Endless Sphere 2.0 Preview - please provide feedback!

[neptronix]

I appreciate all the user testing we can get because working out kinks before the conversion is done is a lot easier than after.

We're about 2 days out on a fix for the user permissions issue.. until then the only way to test the forum would be to sign up as a new user and give it a spin... which isn't as convenient as we'd like.

Will let you know when it's possible again to login as yourself ( after a password reset of course ).

 

[neptronix]

Hey all, i believe we have fixed the permissions issue for previous accounts 100%. It turned out to be unexpectedly difficult to do this. You should be able to reset your password and have proper permissions to tests posts, etc.

Testing instructions on page #1 still apply - read it before testing.

We are moving the transition out to mid-january to allow for more members to provide feedback because we have received so little and think it could be that the previous process was less convenient than now.

We do not want the new forum to come as a sudden shock so please check out the updated preview site and give us your feedback!

 

[docw009]

Looks good to me.

 

[neptronix]

Thanks!

Everyone else: speak now or forever hold your piece! we have about 2 more weeks to collect public feedback before we hit the big red button.

 

[eee291]

Would love to have a dark mode.

 

[99t4]

Everyone else: speak now or forever hold your piece! we have about 2 more weeks to collect public feedback before we hit the big red button.

Sure will. Sent you a PM for help resetting my password in order to preview the new version.

 

[neptronix]

Everyone else: speak now or forever hold your piece! we have about 2 more weeks to collect public feedback before we hit the big red button.

Sure will. Sent you a PM for help resetting my password in order to preview the new version.

Oops sorry.
Changed on xenforo and sent a password reset

 

[mxlemming]

I logged on a few days ago, had a look around, all seems fine to me. I assume you got all the posts I flagged?

I say just jump over, worst case there are bug fixes and you have to jump back right?

 

[neptronix]

I logged on a few days ago, had a look around, all seems fine to me. I assume you got all the posts I flagged?

I say just jump over, worst case there are bug fixes and you have to jump back right?

I just checked them out, thanks for the laugh

Xenforo is a ~12 hour process to jump into so it would be pretty hard to take 2 x 12 hour downtime sessions..!!
I ain't kidding when i say our ducks must absolutely be in a row!

 

[jonescg]

I had a quick look - reminds me of an old motorbike forum I used to use in the early 2000s.

I can survive whatever the platform.

Cheers Nep!
Chris

 

[larsb]

I get this when clicking the new forum link.

I could login at first but when returning it doesn’t work.

 

[99t4]

Is there anything similar or gives the same utility as the round icons to the left of each topic title (in ES v1)?

For example, in ES v.1 I can easily skim the topics lists and open the red icons which will open the corresponding topics to the first unread post in each topic.

 

[larsb]

Thoughts:
- Would like a dark mode as several others already mentioned

- In threads the first line would be better as ”username Location” before headline in the posts (Larsb, Sweden) instead of profile pic since most want to be anonymous or haven’t uploaded a pic. The letters meaning nothing just clutters the view.


- userid location always shown would be an improvement, especially in the ”for sale” section where US ads mostly aren’t interesting for europe and vice versa.

- Wishing for a new category: ”Controller information, setup and fault finding” where all controller data and threads will be located. Today spread over all forum sections cause it doesn’t fit in any of the existing. Biggest problem in current ES in my opinion since the controller normally causes most issues, breaks first and confuses most.

- What’s the purpose of ”media”? Seems to be a hole to fill with whatever, remove maybe?

I shut my new ES page, clicked link to get in again but was directed to same error page as in earlier post. Is it only possible to go to the test site once per day?

 

[eee291]

A little flag would be nice like in the diy electric car forum.

 

[goatman]

+1 for dark mode

 

[neptronix]

Okay, quick and off the cuff because i'm slammed this week:

larsb: re logins: you need to login to the webserver again, see the front page for access details.
Yeah this isn't convenient but we need this extra security so that google doesn't start scraping it and thinking it's the new ES


99t4: The forum shows a similar red to indicate new posts in the category list but may not show this inside the category when listing the posts; this is something we can fix after the fact if it is not happening.


larsb re: profile pictures that are just a letter;
This is the default behavior for when users haven't uploaded profile pictures.
Only a small % of people have uploaded profile pictures on ES because the uploading is very difficult.
On Xenforo, the uploading is very easy and we expect this will be a more useful look in time.
We also don't have good location data for users, so replacing that with location wouldn't be an improvement

- For sale section is ultimately planned to be in a totally different format, so let's cross that bridge when we get there.

