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Re: Forum News discussion/feedback thread

Posted: 26 Apr 2020 23:05
by Aevas
Ser wrote: 26 Apr 2020 21:57I think it would be good to elaborate on the purpose of personal threads. Did you grab that idea from the UniLang forum? At UniLang, there is a difference between personal threads and conversation threads, but it isn't clear to me whether you're replicating that here...

At UniLang personal threads, people post questions they have about the L2 (in the L2 or English) to get answers/opinions, and also journal-like entries of one-three paragraphs for which they welcome corrections (including thorough/detailed corrections if someone has the patience for that). The advantage of allowing people to post questions in these threads is that they can get answers/opinions in English, and also some people just feel more comfortable asking them here than in general question threads.

Meanwhile, in conversation threads, people only speak in the L2, generally about any topic (including, sometimes, people's questions about the L2 or observations people of make about grammar/vocabulary they see in chats/newspapers/etc, and such metalinguistic things). In those threads, corrections are usually kept low. Also, conversation threads usually have lower activity than personal threads and general question threads (not sure why, maybe some strange things about comfortable feelings again).
I did not get the idea directly from there, no, but indirectly it's not impossible that it influenced the thought process (I don't think I've been on that forum in over 10 years now).

I think that your descriptions fairly accurately depict what I had in mind with the thread types. It's probably also a good idea to specify this better in the info thread!
Ser wrote: 26 Apr 2020 21:57I'm just asking about clarifications. I think it's an interesting idea to have a section for language learning.
As so often with new forums, it's a bit of an experiment and not entirely set in stone yet! This is my attempt to merge the spirit of the Other Languages section into the Main section, to see if something new can grow out of it 🙂
Ser wrote: 26 Apr 2020 21:57That said, I've noticed conlangers in general tend to not actually learn languages much, probably because general typology is much more important for the hobby than depth in one language or a few languages. I sometimes feel like a bit of a stranger in conlanging chatrooms or such groups because I actually try to learn various of the languages I give examples about... There's a thread on the ZBB for practising languages, and at any given time it is usually the same relatively few people that participate.
I can relate to this, to a certain extent. Although (sadly) I associate it more with linguists than with conlangers, personally. My impression is still that a lot of conlangers, and members on here, do study languages quite a bit (the Language practice thread has had quite a diverse amount of contributors over the years). But I also get the impression that many of our members do their language learning elsewhere, and don't really see this as a place where they could practice and get help. Which is a shame, because we have quite a lot of competence on that matter. For instance, I've always preferred having conlangers or linguists to help me out with foreign languages, because they're actually able to explain things in a more technical way. Trying to get the same information out of native speakers with no linguistic interest can often be quite frustrating, by comparison...

Re: Forum News discussion/feedback thread

Posted: 27 Apr 2020 00:30
by Salmoneus
• Personal threads for practicing a certain language.
→ Threads should be titled <[Username] – [Language]>; e.g. Aszev – Français.

• Question threads for a specific language.
→ Threads should be titled <[Language] Question Thread: Questions about [Language]>, where the second part is in the language in question (but this can be added later if the thread starter is unfamiliar with the language); e.g. French Question Thread: Questions sur le français.

• Conversation threads in a specific language. In these threads, English should be avoided.
→ General conversation threads should be titled <[Language] Conversation Thread | [Language] Conversation Thread>, where the first part is in the language in question.
→ Threads with specific topics should be tagged with the name of the language used in brackets before the actual title; e.g. [Français] Thread title
Or, to summarise the basic sentiment here: "fuck off, don't even think about posting here".

Great, every thread has to complete a form saying which of the small number of distinct, clearly-defined Permissable Essential Purposes it will be fulfilling, and must then carry its papers, properly labelled in triplicate to an entirely arbitrary set of regulations, ready for police inspection, and heavens help it if it's used a colon where it should have used a pike...

Well, congratulations to us on really managing to nail that "Pandemic lockdown" aesthetic and translate it into the medium of forum posting!



