuff for us.
Cheers,
Scott.
WaterGirl
@Another Scott:
Scott, could you explain what you are thinking of when you say a “reasonable cut and paste?
Steeplejack (phone)
@WaterGirl:
Late to the thread, so I don’t know if this has been answered already. What he means is that currently nyms are case-sensitive, so raven, Raven and RAVEN are potentially three different people. It appears that raven is all three of these, but I know of at least one case—Cervantes and cervantes—where it’s two different people.
Ideally, nyms should be case-insensitive, so that no one can squat on someone else’s nym with a mere change of letter case.
Bill Arnold
@Another Scott:
Well, that sort of works, but it is a very painful way to copy a comment; my usual practice is to write the comment in an editor (various reasons, including loss of comment by FYWP), and then if it is edited, copy the comment html (not the full html but useful) out of the edit window. That way, if i need the a link for another usage someplace else or well into the future, it’s easily available.
(Not sure people realize how many lurkers this site has, BTW.)
WaterGirl
@joel hanes: Oh, hey, WaterGirl :
You get a clickable link.
NotMax
@joel hanes
I think what rankles is the unspoken assumption that we here (not speaking about the web in general) are so dense that we would be going around willy-nilly trying to click on anything with an underscore.
Yarrow
@WaterGirl:
Even when we can see exactly what something will look like it’s not always perfect the first time. People make mistakes that they don’t see until they take a second look.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@WaterGirl: Because of the numerous issues with the current site, a number of people compose comments in another window and then paste them into the comment box. I’ve done this off and on since the days of the dinosaurs, across multiple platforms. Those of us who do this are used to doing basic formatting manually.
What you’re talking about will require typing comments up as plain text, then pasting the plain text into the comment box, then using the mouse to select parts of the comment and doing the formatting with the buttons. That’s quite a barrier to commenting.
Bill Arnold
@WaterGirl:
Not speaking for Scott, but by ““reasonable cut and paste” I mean something that captures the formatting and all hidden stuff. E.g. for a link to an article where the url is hidden by the display and just the title shows, a reasonable cut and paste” would copy both the title and the url, and preferably any formatting, to text.
If necessary, I can revert to ugly, e.g.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/article-how-bad-is-boris-johnson-we-cant-even-find-the-words
“How bad is Boris Johnson? We can’t even find the words”
(Editorial, September 5, 2019)
WaterGirl
@Steeplejack (phone):
Thanks, Steep. I thought he was asking about how the search function would work
I imagine that searching for “Raven”, “raven”, or “RAVEN” would pull up every instance of all three.
The case sensitivity of nyms in WordPress is likely a WP thing we have no control over, but i have posed the question to the developers. thanks
chris
@WaterGirl: Thanks, I guess.
HeleninEire
You say ask me anything. My answer is What is the meaning of life.
Nah. The meaning of life is having lots of friends.
I’m leaving Dublin tomorrow. I have so many friends here. More than have in NY.
Life is good.
Ruckus
@WaterGirl:
Sorry that I misunderstood the various comments.
So if we have a comment that we used the buttons to modify something that we now need to change, how do we do that and keep the same continuity of the comment?
It sounds like we can’t do that because we can not type any HTML codes.
And I actually get why this might be a good idea but then why can we use them (with the buttons) in creating the comment? One without the other seems out of character for the blog as it’s existed for a rather long time.
satby
@Yarrow: we were testing something. And thanks for the embed tutorial. I seldom share tweets here, so now it’s dangerous that I know that ?
WaterGirl
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism:
When the site is reliable and has formatting options, what reason would there be for not creating the comment within the website comment window? Going through all those steps seems illogical when commenting on a property functioning site. No?
Yarrow
@satby: It’s so easy with embed but that won’t be an option with the new site, which just sucks. So you’ve learned it for nothing. Well, useful for the next however long until the site launches.
