Hawksquawk Updating from 4.0 to 4.1

[PSSSHHHRRR87]

I'm not searching through 7 pages worth of the posts to see if this has been brought up, but... donation thingy not working? And what about subscriptions?

[Admin]

I'm not searching through 7 pages worth of the posts to see if this has been brought up, but... donation thingy not working? And what about subscriptions?

Whoops I forgot that adding a plug in to one skin adds them to the others. I'm working on the v2.0 of our new skin and it's much faster and cleaner. Still the same basic look and feel but removing about 50% of the CSS that's slowing the site down. @JayBirdHawk will be happy to know that the updated layout will include the sticky Twitter bar on the right side of the screen like we've always had. 

Did you try making a donation? I just added that widget and I started to go through the process myself and it seemed to be working. You can choose to pay with PayPal or with Stripe. Memberships are now under the "store" but I'm still working on them so they might not be available just yet. 

BTW @PSSSHHHRRR87 you can search within the thread by using the search bar at the top of the page and choose this topic only.

[Admin]

All, much like the Death Star, the Hawksquawk store and donation center is now online and operational. Please let me know if you have any trouble with the system and as always thank you in advance for your support!

http://hawksquawk.net/community/announcement/14-hawksquawk-premium-memberships-donations/

 

[Admin]

Alright well the v2 skin is now live on the site. You should notice it responding much quicker and without as many bugs. There will probably still be issues and sorry @hawksfanatic still no BBCode but I think you all will be pretty happy with the changes. As always let me know if you see anything that doesn't look or behave properly. 

[TheNorthCydeRises]

I'm definitely becoming a financial supporter in the near future.  This is one of the best mobile friendly forums I've ever seen. From a guy who considers himself a perfectionist, I appreciate the time and effort you put in to get the site to everyone's liking.

 

[TheNorthCydeRises]

I see the update has eliminated a lot of the volt. Volt lettering against a black background  ( like with the Homecourt and Submit Reply tabs ) actually looks good, if you want to put the volt back in. 

But from a visual standpoint, this is a great look.

[Admin]

Well that is strange, I didn't get a notification from you @-ing me on this.

Strange it doesn't look like it actually did mention you that time @hawksfanatic .. and it appears it won't do it again. Damn I hate this new mention feature and how buggy it is! 

[Admin]

I see the update has eliminated a lot of the volt. Volt lettering against a black background  ( like with the Homecourt and Submit Reply tabs ) actually looks good, if you want to put the volt back in. 

But from a visual standpoint, this is a great look.

Thank you @TheNorthCydeRises I plan on adding more Volt green back in. I just wanted to get a base template online with the reduced code. I created this design from the base code built by the forum designers, whereas the initial new one was created off of a 3rd party modification and it just had waaaaay too much crap thrown in that wasn't necessary. This one should be much, much faster and that was my primary concern. Now I can tweak the colors to make them more Hawks 2016. 

[Admin]

Strange it doesn't look like it actually did mention you that time @hawksfanatic .. and it appears it won't do it again. Damn I hate this new mention feature and how buggy it is! 

My guess is that because there are about 100 names that start with 'hawks' in our member database that when it runs the query after starting to type your name that it is taking too long to come back with a response. But that's just me guessing.

Err scratch that. Here's how to make it work... start typing in the name and then hit TAB and it will show the list of possibilities. @hawksfanatic

[Admin]

I'm definitely becoming a financial supporter in the near future.  This is one of the best mobile friendly forums I've ever seen. From a guy who considers himself a perfectionist, I appreciate the time and effort you put in to get the site to everyone's liking.

 

Thank you sir! If you knew how many hours I've put into this moving things 1 pixel or trying to get the colors to compliment each other without being too obtuse then you'd see how much of a perfectionist I "try" to be with the site as well. 

The mobile skin does look pretty badass I think. 