-----

Aszev: I appreciate that you still have access to everybody's posts. But conventional etiquettte is to warn people in advance when you're deleting people's posts, so that they can take whatever actions they feel appropriate. Saying, if you'll excuse the unceremonious paraphrase, "Fuck off I'm in charge, everything here belongs to me and I'll take it from you if I want to - but don't worry, I might give some back if I feel like it, so it's OK!" is of course your privilege as the owner, but it does rather set a certain tone...

Re: Forum News discussion/feedback thread

Posted: 27 Apr 2020 00:39
by elemtilas
Aszev wrote: 26 Apr 2020 23:05As so often with new forums, it's a bit of an experiment and not entirely set in stone yet! This is my attempt to merge the spirit of the Other Languages section into the Main section, to see if something new can grow out of it 🙂
Makes sense. I guess my main question is: what were the original intention of that sub forum (back in the Beginning) and what is the overarching intention of the subforum, especially given that all the old threads have been copied there?

It's not entirely clear to me from your post in FNT what the differences are!

Salmoneus wrote: 27 Apr 2020 00:30 Or, to summarise the basic sentiment here: "fuck off, don't even think about posting here".

Great, every thread has to complete a form saying which of the small number of distinct, clearly-defined Permissable Essential Purposes it will be fulfilling, and must then carry its papers, properly labelled in triplicate to an entirely arbitrary set of regulations, ready for police inspection, and heavens help it if it's used a colon where it should have used a pike...

Well, congratulations to us on really managing to nail that "Pandemic lockdown" aesthetic and translate it into the medium of forum posting!



-----

Aszev: I appreciate that you still have access to everybody's posts. But conventional etiquettte is to warn people in advance when you're deleting people's posts, so that they can take whatever actions they feel appropriate. Saying, if you'll excuse the unceremonious paraphrase, "Fuck off I'm in charge, everything here belongs to me and I'll take it from you if I want to - but don't worry, I might give some back if I feel like it, so it's OK!" is of course your privilege as the owner, but it does rather set a certain tone...
Looks like someone didn't bother to look at the new sub forum. :roll:

The old messages are / have been dumped into the new forum. If you really want to see them that badly, they're there.

Even your own (two, anyway) posts! ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤

Re: Forum News discussion/feedback thread

Posted: 27 Apr 2020 01:18
by Sequor
Salmoneus wrote: 27 Apr 2020 00:30Or, to summarise the basic sentiment here: "fuck off, don't even think about posting here".

Great, every thread has to complete a form saying which of the small number of distinct, clearly-defined Permissable Essential Purposes it will be fulfilling, and must then carry its papers, properly labelled in triplicate to an entirely arbitrary set of regulations, ready for police inspection, and heavens help it if it's used a colon where it should have used a pike...

Well, congratulations to us on really managing to nail that "Pandemic lockdown" aesthetic and translate it into the medium of forum posting!
I'm quite mystified by your reaction here. These are not requirements. It sounds like you missed this line before the bullet point list:
Aszev wrote:Suggestions for threads that go in this forum are:

• Personal threads for [...]
By which I mean the word "suggestions" there. The real forced/enforceable rules are the ones at the bottom, which direct certain content into other subforums:
This forum is not for:

• Writing in or promoting your own conlang. (→ Conlangs, etc.)
• Posting lessons for conlangs or natlangs. (→ Teach & Share)
I totally agree that taking down all the old threads without any warning was inappropriate though, and I think your complaint is valid regardless of how much you participated (or, well, didn't participate) in it. Also, calm down.

Re: Forum News discussion/feedback thread

Posted: 27 Apr 2020 03:00
by Khemehekis
Lots of thanks for bringing back the 6-year-old posts. However . . .

While the old posts were down, I remembered an old thread I had made -- I think it was titled "Let's do lipograms", in whose OP I had posted a composition without using A, E, I, O, nor U. It had the word "hyphy" in it -- if you search for that you may be able to find it. I couldn't find my lipogram thread while doing though the thread titles in the Linguistics & Natlangs board. Can you find it?