WaterGirl
@chris: Laughing. I hope I didn’t offend you! Very sorry if I did.
satby
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: you would only need to comment and format in the same window.
I appreciate all of you as commenters more though, because a lot of you put way more work into it than I do.
J R in WV
@WaterGirl:
It would keep me from commenting at all, would it not?
AI at work, right?
NotMax
@NotMax
Am put in mind of a tag seen on some infant wear.
Or an old favorite from years past attached to those lemon-shaped containers for lemon juice: “Plastic lemon. Do not slice.”
:)
WaterGirl
@Bill Arnold: Yes, I did a bit of testing. I see that on the current BJ, everything is stripped out of the embed code except for text and links. That is edifying.
joel hanes
@WaterGirl:
you get a clickable link
underlined, with the URL shown as the link text, I assume.
I can live with that.
WaterGirl
@Yarrow:
This is a true statement.
JWR
@J R in WV:
Yes, this would be fine, and right in line with my original concern.
Yarrow
@WaterGirl: Find a tweet with a line break between one line and another. You’ll see it includes two br codes in brackets. It does not post that way–all lines run together. I have to manually add returns to make it render properly. Won’t be able to do that with new system. From what you say I don’t think we can use the embed tweet option at all. Sucks.
WaterGirl
@Planetjanet:
The new site will be using a different ad service. Thank dog for that.
WaterGirl
@joel hanes: In my test case, I typed chicagobears.com into the URL window of my browser, and up came the Chicago Bears site. I highlighted and copied the URL that came up:
https://www.chicagobears.com
And pasted it into the comment. It shows as color, not underline.
WaterGirl
@J R in WV: No it would not!
satby
@Another Scott: ok, so if you do your murderous red in a comment and think better of it, in the edit window you should see the HTML around the red words and be able to delete it. But no buttons to inset html is what I’m thinking.
JWR
@Yarrow:
Hmm. I’ve never tried that. I’ll look into it, even though I’ve never copy/pasted from a tweet.
Planetjanet
A million thank yous, WaterGirl.
WaterGirl
@NotMax: Ha!
Yarrow
@satby: No, there’s no HTML in either original comment box or in Edit. Also in Edit no buttons. So you’re screwed if you fuck up the formatting and don’t see it until after you post the comment. You can just delete the messed up part, I guess.
joel hanes
@WaterGirl:
Rembrandt, with occasional bad-tempered excursions to Durer.
Yarrow
@JWR: In any tweet there is a down arrow in the upper right corner. Click on that, two options–Copy link to Tweet and Embed Tweet. Choose Embed Tweet, it opens up the HTML, copy that and paste. It captures everything. Only issue is the line break like I said above and if it has too many links it doesn’t post.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@WaterGirl: Nope. Because there’s still the “comment disappears because the browser updated and you forgot to turn off the backspace == back button so-called feature” problem and the “cat walks across the desk and somehow manages to post the comment half-finished” problem and the “browser crashes and everything’s gone” problem.
I don’t trust browser-based anything, because I don’t trust browsers.
Half of the screaming over Gutenberg was for this same reason.
WaterGirl
@satby: edlin! I had completely forgotten about edlin!
chris
@WaterGirl: Not at all, I wouldn’t be much of a jackal if you did. Many thanks for all your hard work.
WaterGirl
@2liberal:
I am not seeing it – has someone else already released it?
Another Scott
@satby: That’s what I would hope would happen, and that’s what happens in the Edit window in the current site. You see the HTML tags that you can edit, and you don’t see the convenience HTML buttons. So, if you know a little bit of HTML, you can fix broken anchor tags, formatting, add text, and all the rest, in the Edit window even without the buttons.
As I understand WG’s comments, with the new site, we would not see the HTML tags (the tags are hidden from us) and we would not get the HTML buttons. So if we really messed up, it would be impossible to fix.
I hope that it actually will not work that way.