[Admin]

This is the kind of stuff with the editor that I do not like. It should just be a tag around the name if I already know it. So I go with [ tag ] dolfan23 [/ tag ] as opposed to the sometimes it works @dolfan23 which it actually doesn't work if I type it quickly. If I slow down, start the @ then type I can slowly get the editor to recognize after typing three letters of the name ...... wait no. Apparently that isn't working at all for me at the moment.

Well the point of this is that most people don't know the users name or how to spell it properly so the person never gets tagged. With most people you won't have to hit TAB to get the auto complete but if it starts with a very common thing on here like "hawks" then it's having to look through a lot of members in the database. 

Try typing @dol then hit TAB and it should work every time. You love the keyboard so that should be fun for you! @hawksfanatic 

You can also type the @ symbol then hit TAB before you even type a letter of their name and then click back after the @ and start typing their name. 

[Admin]

Yeah, I was trying by hitting the tab after @ and it was not showing up my last post.

Arrgghh, I just did that and after a few seconds some options showed up. I didn't want to select any of them so I hit backspace aaaaand the I was sent back to the previous page. I hate this editor.

The annoying thing with this editor is that you have to make sure you're giving it focus. When you hit TAB it behaves like Windows does and it moves focus off of it. So after you hit TAB make sure that you click back on the text editor.  I think they said something about the focus issue being fixed on 4.1 but I'm not sure. 

[Admin]

Oh @Dolfan23 I also tried to use the "source" editor the other day. It was OK, but then whenever I attempted to go in and reply to another post my default editor was no longer "source" but back to the regular one. So even if I do get used to the html tags instead of BBCode tags, it doesn't matter much because I can't default to "source."

Yeah I don't think it's going to save 'Source' view as your preference.  I might be able to hack it though so let me take a look at it.  Just curious though when you say it doesn't matter and I don't mean it sarcastically but is it that big of a deal to hit the 'Source' button when you reply? 

[Admin]

It would be a transition like all the other times that the site has gone through some sort of a change. Probably after a month I will be used to it, although I am not a fan of the "source" option at the moment because html tags are more frustrating than the old BBCode.

I do know for sure that I will not be able to get used to the Windows-like guessing of the editor, which is why the BBCode option is the best for me. I used the old "source" editor on the previous site because of this reason and the site saved that option for me whether I was on desktop or mobile version of the site. So to go from being able to write up posts in such an intuitive fashion to now having this editor guess whether or not I am posting a YouTube video or a URL annoys me.

Edit: oh and trying to break up a quote into multiple parts right now? Freaking impossible.

Yeah I know that we've had a good bit of changes but it's almost 2016 and for us to just now switch away from something (BBCode) written in 1998 is quite a long time. This is also our first real editor change since 2007 when we moved to IP.Board. 

There might be a way to save the 'Source' editor as your preference but I will have to dig into finding a way. 

I just found a way to add "plug-ins" to this editor and added one that formats the code in the 'Source' view to give it proper breaks in the code. That should make it much easier to copy and paste code. 

@hawksfanatic just for reference, which BBCode's do you feel you absolutely need or used the most? 

[Admin]

I'm not sure what age of a piece of code/lanugage has to do with much, and I'm not saying this to be a curmudgeon/luddite. Isn't C++ one of the oldest computer languages out there? And yet, that is pretty much what financial traders code in exclusively because of its speed in executing financial trading algorithms. Getting the newest piece of code or data is something that infuriates me if the previous code is fine or if there is a reason for having data from 2000 instead of 2015 (data part has nothing to do with this, just a pet peeve dealing with database managers who insist that the latest data means the best data).

As for the BBCode, I think it's more or less that I liked being about to use that to do all the functionality in the editor. Inserting tweets, images, YouTube, URLs, and quotes with BBCode were simple an easy for me. All of those are overtaken by the current editor in some Word-like fashion which guesses at what I am trying to do instead of allowing me to explicitly state what I want. So it's not even that BBCode is what I want, I'd be happy with another simple code/language where I could dictate a tweet/video/quote through some simple tags. The guessing of this editor is the most frustrating part as I have attempted to insert a YouTube clip and it posts a URL...or I want to quote a post but then I can't insert any words after the quote....or I want to break up a quote into pieces....or the editor starts jacking up the font that I copy and paste from other sources (luckily, I've figured out ctrl+shift+v is a plain text paste)...

