A few site updates

We’ve made a few small updates to the web site worth mentioning. Seeing layout problems? Try reloading / clearing your browser cache.

• If you’re reading this, you’ll already have noticed the new blue banner at the top of the page. This is a bit overdue as we’ve used the blue banner at RISC OS shows for a while now!
• The bounty pages now give a clearer indication of percentage of funding towards target (or even over target in some cases!)
• The default “recent posts” feed for the forum now excludes Aldershot and Tests. Those two have their own feed, at https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/posts?tests_and_aldershot=yes or, for RSS readers, https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/posts.rss?tests_and_aldershot=yes.

Edited next day to add:

• Bug tracker ticket search indicates found tickets’ or comment’s associated ticket status, along with using strike-through for “fixed”, “won’t fix” and “invalid” – example at https://www.riscosopen.org/tracker/search?q=HAL

Edited a day later to add:

• Footer updated to same style as new header; About and Contact links moved there
• Header items link to Root
• This allows the main navigation bar to be simplified a lot; Documentation renamed to Library as that “feels” a bit more RISC OS and old school :-D

To me this clean design is an improvement.

As Paul says, cleaner look is good.

I notice that the Textile reference link has changed to a working page.
Maybe that specific sentence, See also the Textile reference here. should be bold to attract more attention ??

The default “recent posts” feed for the forum now excludes Aldershot and Tests. Those two have their own feed, at https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/posts?tests_and_aldershot=yes or, for RSS readers, https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/posts.rss?tests_and_aldershot=yes.

So, without exception, we should be good neighbours and move the irreverent and irrelevant stuff to Aldershot. OK

Those two have their own feed

It’s a good idea to separate for those who aren’t interested in the “other stuff”.

Would it be possible to have a everything=yes option for the old behaviour? I access this site from a pinned bookmark.

I notice that in NetSurf (a RISC OS browser) the top-right “Contact us” can be overlapped by the “Log in” or “Account” link which apparently renders it unuseable if you don’t realise the effect of widening the window.

It caught me out momentarily on my 1728 × 972 screen until I twigged. Probably unimportant practically, but should a screen-width dependent item be on the same line as fixed width links?

I have no idea what happens on phones.

Is the combination of Aldershot & Tests intended as punishment for those that engage in chit-chat or would it be possible to separate those too? Not sure repeated ‘perhaps it will work this time’ equivalent posts will often be of interest to other than the poster.

Not a problem with an RSS reader but on a web browser & phone?

Is the combination of Aldershot & Tests intended as punishment for those that engage in chit-chat or would it be possible to separate those too?

I saw it more as a service to the part of the community that isn’t overly interested in chit-chat. Those of us that are interested should, of course, assist by moving said chit-chat to Aldershot.
That I think ends that bit.

I think you missed the point. Nevermind.

The ‘Recent posts’ change is the best thing ever. Thanks Andrew.

I was tempted to try it myself, so flicked through the code in SVN a while ago – but I didn’t really know where to start!

Maybe that specific sentence, See also the Textile reference here. should be bold to attract more attention ??

People don’t really seem to have trouble finding details on the whole. Don’t think I need to be more shouty!

So, without exception, we should be good neighbours and move the irreverent and irrelevant stuff to Aldershot. OK

Kind of… But there aren’t any hard and fast rules, just preferences. I don’t think it would be a good community “feel” to berate people if a thread wanders off-topic (as they almost always seem to!), but of course we’d already politely suggest something that’s off-topic for any forum from the get-go be moved to a more appropriate location anyway, regardless of yesterday’s site update.

Would it be possible to have a everything=yes…

Personally I really don’t use those links and am surprised people do; I just browse forums showing new posts as interest takes me. But since there’s a request to have an old “absolutely everything” list and since that’s easy – done!

• https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/posts
• https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/posts?tests_and_aldershot=yes
• https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/posts?everything=yes

…and as usual put .rss after /posts for RSS feed versions of all of the above. If you try hacking and add both query string parameters (don’t do that) then you’ll find that Altershot/Tests takes priority just because of the if…else order in the code.

I notice that in NetSurf (a RISC OS browser) the top-right “Contact us” can be overlapped by the “Log in” or “Account” link

There’s not much I can do about this and it behaved like that previously. NetSurf is ignoring simple CSS min-width declarations and is not correctly wrapping a floated inline block. The minimum usable width as a result is about 920px, but like I say, that’s very hard to work around given it seems to be a collection of both quite basic CSS omissions or implementation bugs, and what appear to be simple float layout handling problems. It is difficult to find workarounds that might dance around today’s NetSurf issues without breaking all the other browsers or failing with older or even newer NetSurf versions,, so while I recognise it’s rather unsatisfactory, the standing recommendation for the updated site is the same as it was for the prior design – make the window a bit wider! Sorry…

EDIT – note followup post later, I was wrong about the above NetSurf capability issue.

If it makes you feel any better, recent macOS updates rolled out Safari 17.3 across a whole bevvy of still-supported operating systems and my goodness, what a mess of bugs that is. A really shocking release, even by modern Apple’s rotted-software-everywhere standards. HTML, CSS, JS technologies are just far, far too huge and complex now to implement at all reliably so there are bugs in everything and really you just have to kind of strap in, hold on, and hope that the site you want to use just about works.