I understand the desire to not have to parse manually-entered HTML. But if we can only use buttons for HTML in the Compose window, then we really need to have them in the Edit window as well.
If we get the WYSIWYG rendering of the HTML in the Edit window then there would be a chance to fix things, but it would mean deleting the bad tags and text and re-entering them. A pain, but something we could live with. If, on the other hand, the Edit window doesn’t WYSIWYG render for us, then it’s broken if we can’t see and manipulate the HTML tags. And if it does WYSIWYG rendering, how would we fix URLs in Anchor tags if we can’t access the buttons or enter our own HTML???
I hope this is clear! :-)
Thanks again, WG.
Cheers,
Scott.
WaterGirl
@Ladyraxterinok: I remember that! I think I was involved in that conversation. When the new site comes up, maybe you use the search feature for that and find the original conversation? Then we could revisit the idea?
satby
@WaterGirl: he was also completely annoyed that we were installing Windows 3.1 because DOS worked perfectly well also.
This thread has me between Munch and Dali on the pain scale when I flashback to those happy conversations.
WaterGirl
@NotMax: I put cyrillic in the specs for the site, so yes, it is there and it is working.
Yarrow
@WaterGirl: I think John Cole posted about it on a front page post. There were comments about it on that thread.
WaterGirl
@Another Scott:
Yes, that’s very helpful. I appreciate that.
I would bet good money that says Cole will tell me this thread was a bad idea. But I’m an information sharer by nature, so what am I gonna do? ?♀️
Yarrow
@Yarrow: @Ladyraxterinok: @WaterGirl: Yes, it was a Cole post. Here’s the thread.
https://balloon-juice.com/2012/12/20/open-thread-1505/
Excerpt:
It’s from 2012, back when he still posted here.
WaterGirl
@Yarrow: If it was in a front page post, you can search for it now. If it was just in comments, that will come with the new site.
JWR
@Yarrow: Okay, let’s try this…
satby
@Yarrow: @Another Scott: she answered that at #155.
And while she and I were on the phone messing with tweets she also tried bolding a word and then in the edit window the *b*shows and she deleted it, fixing the formatting. So you see the HTML in the edit window and can remove it.
LOL FYWP saw through the quotes I was attempting to disguise the bold HTML with.
Yarrow
@WaterGirl: I’m remiss in saying I appreciate what you all are doing. It’s a very difficult job. Thank you. At least with today’s batch of complaints you’ll be prepared for the “WHERE’S MAH HTML???!!!” howls when the site goes live. You’ll can have your version of, “Suck it losers. You’ll get WYSIWYG and you’ll like it!” all ready to go.
NotMax
Will be joyful if after refreshing a page on the new site I find myself somewhere in the vicinity of where I was on the page before the refresh as opposed to the roll of the dice as to where one lands now.
Major Major Major Major
@NotMax: i think this is just because of embedded tweets, and I’m not sure there’s an easy way around it.
WaterGirl
@joel hanes: Special thanks to you and to anyone else who used the art pain scale, for some reason that is particularly helpful.
Everyone: if this is important to you, please add your location on the art pain scale. That will give me a better feel as to where people are on the html rebellion scale. :-)
My dogs and cats are all staring at me, and I just looked at the clock. No wonder I’m hungry!
I tried to respond to everything, but I know i did not manage to do that. At some point in the middle i lost my place, so at that point I started reading from the bottom up. I will read all the comments in the morning when I am fresh. If I missed responding to what you wrote, you can be assured that I will read (or re-read) what you wrote in the morning and I will try to address any unanswered questions in the next Ask Me Anything.
Yes, I really am dumb enough to do this again. :-)
Happy Sunday, everybody.
Yarrow
@satby: That is not what she said previously, at least not that I understood. In fact she told me because you could see how it looks in real time as you create your comment you don’t need any code editing options. You can get it right the first time before you post it. Which is ridiculous because everyone makes mistakes and needs to edit from time to time.