- 'Media' will become useful as the forum is populated with new posts; right now it's blank since it doesn't agregate past content.


Multiple people talking about dark mode:

Planned for sometime this next year once i've built a tool that performs operations on colors in CSS to automatically make a 'dark mode' version of an existing 'light mode' design.

We are due for another redesign when we switch to ebikes.com, which should be a more 'modern' design whereas the one you see for ES 2.0 was intended to balance of familiarity and modernity so that it wasn't a huge shock to the eyeballs after seeing ES1.0 look relatively the same for a decade.

Let's talk dark mode next year, i'd like to implement it but currently it would be a huge pain in the ass to do.

 

[larsb]

larsb: re logins: you need to login to the webserver again, see the front page for access details.
Yeah this isn't convenient but we need this extra security so that google doesn't start scraping it and thinking it's the new ES

larsb re: profile pictures that are just a letter;
This is the default behavior for when users haven't uploaded profile pictures.
Only a small % of people have uploaded profile pictures on ES because the uploading is very difficult.
On Xenforo, the uploading is very easy and we expect this will be a more useful look in time.
We also don't have good location data for users, so replacing that with location wouldn't be an improvement

1) I’m directly routed to the error page so i can’t login with ”espreview” and ”nepsentme” and this is the issue.
2) I know this is a default behaviour but the reason for most to be without profile pic is that they want to be anonymous - hence there won’t be more profile pics in xenforo. It’s especially useful being anonymous while building ES hotrods.. so my comment remains.

I would rather have ”larsb, location” as a simple text before posts than something else. Of course i’ll then miss some really nice profile pics like ianhill’s and tomjasz

 

[neptronix]

You may want to close your browser / try another / reload the tab.
All browsers i use ( desktop ) have the behavior of asking for the password again if you refresh.

Location data is lacking for a majority of most members, so we cannot put location data there instead of profile pics.

I don't think it's about anonymity. I mean.. my profile picture is a stator. You can be a stator like me and Fechter if you want.

Current profile pic upload requires you to know how to crop an image manually to a tiny size and then optimize that size to a certain KB.
Xenforo's upload is more like a social media site's - throw an image at it and the site will perform the optimization.

I expect more people to have profile pictures as a result of this and everything will work out, or your eyes will just adjust to it.

 

[eee291]

What am I doing wrong here?

 

[neptronix]

Sounds like it's expecting a certain format of URL and rejecting it..
It's possible that future updates will have fixed this.

On the list of things to deal with after the conversion

 

[neptronix]

Very good news sirs.
I've finalized the conversion process and the order things go in.


I'm hoping i can get you guys to do another quick test for me to determine if we really fixed permissions issues or not.

New test site here:
https://test.endless-sphere.com/xenforo

browser username / password is:
espreview / pikachu80

Login as yourself.. no tricks needed this time because permissions should be 1:1 with phpbb now.


Here's what i wanna know from this test:

1. Do you have proper user permissions?
2. Can you post?

I could use two regular users and a moderator to login and try to post.
No need to go further than that unless you want to.

If i can get results by saturday then i have everything i need to schedule the surgery. :thumb:

 

[A-DamW]

Looks like I can post, but I may have too many permissions.

I randomly clicked on chalo's user profile and i see a Moderator tools drop menu:


Was also able to warn a different user, sorry forgot the name, closed browser the tab.

 

[amberwolf]

At least this time I can correctly log in (I never was able to get that to work till now, even with previous instructions, even with the generic admin login, but it works perfectly this time with my own login).

I've been able to access the things I suppose a mod should be able to, but I can see a post from Adam above in the mod forum, so permissions are definitely not correct there.

THis page
https://test.endless-sphere.com/xenforo/index.php?members/&key=staff_members
doesn't list me, though it lists another mod. ? I do show as a moderator in the dropdown from my name at the top right of every page.

Can't check more stuff because now I just get this error on anything I do

Page could not be loaded
The requested page could not be loaded.

Check your internet connection and try again.
Certain browser extensions, such as ad blockers, may block pages unexpectedly. Disable these and try again.
XenForo may be temporarily unavailable. Please check back later.

Not related to that, some assorted niggles and stuff I found in a few minutes (took longer to write up) that you probably can't do anything about, at least not for this version. I'm sure there's more we'll run into as people use the new forum.


