Forum functionality issues

[kphoger]

I don't remember exactly what it was that caused Baloo Uriza to get banned.

Legal threats.

Threats of a DMCA takedown notice?   

[Scott5114]

"Threat of legal action by a banned user"

Hmm, I wonder if this bit I saw when the forum was closed gives a clue to said user


EDIT: Never mind, it was mentioned above.

I must know, where did you find that?

One of the things that was broken during the downtime was the news function, so I used that as a test message (it was the first thing that came to mind, and I thought it'd give people a chuckle if they were looking at it).

[formulanone]

Should we report every time a 'loo appears in a past discussion, or is that not necessary?

(I try to avoid making fun of names, but dirty tricks get what they deserve.)

[kphoger]

Clicking the global "mark all posts as read" on my end does not mark the whole forum as read, it seems there are a few topics (like this one) that refuse to get counted as being "read".

Some added information, not sure if this has been mentioned yet:  when I click on the [NEW!] button of a topic in the list, it takes me to the most recent post still marked as [NEW!] in the thread—not the post most recent post in reality.  Just in case anyone was wondering.

[Scott5114]

Should we report every time a 'loo appears in a past discussion, or is that not necessary?

(I try to avoid making fun of names, but dirty tricks get what they deserve.)

If it's one of his posts, or a quote of one of his posts, yes, we need to know about that so we can destroy it.

[Hunty2022]

What years was the user on the forum?

[Scott5114]

What years was the user on the forum?

We are not going to discuss him because next he'll threaten to sue us for that too.

[Amaury]

Legal threats.

That's certainly an interesting one. Banned for that about two years ago and then tries it again two years later or tries to actually follow through with it two years later, if I've been reading everything correctly. I don't know about this situation here specifically and won't ask for details—and even if I did, I know I wouldn't be able to get anything specific, just the general stuff that's been mentioned here already—but I know people get blocked on Wikipedia for the same thing, and from every case I've seen, at least, it's used solely for scare tactics. I know there's even a WP page for that, I just can't remember the name of it off the top of my head.

But that's all I'll say on the matter. I wasn't here then, anyway.

[Quillz]

I'm not sure what legal standing this user even has. It has generally been ruled that forums and their operators are not responsible for the content posted on them. So any posts he made are his own, and legal threats will almost certainly be shot down should he actually try. Granted, it might be more expensive to hire a lawyer of your own and potentially go to court.

[Max Rockatansky]

He didn't.  The host just was looking for the easiest way to make him go away.

[minneha]

I've seen quotation marks, apostrophes, and some other punctuation be displayed as special characters, such as in this thread:

https://www.aaroads.com/forum/index.php?topic=7515.50

[ZLoth]

What years was the user on the forum?

We are not going to discuss him because next he'll threaten to sue us for that too.

I've dealt with enough "he who shall not be named" types over the years to know that a. I don't want to know any details, and b. I won't ask. And my experience goes back to the Fidonet BBS days.

[Max Rockatansky]

I generally appreciate having names, even if just mentioned in private.  That way I know who deny entry to, preemptively block or remove from the groups I manage. 

As an example a "roadside certain shrubbery enthusiast" recently re-emerged on a Facebook group.  Given what I was as told about the malefactor in question I took steps to prevent them from discovering my presence.

[NE2]

Rhymes with Small Conson.

[J N Winkler]

I have been skimming my old posts, and I note continuing issues (probably encoding-related) with the following:

*  Degree symbol

*  Curly apostrophe

*  Curly double quotes

*  Section symbol (often used in MUTCD cites)

*  Various Western Latin extended characters (generally rendered with leading Ã, which is typically a sign of a two-byte UTF-8 sequence being misparsed as two separate characters in ANSI/ISO-8859-1 or related encodings)

Strangely, some posts (such as this) have mojibake for Western Latin but correct rendering for Chinese characters.  Others have also observed correct rendering for UTF-8 emoji and Eastern Latin characters.