Edit: She is a front pager, so has HTML privileges. The rest of us will not. She should be able to see HTML in edit. We will not.
PLEASE can someone clarify what will be in the Edit comment box on the new site? Formatting buttons? No buttons? HTML code visible? No code visible?
Also, what does the “plain text option” that satby said was relevant in comment 155 mean? I understood that was a button option, which would only be available in the ORIGINAL comment box, not the Edit. And plain text just removes all formatting, right? It doesn’t bring up HTML.
NotMax
@WaterGirl
Haven’t clue one what you mean by art pain scale. Suffice to say it is important to me. Very important.
Yarrow
@NotMax: Go up to this comment by WaterGirl and click on the twitter link. There is an image of an “art pain” scale. Alternatively, here’s the link to the image:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/De_sL9qWkAAikBK.jpg
WaterGirl
Forgot to say thank you to everyone who participated. In spite of many of us commenting here day after day, over a period of years, we really all do use the site differently. I was reminded of that today, and I learned a lot!
Ruckus
@Yarrow:
I think I’ve got it.
1. There will be more than enough HTML buttons to get the comment looking how we want when we first type it out.
2. We will have a way to revert to plain text in editing our comment.
3. We will not have a way to change any HTML code other than #2 above.
I’ll get used to whatever in a bit after I see it. I’ve worked on so many different editors/word processors/layout programs/actual HTML/teletype coding and I’d bet I’m not close to what many have done, that I can adapt to whatever and I won’t stomp my wittle feet and complain. It’s a blog, we aren’t writing and editing War and Peace, it’s supposed to be a bit quick and dirty, first thoughts and all that.
satby
@Yarrow: while we were testing that she was logged in as a user to see the embed tweet function as users do. So she described the HTML in the edit window, I told her to delete it and save the edit, and the formatting disappeared. Can’t really make it clearer. No format buttons, html code from the buttons visible, ability to delete said visible html, no ability to insert new html.
NotMax
@Yarrow
This old fart don’t do Twitter. Ever.
On a 1-10 scale, I would rate it an 11.
jeffreyw
@NotMax: The courts have ruled that pain that has a redeeming social value is an art pain.
satby
@Ruckus: exactly!
NotMax
@jeffreyw
“I cannot define it. But I know it when I feel it.”
– Marquis de Sade.
:)
WaterGirl
@Yarrow:
You can probably get the formatting right the first time, but you are right, we all make typos etc that we don’t catch until the comment is posted.
For my testing on this, I have not been logged in to WordPress. So I see what you will see.
As things stand today:
– Formatting buttons are there when you are composing your comment.
– Your formatting shows instantly as you compose your comment.
– There is a button to remove all formatting or formatting in a particular part of your comment, in case something goes terribly wrong.
– Formatting buttons are not there if you edit your comment.
Ruckus
@WaterGirl:
That pain scale doesn’t go high enough.
I have levels 11 and 12 because of some migraines. I’ve only told them to a couple of docs, they have to be in the right frame of mind to hear them, they do involve more pain relief than normal #10 and real finality, #10 being just sedation. Besides if you go past 10 you probably can only scream, which normally just makes it worse. I told the totally dead pan doc who told me what an aneurysm is like when it bursts what #11 and 12 are, it at least got him to snicker. BTW I’m not repeating what he said. That’s too much information.
Another Scott
@WaterGirl: I guess I’m at Rembrant on the HTML/Editing stuff. Subject to change, we’ll have to see, etc., etc.
Thanks again.
Cheers,
Scott.
Another Scott
@WaterGirl: I need a concrete example.
What happens if:
You compose a beautiful post with a link in an anchor tag, a blockquote, and some text in Red Bold. Everything looks great. You hit the Post Comment button.
On looking at the comment on the page, you see, “OMG, I used the wrong URL for the link!, and I really need to get rid of that Red Bold text and make it [em]italic[/em] instead. And the Blockquote missed the last paragraph!”