Re: Forum News discussion/feedback thread

Posted: 27 Apr 2020 04:20
by Sequor
Khemehekis wrote: 27 Apr 2020 03:00While the old posts were down, I remembered an old thread I had made -- I think it was titled "Let's do lipograms", in whose OP I had posted a composition without using A, E, I, O, nor U. It had the word "hyphy" in it -- if you search for that you may be able to find it. I couldn't find my lipogram thread while doing though the thread titles in the Linguistics & Natlangs board. Can you find it?
You may notice that neither the forum's search function nor Google return any result for "hyphy". The great pruning of August last year mainly targeted games, so most likely your thread now only survives in Ossicone's backup.

As I understand, the pruning last August was carried out to lower hosting costs after moving to a new one due to problems with the former one ("we were treated like shit"). Consider that free phpBB forums are typically kept up basically out of charity, with few exceptions...
Ossicone wrote: 25 Apr 2020 10:56Unfortunately, in order to make sure the majority of posts can remain up some had to be sacrificed.
Unless you want to pay for dedicated server hosting, in which case I can restore all of the posts.
I can't deny I'm curious about what your costs are... Although it's true that if I'm interested in covering costs, this isn't exactly a moment I'll do it right now...

Re: Forum News discussion/feedback thread

Posted: 27 Apr 2020 04:36
by Khemehekis
Ser wrote: 27 Apr 2020 04:20
Khemehekis wrote: 27 Apr 2020 03:00While the old posts were down, I remembered an old thread I had made -- I think it was titled "Let's do lipograms", in whose OP I had posted a composition without using A, E, I, O, nor U. It had the word "hyphy" in it -- if you search for that you may be able to find it. I couldn't find my lipogram thread while doing though the thread titles in the Linguistics & Natlangs board. Can you find it?
You may notice that neither the forum's search function nor Google return any result for "hyphy".
The CBB search function doesn't return any of the newly returned older-than-5-years posts.
The great pruning of August last year mainly targeted games, so most likely your thread now only survives in Ossicone's backup.
This wasn't really a game thread. It was mainly a discussion of lipograms, with me posting my no-A-E-I-O-nor-U piece in the OP, but no one else posting something to rival it.

Re: Forum News discussion/feedback thread

Posted: 27 Apr 2020 17:19
by Aevas
Salmoneus wrote: 27 Apr 2020 00:30
• Personal threads for practicing a certain language.
→ Threads should be titled <[Username] – [Language]>; e.g. Aszev – Français.

• Question threads for a specific language.
→ Threads should be titled <[Language] Question Thread: Questions about [Language]>, where the second part is in the language in question (but this can be added later if the thread starter is unfamiliar with the language); e.g. French Question Thread: Questions sur le français.

• Conversation threads in a specific language. In these threads, English should be avoided.
→ General conversation threads should be titled <[Language] Conversation Thread | [Language] Conversation Thread>, where the first part is in the language in question.
→ Threads with specific topics should be tagged with the name of the language used in brackets before the actual title; e.g. [Français] Thread title
Or, to summarise the basic sentiment here: "fuck off, don't even think about posting here".

Great, every thread has to complete a form saying which of the small number of distinct, clearly-defined Permissable Essential Purposes it will be fulfilling, and must then carry its papers, properly labelled in triplicate to an entirely arbitrary set of regulations, ready for police inspection, and heavens help it if it's used a colon where it should have used a pike...

Well, congratulations to us on really managing to nail that "Pandemic lockdown" aesthetic and translate it into the medium of forum posting!
I'm choosing to interpret this kindly, and assume that you haven't read the post where that bit was quoted from. Either way, I find your characterization of it needlessly aggressive and assuming ill intent that isn't there.
Salmoneus wrote: 27 Apr 2020 00:30Aszev: I appreciate that you still have access to everybody's posts. But conventional etiquettte is to warn people in advance when you're deleting people's posts, so that they can take whatever actions they feel appropriate. Saying, if you'll excuse the unceremonious paraphrase, "Fuck off I'm in charge, everything here belongs to me and I'll take it from you if I want to - but don't worry, I might give some back if I feel like it, so it's OK!" is of course your privilege as the owner, but it does rather set a certain tone...
Again, this is needlessly aggressive, and I take issue with your painting me as someone who goes off on wielding my power. We generally don't prune the forums, however conversation threads and game threads have been split and deleted on a semi-regular basis for serveral years now, and I would assume frequent visitors to know that. In any case there wasn't much of a deletion to begin with, the vast majority of the threads that were in the Other Languages forum are now located in the new LL&N-E forum.
elemtilas wrote: 27 Apr 2020 00:39Makes sense. I guess my main question is: what were the original intention of that sub forum (back in the Beginning) and what is the overarching intention of the subforum, especially given that all the old threads have been copied there?