I don't see any way to tell which threads I've actually read vs unread, in this view (which is the main one I use). It may not be something you can fix, but thought you should know. I do not have any blocking of any kind setup on the test forum (I specifically disabled it all for that domain):
https://test.endless-sphere.com/xenforo/index.php?watched/threads
All icons, colors, etc appear identical even after I visit a thread via the date or time link on the far right and refresh this page. This means that if I am visiting the forum more than once a day (which is nearly every day) then to tell which ones I've already read to see if they had any new replies, I must re-open every thread for at least that day or that have "x minutes ago" on them, unless i keep track of how many minutes or hours ago it was I last visited each one, which is impractical at best.

ES 1.x uses both a large red page icon and a small red page icon at the left end of the post, which is itself a link to the last post (like the date or time is on the right end of 2.0), to indicate unread posts vs read ones which are a blue icon with a red star).


I can't find any way to show me a full member list (so I could sort it and do spam control, etc). Not even a "new member" list, for those joined since I last clicked it. There's a fairly useless box on the lower left of the members page showing icons with letters in them, but it has no info about them without clicking on each one.

When I do click them, I don't see any moderator tools to view spamcontrol info, or do any banning, be able to remove spam profile stuff (links, etc). What info there is is in separate tabs so it takes several clicks to get to info that used to be all on one page for any member (even for non-mods) on ES 1.x Personally, with all the blank space all over the member's profile page, I don't see a reason for tabs for this info; it would be better in one place.





It does not appear to be possible to simply edit a quote to remove extraneous bits when replying...if you do, it automatically breaks the quote into separate quotes wasting a lot of space instead of letting me just put "<snip>" in there, so I can quote just someone's relevant stuff and reply to that as needed. It ends up looking like I quoted a bit and didn't reply to it then quoted another bit and did reply to that.

I found a workaround to click the ... dropdown and "toggle bb code" to be able to just edit like here on ES1.x; not sure if there is an option to set this as a default anywhere.



I don't get what the "media" page is for, since it has nothing in it but i know I have probably thousands of images in posts, and there are probably many hundreds of thousands in total by everyone, not even including other document types--if it actually indexed those so they could be accessed for re-linking in new posts (like helping troubleshoot, etc), and that would be useful. New stuff I attach to posts in 2.0 don't show up there either. (1.x has a place to manage attachments, though it's not really useful because it offers no preview or thumbnail of each one).





EDIT: fixed the below, it requires the user to manually refilter the results in the New Posts link to include Unanswered, but it does work. (there is an option to save this as the default, but then there is no pure Unread page. But then the Unanswered filter can just be cleared with a click and refresh the page, so it isn't as hard as it could be. Would be better to have a pre-made link like 1.x does in Quick LInks dropdown for Unanswered, and one for Unread.

EDIT EDIT: Found there is actually a direct link for Unanswered threads, but ONLY if you are NOT in any of the forum / thread pages, but rather in say, a profile, or the media section, etc. When you're there, the word Forum at the top of each page gets an added dropdown arrow that doesn't exist when actually in the forum itself, and that dropdown has links not existing elsewhere that either should also exist elsewhere or the dropdown should exist everywhere.

I can't find a page to show the unanswered threads, ones with only the OP and no replies. I use this multiple times a day to help those that have not had any answers from anyone else. This is that page here on ES1.x
https://endless-sphere.com/forums/search.php?search_id=unanswered







Both Home and Forums tabs at the top always go to the same page
https://test.endless-sphere.com/xenforo/index.php
so there's no need to waste space up there with both.




Also, there's a few places where there are large non-optional areas of non-useful information for me, at least, that can't be removed by uBlock Origin or other page-modifying stuff I just quickly checked out, wasting a lot of screen space with info I don't need instead of showing me more info I could use. I haven't written it up because I don't expect it's something anyone else will care about, at least not enough to be worth all the work of changing (at least to make it optional per-user). If you think it would be helpful, I can write it up with screenshots, etc.

 

[neptronix]

ok if adamw was able to post in the moderator forum then i've shut test.endless-sphere down because we have a serious problem.

I looked through the settings for user permissions and everything appears correct.
It looks like the fix for everyone's permissions being bogged up from the beginning creates some extra phantom permissions which is not good.

Taking another run at the problem now.

 

[neptronix]

Ok folks, went a different route in fixing the user permissions.
This route should be solid.

other users/moderators, can you log in and see if your permissions are as expected?