I suspect a fix targeted just to misparsed characters that exist in ISO-8859-1 may be all we need to fix the encoding issue definitively.  However, I haven't checked whether this reasoning applies to special dashes like the three-byte em-dash in UTF-8.

[bandit957]

Please post any functionality problems you encounter or other Forum software issues you note. We will use the input to better address the errors the recent database changes made.

On some threads, the yellow "NEW" symbol appears even though I've already read the thread.

[Henry]

Please post any functionality problems you encounter or other Forum software issues you note. We will use the input to better address the errors the recent database changes made.

On some threads, the yellow "NEW" symbol appears even though I've already read the thread.

Even on the front page and select pages with subsections (such as General Highway Talk and Off-Topic), all the green arrow lights are on, no matter what section I've visited. But I've had no problems with the "NEW" symbols on the threads I just read.

[Alex]

I suspect a fix targeted just to misparsed characters that exist in ISO-8859-1 may be all we need to fix the encoding issue definitively.  However, I haven't checked whether this reasoning applies to special dashes like the three-byte em-dash in UTF-8.

If there is conversion for characters from one to the other, a series of queries on the database could clean up some of this.

[Jim]

For me, the main thing I've noticed is that nothing seems to stay marked as read, whether from me actually reading it or hitting the "Mark All Message As Read" link.  I see some mentions of related things above but I didn't notice any that mentioned this issue exactly.

Thanks to all who are putting in what I'm sure is massive amounts of time to deal with this.

[vdeane]

One small change I've noticed - and I say "change" because I haven't fully judged whether it matters enough to the forum experience to be an "issue" - previously, after clicking on a board, then back to the home page, the green arrow next to that board would turn gray, to represent that board having been viewed. Now, the arrow remains green even after clicking on and off a board several times. My guess would be that the arrow will still turn gray, but only after each individual thread in that board has been viewed, although I haven't tested this yet.

This is just straight-up broken, unfortunately; once lit the green arrow never goes off. There's obviously something stuck in some table or another that isn't supposed to be there, but finding out which table and what needs to be removed is tricky.

When I was browsing earlier, I actually did have one go away.  That said, the only ones that were capable of going away at the time were OT and GHT.  It seems that whatever makes them go green or yellow works fine, it's just whatever should turn them gray isn't.  Or at least it was at the time.  Marking topics as read was working fine then, so who knows if that's changed?

For me, the main thing I've noticed is that nothing seems to stay marked as read, whether from me actually reading it or hitting the "Mark All Message As Read" link.  I see some mentions of related things above but I didn't notice any that mentioned this issue exactly.

Thanks to all who are putting in what I'm sure is massive amounts of time to deal with this.

Let's hope they get that one fixed.  I can deal with the arrows not working correctly, but not having topics get marked as read correctly completely breaks how I browse the forum.

EDIT: Incidentally, threads seem to take momentarily longer to load now.  Not sure if that's related to all this or not.

[CovalenceSTU]

I suspect a fix targeted just to misparsed characters that exist in ISO-8859-1 may be all we need to fix the encoding issue definitively.  However, I haven't checked whether this reasoning applies to special dashes like the three-byte em-dash in UTF-8.

If there is conversion for characters from one to the other, a series of queries on the database could clean up some of this.

I linked it upwards in the thread; accents are bit more complicated (as there's more of them and they use two-character codes) but this covers the punctuation:

Code Select Expand


" = left quote  = "
"  = right quote = "
"˜ = left single quote  = '
' = right single quote = '
– = en dash = –
— = em dash = —
- = hyphen   = -
... = ellipsis = ...


[hotdogPi]

I can now read posts again.

[Hunty2022]

And so can I, but I still have two "removed" posts.

[74/171FAN]

I can now read posts again.

Yes, and the arrows are no longer green on unread boards.

[TempoNick]

User threatened DMCA to remove all his posts. Forum was down, and they were all removed via script. This caused some threads to no longer have a most recent post, breaking things. To fix it, some issues regarding non-ASCII encoding happened.

I would have thought that the terms of service cover that. If you post here, it's public domain. At least that's the way most social media works.