It's not entirely clear to me from your post in FNT what the differences are!
That's understandable, I wasn't being very clear.

The original intent behind the Other Languages Section was to have discussions in other languages of the same kind as in the English section. For various periods of time, that worked to certain extent, and we had special subsections for discussions in French, German and Scandinavian (among others). But this was always hard to sustain, as a) it relied on having an active "core" of members speaking a certain language, and b) members often preferred posting in the English section, as it was significantly more active and they would usually be proficient in English anyway. This resulted in the Other Languages section over time being more of a backyard to the main section, with the conversation often being about the language being spoken rather than about con-arts. And in retrospect this makes sense, since English is the main language of the board, and those who come here will do so because they speak it.

At the same time, I know that people have occasionaly shied away from posting in the OL section because they didn't feel it was for them, as not-entirely-proficient L2 speakers. So I'm hoping that we can bridge this a bit, and encourage both language learning and conversation in other languages than English with this new forum.
Ser wrote: 27 Apr 2020 04:20As I understand, the pruning last August was carried out to lower hosting costs after moving to a new one due to problems with the former one ("we were treated like shit"). Consider that free phpBB forums are typically kept up basically out of charity, with few exceptions...
Yes and no. I guess I was too brief when I last mentioned this!

Basically, without warning, one morning the host had shut the entire site down due to there being too much on it (iirc they got suspiscious of the amount of files, but I don't remember the details...). So me and Ossicone had to go into sudden crisis mode and had to start deleting content in order for them to let it back up (because then the issue changed into simply being: there are too many files). I tried to get them to let us access the site, so that we could delete threads that were of less importance content-wise (like old conversation threads, game threads, etc), but they refused until we reduced its size. So we had to delete things in bulk directly in the database.

So after this I decided that that host could go... somewhere else, and started looking for a new one. The new host is more expensive, but should be a better match for a board of this size. It should also have better customer service...

Re: Forum News discussion/feedback thread

Posted: 27 Apr 2020 18:11
by sangi39
Khemehekis wrote: 27 Apr 2020 04:36
Ser wrote: 27 Apr 2020 04:20
Khemehekis wrote: 27 Apr 2020 03:00While the old posts were down, I remembered an old thread I had made -- I think it was titled "Let's do lipograms", in whose OP I had posted a composition without using A, E, I, O, nor U. It had the word "hyphy" in it -- if you search for that you may be able to find it. I couldn't find my lipogram thread while doing though the thread titles in the Linguistics & Natlangs board. Can you find it?
You may notice that neither the forum's search function nor Google return any result for "hyphy".
The CBB search function doesn't return any of the newly returned older-than-5-years posts.

Links within threads to other threads/posts on the Board also now don't work because the domain name has changed.

As far as I know, specific threads and posts still have the same address after the ".com" part, so it's a straight switch between domain names.

I think that means the Mods can go through and edit things like the House Rules, but when it comes to individual posts, I don't know if it's best for us to go through them ourselves, editing other people's posts, or if we should leave it to individual users. I might check with Aszev or Ossicone to see if there might be a way of making that change en masse.

Re: Forum News discussion/feedback thread

Posted: 27 Apr 2020 20:12
by Sequor
Aszev wrote: 27 Apr 2020 17:19Basically, without warning, one morning the host had shut the entire site down due to there being too much on it (iirc they got suspiscious of the amount of files, but I don't remember the details...). So me and Ossicone had to go into sudden crisis mode and had to start deleting content in order for them to let it back up (because then the issue changed into simply being: there are too many files). I tried to get them to let us access the site, so that we could delete threads that were of less importance content-wise (like old conversation threads, game threads, etc), but they refused until we reduced its size. So we had to delete things in bulk directly in the database.