You hit the Edit button. The Edit window comes up.
What do you see in that Edit window? What can you change? Can you change the URL to the correct one? Can you replace the Red Bold text with italic? Can you move the end of the Blockquote?
Thanks very much. :-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Yarrow
@WaterGirl: Thanks. I’m feeling particularly dumb here because I still don’t understand.
Is that button available in the original comment box, the edit comment box, or both?
That’s what is NOT there. What IS in the edit box? Are you editing the comment in wysiwyg format? Can you see the HTML? Satby says you can, but that’s not what I understood from you above.
One of you said in the Edit box you can delete HTML but you can’t add it. That seems weird because if you can see it you should also be able to add it. You can’t? Like, if you want to add a tweet to a comment in the Edit box, can you do the Embed Tweet and copy/paste into an Edit box then? Or is that prohibited?
What CAN you see in the Edit box?
Yarrow
@Another Scott: Great example. Those are the sorts of things I want to know. What CAN you see and do in the Edit box? I’m still confused.
Bill Arnold
@WaterGirl:
Probably, honestly, Courbet, with the occasional Munch
I can just mostly revert to plain text, ugly links, sparing on bold or italics, manual formatting where possible. Google will still index things every few hours hopefully.
JWR
@Another Scott:
That’s what I’ve been wondering and worrying about all thread long, but however it turns out, well, what can I say, except there’s always LG&M! ;-)
/ S N A R K!
Yarrow
Based on the lack of clarity on the Edit box issue, and my understanding that you cannot see HTML at all ever, nor can you edit HTML or add anything at any time using HTML code–not in the original comment, not in the Edit box–I am upgrading to Munch.
joel hanes
@Ruckus:
it’s supposed to be a bit quick and dirty, first thoughts and all that.
This audience and the audience at LGM are among the most difficult for which I’ve ever written.
(Both audiences comprise many educated, knowledgeable, snarky, competent writers)
There are times when I want to say something that seems important to me, and I want to get it _right_.
Maybe a better way of stating that is that I care, perhaps too much, what y’all think of what I write.
Once or twice a year I spend more than an hour writing and editing a single comment.
Steve in the ATL
@joel hanes: LGM is pedantry overload, and the nitpicking too often derails what were productive conversations.
J R in WV
@joel hanes:
If I can’t strike thru shit I want to strike out, I will be Ver unhappy.
Yarrow
@J R in WV: As it stands now, there will be a Strike button available for the original comment. If you realize you meant to Strike something and need to edit your comment, you will not be able to do anything to add the Strike back in. No buttons, no adding HTML. Get it right the first time.
joel hanes
@Yarrow:
Given that half my use of the strike format is to visibly retract things I got wrong, as explained in an ETA edit below the changed text. This will apparently no longer be possible.
NotMax
Belated thought on what buttons to add.
A snark button.
More than half serious about that – not to change the color but to change the font – either the size of the font just enough to be noticeable or else change the selected text into a different font altogether. If it gets abused from overuse, can always remove the button later on.
J R in WV
@WaterGirl:
Thanks, you’re sweet this evening !!
I try to not be hostile to regular posters, though if you appear to be trolling regular Democratic posters, I can go off.
But being able to edit comments in raw HTML [ or even just limited HTML allowed on the comments of B-J! ] makes that easier to back off of after you realize you’ve gone off on people.
Omnes Omnibus
@NotMax: What is the point of snark if you have to label it as snark?
Another Scott
@Omnes Omnibus: It’s a mystery…
;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Ruckus
@joel hanes:
You may have noticed that a lot of my comments are long. You might be amazed how much I often go back and cut before I hit post.
I like it here because we often have a lot to say and a lot of people who say things well. I just opened a twitter account because so much is said on there these days. Most of it is retweet and fluff but there is a lot of good stuff and it demands that you use brevity. Or link your tweets. Which I’ve not done yet. What is also does is basically shorten the entire conversation to a single thought, which is not always bad, but often is just not enough to do a concept justice.