The age of the code in this instance is important because the HTML standard changed to 5 within the past 2 years, where it had previously been HTML 4 for nearly 2 decades (since 1997). That's the whole purpose of BBCode. It wasn't to simplify typing code into an editor even if that was a feature of it, it was meant to make it possible to have your text formatted with bold, underline, emoticons, etc. without admins allowing users to type in HTML code which could be very dangerous for the site to get hacked. It's now 2015 and most people expect responsive design and they want data returned without page refreshes and all sorts of other things that jQuery, HTML5, CSS 3, etc. are bringing to the web that just weren't available before. They want web page copy to have proper paragraphs and proper paragraph headings. On the admin side of things that's extremely important for SEO. You may not think that's important but I assure you that it is. BBCode was created simply because it was the only way of even remotely making posting comments unique for the users. HTML is far more powerful and while it may not be as fast for people who prefer typing code, it's the best way to translate what's in a persons head to the page. You have an enormous amount of options now by being allowed to type in HTML in the code editor that you just couldn't do before. You can actually put in tabular data and have it look the way you expect it to look. Having tables that make sense instead of seeing stats copied and pasted from a table to a BBCode editor makes it unreadable as nothing lines up properly. Quite frankly learning basic HTML should be very easy for you and while it may not be as quick as BBCode, I would think the power of it should be more than enough for you to want to transition to it. Honestly there's not that much difference in typing in < b >TEXT < /b > vs [ b ] TEXT [ /b] either.. assuming that switching to and from the 'Source' view isn't that big of a deal and that it works properly.

Inserting Tweets, Images, YouTube, URLs are all easier now as you don't have to type anything but the URL and the editor should automatically parse them. Again this is a 4.0 version of the software and they know that the editor had some parsing bugs. So getting frustrated by it right now isn't worth it since it likely won't be an issue soon. 

[Guest]

Again @Dolfan23  thanks for all you do.  And major thanks for addressing our concerns in such a timely manner and all for FREE!

 

Squawkers, please keep donating so we can keep this site ad free.

[Guest]

Oh @Dolfan23 - the chat surprise sounds more like a rooster that a Hawk but it had the desired effect - scared the crap out of a couple Squawkers like @Spursfanpeacemaker, he screamed like @kg01 (a girl).

Edited October 26, 2015 by JayBirdHawk

[Guest]

@Dolfan23  You mentioned previously about changing how at @lethalweapon3 will submit his game day sermon.  Is it still so? 

Speaking of game day threads - I can't wait for the 1st one of the season that's tomorrow  - I hope lw3 is ready - IT WILL BE EPIC!!!

[Admin]

Again @Dolfan23  thanks for all you do.  And major thanks for addressing our concerns in such a timely manner and all for FREE!

 

Squawkers, please keep donating so we can keep this site ad free.

The site will always be ad free for Hawksquawk Supporters. That will definitely never change. 

Thanks to everyone who's providing feedback on the site and I'm always wanting to make it look and behave the way that you all want it to... assuming it's something I can affect at least. 

[Admin]

@Dolfan23  You mentioned previously about changing how at @lethalweapon3 will submit his game day sermon.  Is it still so? 

Speaking of game day threads - I can't wait for the 1st one of the season that's tomorrow  - I hope lw3 is ready - IT WILL BE EPIC!!!

I am working on that right now. It's a pretty big addition to the site so there's a bit of a learning curve but it's coming along. It will make things a lot easier for him and others who are writing articles for us to write them and have them show up as topics. Just like you I am looking forward to seeing his awesome game day threads again!