So after this I decided that that host could go... somewhere else, and started looking for a new one. The new host is more expensive, but should be a better match for a board of this size. It should also have better customer service...
Oh, I see. Complaining about website size is one thing, but I gotta say it sounds ridiculous they would complain about the number of files of all things. A phpBB forum only uses about 140 files in the database, which is nothing (although a few specific files, namely phpbb_posts, phpbb_search_wordlist and phpbb_search_wordmatch can get big).

I'd believe the website size complaint if you were with a cheap host that expected you to only have a small site. At the ZBB there was a point when the forum had gotten about 3GB big, and the forum was heavily trimmed (and some time later moved) because zompist's friend's server was lagging. And this happened while still constantly trimming the most-used subforum every week... That said, 3GB should also be nothing if you were not paying for something low-scale but rather average personal hosting.

By the way, if you ever need to trim down the size a phpBB forum again, I'd say focus on the attachments first (the files that people include in posts). I mentioned that a month ago, me and another guy made some effort to recover the data of the old ZBB forum from a backup holding mostly posts from 2016 to mid-2018 (plus a small number of threads from 2002-2015). We found that attachments and user avatars made up 60% of the forum backup, the search data and logs 23%, and the actual public user text data and post content a mere 16%.
sangi39 wrote: 27 Apr 2020 18:11Links within threads to other threads/posts on the Board also now don't work because the domain name has changed.

As far as I know, specific threads and posts still have the same address after the ".com" part, so it's a straight switch between domain names.

I think that means the Mods can go through and edit things like the House Rules, but when it comes to individual posts, I don't know if it's best for us to go through them ourselves, editing other people's posts, or if we should leave it to individual users. I might check with Aszev or Ossicone to see if there might be a way of making that change en masse.
Yes, it can be done, by writing a program that directly modifies the URLs in the database.

In a phpBB database, URLs look like this (real example from the ZBB backup):

Code: Select all

[url=http&#58;//fds&#46;oup&#46;com/www&#46;oup&#46;co&#46;uk/pdf/0-19-924906-7&#46;pdf:2696rdjc]Ethnosyntax[/url:2696rdjc] - Explorations in Grammar and Culture
So someone with access to the database would need to change the URLs from cbbforum.com/ (and also the older www.cbbforum.com/) to the current domain, like, with a Python program or similar. Specifically, from:

Code: Select all

http&#58;//cbb&#46;aveneca&#46;com/
http&#58;//www&#46;aveneca&#46;com/cbb
to:

Code: Select all

http&#58;//cbbforum&#46;com/
The steps of such a program would naturally be connecting to the MySQL/MariaDB database within the server, proceeding to step through every post that has the old URLs by grabbing the ID and text and then replacing the post with the modified URL text (identifying the post with the ID for the update) one at a time, and committing the changes and closing the connection.

Beware that ancient phpBB posts use a different format. In my ZBB backup, posts up to January 2005 use this:

Code: Select all

<!-- w --><a class="postlink" href="http://global.oup.com/">Oxford University Press</a><!-- w -->)

Re: Forum News discussion/feedback thread

Posted: 27 Apr 2020 20:54
by qwed117
Given that the CBB doesn't include attachments other than user avatars, I'd suspect that the problem was largely the hosting service being bad abusive people, rather than the size of the attachments

Re: Forum News discussion/feedback thread

Posted: 27 Apr 2020 21:46
by elemtilas
Aszev wrote: 27 Apr 2020 17:19
elemtilas wrote: 27 Apr 2020 00:39Makes sense. I guess my main question is: what were the original intention of that sub forum (back in the Beginning) and what is the overarching intention of the subforum, especially given that all the old threads have been copied there?

It's not entirely clear to me from your post in FNT what the differences are!
That's understandable, I wasn't being very clear.

The original intent behind the Other Languages Section was to have discussions in other languages of the same kind as in the English section. For various periods of time, that worked to certain extent, and we had special subsections for discussions in French, German and Scandinavian (among others). But this was always hard to sustain, as a) it relied on having an active "core" of members speaking a certain language, and b) members often preferred posting in the English section, as it was significantly more active and they would usually be proficient in English anyway. This resulted in the Other Languages section over time being more of a backyard to the main section, with the conversation often being about the language being spoken rather than about con-arts. And in retrospect this makes sense, since English is the main language of the board, and those who come here will do so because they speak it.