WaterGirl
It appears that there are about 10 people on this thread for whom being able to manually enter your own html codes is a big Joe Biden deal.
A bit of breathing room while i think this through would be most appreciated! ~ WG
2liberal
@WaterGirl: re: releasing bad word post – it was released by another and is currently residing at #112
Origuy
@WaterGirl:
There’s a trick in iOS that is not widely known. If you hold down the spacebar, the keyboard fades and you can move the cursor in the edit window by moving your finger around on the screen. When you lift up, the cursor stays where you left it. Then you can press at the cursor position and get the Select option starting at the cursor. Otherwise it’s tricky to get the cursor where you want it.
LurkerLoo
Very late to comment. Based on what’s been discussed before I got here, would grade my response as Picasso to Munch, hovering mostly at Courbet.
No html for jackals is BFD for sure. More people than you may know type then copy/paste comments with code. Thus it’s not about need more options but about losing an option. Buttons may be easier for some, but harder for others.
Can you explain why it isn’t that simple?
It seems illogical to you; to others it’s perfectly logical, and often makes more sense. Some people start at the front page, others from a feed.
Colored text? For the love of g*d why? What does that add beside a headache to people trying to read it?
Which leads into a question about accessibility – have the developers checked to ensire the contrast rations of text to background meet the standards?
WaterGirl
@LurkerLoo:
Yes.
WaterGirl
@Origuy: I copied your instructions to try next time I have my iPad out. Thank you.
JaySinWA
@LurkerLoo:
I will reiterate my statement that Highlighting, (changing background color for text) would be much more useful than changing text color.
prostratedragon
A (ahem) music scale?
The trumpet player, J. Finlayson, is a relative of mine.
NotMax
@JaySinWA
That too could turn out to be a eye assaulting mess. Remember when each of the front pagers was assigned a different background color in their comments? Pages looked as if a packet of jellybeans had exploded.
JaySinWA
As to artsy fartsy pain, it depends. If Satby’s description of the edit box is accurate, along with being able to paste HTML formatted links from copy paste into the original comment box I am Rembrant-ish. If not, I get to Van Gogh or higher. Being able to delete HTML is good as long as you can’t break it by deleting closing tags, being able to move it around, close open tags or paste in corrected HTML would be better. Having all the editing tools the same as the original comment tools would be best for me, but I understand the utility of composing in another editor to drop in here.
JaySinWA
@NotMax: While it could be abused, the fact that someone would have to add it rather than it being dynamic would tend to limit its use. I would see 1-4 highlight background colors mimicking actual highlighters (I think Word does this).
JaySinWA
@JaySinWA: I also sometimes copy and paste parts of a comment’s text with quote tags to make clear what I am referring to. Will the original formatting from the copy be echoed in the paste?
NotMax
@JaySinWA
Multiple colors invites excessive use/abuse, methinks. One color only would be a livable compromise (strictly IMHO).
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
After sleeping on it, I’ve decided that the best workflow for the posting/editing combo as I currently understand it will be to simply delete all of the text in Edit, replace with “Error, ignore me”, and then paste the comment text into a new comment and try to get it right this time.
joel hanes
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism:
That’s perceptive and probably what I’ll have to do when I make a major goof.
joel hanes
If it _must_ be format buttons, and only format buttons:
1. Please, dear developers, make them _toggle_, so that if I click it once it turns that format mode on and visually changes the button so that I see that that format is on, and that if I click it again, it turns that format mode off and changes the button back. Please.
2. They should be present in both the comment entering box and in the comment editing box.
But whatever ensues, thank you for doing the thankless work of renewing this site’s implemetation.
Mo MacArbie
I lurk a day late, but add me to the folks who like to type internet while on the internet.