Is the combination of Aldershot & Tests intended as punishment

Of course not, but what would be the point of a collection of links underneath the forum list where some of them were just for a single forum anyway? That’s what the table above already provides.

IMHO the new look is a great improvement, and a welcome update of RISC OS Open’s public face – well done!

Do the feeds for the RSS buttons on the Aldershot & Tests pages need changing?

and am surprised people do

Quickest way to look at specific stuff on mobile. There’s a quick link for here, one for El Reg, one for The Guardian, and one for my Pi (gives the current outdoor temperature – 5.8°C).

As it turns out, Android Chrome is following in the grand tradition of lame arse programming from Google.
You can’t add suggestions to the quick links, it bases it upon the frequency of recent use or something, it is not capable of telling that “?everything=yes” is different (but, then, you can’t edit it either, so I’m going to have to do it manually until it updates itself).
Oh, and the top formatting is wrong (banner too narrow) but I wouldn’t waste any time on it as Chrome automatically always tries to resize stuff because it knows best (no, it really doesn’t).

Firefox? Editing the bookmark disassociated it from the shortcuts, so simply delete the existing shortcut, open the new one, then choose to pin it as a shortcut. It changes place, but otherwise was kind of stress free (unlike Google’s mess).

Anyway, thank you!

A really shocking release, even by modern Apple’s rotted-software-everywhere standards.

;)

Glad I’m not the only one to perceive it as style over substance.

Glad I’m not the only one to perceive it as style over substance.

The only thing to be said in Apple’s favour is that it’s a tad less dreadful than Microsoft.

style over substance

“Apple Inc.” is a shorter description

But since there’s a request to have an old “absolutely everything” list and since that’s easy – done!

Thank you. I tend to like poking through Aldershot so having a single link is something I appreciate.

I notice that in NetSurf (a RISC OS browser) the top-right “Contact us” can be overlapped by the “Log in” or “Account” link which apparently renders it unuseable if you don’t realise the effect of widening the window.

Looks like I misspoke on this John – max-width was being honoured but I had a bug in the CSS. There has always been a float problem in the navigation bar, but I’ve shaken out the issues and restructured things to make it work in NetSurf with some word wrapping and perform well in other browsers, with no need for workarounds or hacks – in fact I was able to remove an older NetSurf workaround related to alignment.

So, happily, that is now fixed even though I didn’t expect it to be!

Do the feeds for the RSS buttons on the Aldershot & Tests pages need changing?

No. Individual forums always had their own post feeds.

That’s my point. Stopped working… here at least. The other forums fetch fine.

That’s my point. Stopped working… here at least. The other forums fetch fine.

Ah, thanks, unintended consequences. Turns out the collated by-user or by-forum post lists and feeds all run through the same code and I hadn’t realised that was going on, so was then always adding by-default “not aldershot or tests” filters. Obviously, then, for both Aldershot and Tests, the per-forum feeds returned nothing.

I’ve fixed the bug – your feed will be working again now.

conditions = []
[:user_id, :forum_id].each { |attr| conditions << Post.send(:sanitize_sql, ["posts.#{attr} = ?", params[attr]]) if params[attr] }
conditions = conditions.any? ? conditions.collect { |c| "(#{c})" }.join(' AND ') : nil

if conditions.nil?
  if params[:tests_and_aldershot] == 'yes'
    conditions = "(name = 'Aldershot' OR name = 'Tests')"
  elsif params[:everything] != 'yes'
    conditions = "name != 'Aldershot' AND name != 'Tests'"
  end
end

(Also sorry about the constant server restarts; Production mode caches all code and layout fragments on application startup, so layout and code changes require a down-up cycle).

The width issue on NetSurf is fixed now.

There is a little new issue, the ‘Home’ and ‘Documents’ headings in the menu bar are missing, as seen on any browser.

edit Missed this addition to the original announcement.

Edited a day later to add:

Footer updated to same style as new header; About and Contact links moved there
Header items link to Root
This allows the main navigation bar to be simplified a lot; Documentation renamed to Library as that “feels” a bit more RISC OS and old school

edit2 ‘Home’ is a click on the top ROOL banner.

Thank you for the overall change. It is good to be able to easily avoid Aldershot.

Yes, redundant links are gone. The Photos section was so outdated that it didn’t seem worth keeping but I must remember to provide a link in content elsewhere, at least, for archive purposes. EDIT: Added to the intro paragraphs of About Us.

The hard-to-read OPEN on the light background is NetSurf-specific due to not supporting a few higher level CSS things. At some point I want to try and get a shadow that I’m applying via CSS filter baked into the image, but getting the metrics of that and the sizing “just right” is unreasonably time consuming so I’ve just left it as-is for now. In wider viewports, NetSurf “moves” the darker area of the background underneath “OPEN” and it is easier to read, but it does need fixing.

Not particularly important, but since there is stuff happening to the site:

Should probably remove the links to Beast and Rick Olson down the bottom right, as both are non-existant domains these days. And I would imagine Josh Goebel learned the hard way that a mailto: on public sites wasn’t ever going to be a good idea…
Oh, and in various places, http → https. Like in the “About us” page, for instance. Bottom banner to Arachsys ¹ and Rails.

¹ Arach…nids. Obvious really. ;)

Oh, and in various places, http → https.

On the basis that most browsers complain when you click a link that launches an insecure item from a secure one, although Arachsys doesn’t seem to have an HTTPS