ePlaya 2018 Updates

[trilobyte]

I am very pleased to announce that at long last, and after a couple false starts, we have finished a bunch of updates to ePlaya for 2018. All in all, in the last week the site software, our custom style, and more than 18 extensions were updated. Under the hood, there are a number of improvements to help with speed, stability, and security. Mostly technical stuff like PHP versions, symfony and ajax and whatnot... but in the way of things that are meaningful to us....

• Emojis - people can now use standard (aka unicode) emojis from their phones, tablets, or computers. !
• Clever Quotes - quotes got a wee bit smarter. When you quote somebody's post in a thread, it adds a link to jump back to that post, as well as the date of the post that's being quoted.
• Search User's Topics - when you're looking at a user's profile, you can now search a user's topics (as well as search the user's posts). That can be handy especially with some of the more active veteran users who may have quite a few posts under their belts
• Style Update - We now use CSS driven icons from FontAwesome, which give us retina quality icons on high resolution displays and considerably improving the speed of page loads for everyone.
• Improved Notifications - they now work faster and more efficiently, and reduces posting time.

At the moment, the installation is complete but the site is a little slower than usual while we re-index the search. Since we've got a lot of content, that will take a little while to finish, but should wrap up later today in the next day or two... and then the board should be noticeably faster - especially if you're connecting on a mobile device.

Huge thanks to trailblazer and everyone on the tech team who helped us get all our in a row for this update. And thanks to everyone who's had to put up with site downtime over the last week.

I have noticed a couple small issues, specifically some formatting that doesn't look great on phones. If you see something that doesn't look right or that you think is misbehaving, post about it below. Use a screen shot if you can, and please include any info on what kind of device you're experiencing the weirdness on (iphone, galaxy s7, laptop, toaster oven, etc).

[BBadger]

I'm seeing a couple visual issues with the new update to the site:

1) An out-of-place gap of space above the section title links (e.g. "Rideshares & Resource Sharing"). They really ought to line up in the same manner as the topics do.

2) While there are high-quality CSS icons now, the images to the left of topics (e.g. the light bulb/circles icons) are still the original images. When they're scaled, they look pixelated. The images should probably not be scaled as they aren't in the forum links in the upper section in the screenshot.

visual_issues.png

[motskyroonmatick]

I just went through all my messages and noticing about all of them were duplicated I proceeded to check box every other message to delete the repeats and it turns out both the original and duplicates were deleted as I did this. I'm not to disturbed by the loss of those messages but another Eplayan might be. Maybe this could be checked out.

[trilobyte]

Are these messages sent or received recently, or is this the first time you've checked them in a while? There was a known issue in the fall with inbox duplication, but my understanding is that part was resolved months ago, and the lingering issue with receiving two notification emails for a private message has been resolved in the most recent update.

[BBadger]

Can an explicit new line be added between the name of the last post author and the "View to the latest post" lines, as depicted below. It'll make it easier to read and tell that there is a link there.

On another note, can the links on forum indexes be made easier to identify? They look like all the other surrounding text. Change their color, underline them, or do something with them, not just add a hover effect.

eplaya_line_return.png

[BBadger]

There seems to be some inconsistent wrapping in the forum topics listings, especially where the dates are shown. There is a lot of extra horizontal room in the column, and the site width is fixed; why is it allowed to wrap at all?

2018-06-21_231559.png