At the same time, I know that people have occasionaly shied away from posting in the OL section because they didn't feel it was for them, as not-entirely-proficient L2 speakers. So I'm hoping that we can bridge this a bit, and encourage both language learning and conversation in other languages than English with this new forum.
Thanks!

I'd participated (very sporadically) in the Latin & Anglish forums. The others, no...and for the reason you say.

Another question, now that's been broached a couple times, is one I've often wondered: how much dóes it actually cost to keep CBB afloat, Olympicwise or Titanicwise, and, currently, who's paying for it? And would you ever consider allowing those members that wish to, to share that burden?

Also, have you ever considered partnering with or leastways talking with the LCS as regards hosting?

Re: Forum News discussion/feedback thread

Posted: 27 Apr 2020 21:54
by elemtilas
sangi39 wrote: 27 Apr 2020 18:11 As far as I know, specific threads and posts still have the same address after the ".com" part, so it's a straight switch between domain names.
This is true. I went through the Snippets index and renamed all the CBB links. Was just a matter of replacing "cbbforum.com" (or whatever) with "cbbforum.com" with fore and aft slashes as appropriate.
I think that means the Mods can go through and edit things like the House Rules, but when it comes to individual posts, I don't know if it's best for us to go through them ourselves, editing other people's posts, or if we should leave it to individual users. I might check with Aszev or Ossicone to see if there might be a way of making that change en masse.
While that would be sporting, I'd not request it unless it unless it could be done as a relatively simple global command. I don't think you should have to go through post by post to do it manually!

I have the feeling that most such links will be found in relatively ephemeral conversation threads anyway, linking to other even more ephemeral conversation threads. I wouldn't consider changing unimportant links in my own posts: I can hardly ask you guys to bother doing the same.

Re: Forum News discussion/feedback thread

Posted: 27 Apr 2020 23:51
by Ossicone
qwed117 wrote: 27 Apr 2020 20:54 Given that the CBB doesn't include attachments other than user avatars, I'd suspect that the problem was largely the hosting service being bad abusive people, rather than the size of the attachments
The problem was indeed server usage rather than file size. That is why I had to remove a very large number of posts. Certain behind the scenes factors, such as updated php version, make me hopeful that this won't be an issue again as the forums are running quicker now.
Ser wrote: 27 Apr 2020 20:12 In a phpBB database, URLs look like this (real example from the ZBB backup):

Code: Select all

[url=http&#58;//fds&#46;oup&#46;com/www&#46;oup&#46;co&#46;uk/pdf/0-19-924906-7&#46;pdf:2696rdjc]Ethnosyntax[/url:2696rdjc] - Explorations in Grammar and Culture
The urls have been updated now.
Although, the url formatting you show is not correct and it likely represents an older version of phpbb.

Re: Forum News discussion/feedback thread

Posted: 28 Apr 2020 22:18
by Aevas
elemtilas wrote: 27 Apr 2020 21:46Another question, now that's been broached a couple times, is one I've often wondered: how much dóes it actually cost to keep CBB afloat, Olympicwise or Titanicwise, and, currently, who's paying for it? And would you ever consider allowing those members that wish to, to share that burden?

Also, have you ever considered partnering with or leastways talking with the LCS as regards hosting?
I appreciate the question, but I hope you'll understand that I don't wish to talk numbers. I pay for the site, and always have. It's not peanuts, but it's not the largest of my bills either, to put it that way, and it's not an issue that's causing me any trouble. I have not considered talking to the LCS about anything, really (I'm honestly not very familiar with them).

And since you ask, I do have considered making a Patreon page for the CBB, for anyone who might feel like helping out. But it hasn't been high on my to-do list, mainly due to a) never finding enough time for anything these days, b) because it's not a very big deal, and c) because it seemed a bit like bad timing during a pandemic... 😅

Re: Forum News discussion/feedback thread

Posted: 29 Apr 2020 02:55
by elemtilas
Aszev wrote: 28 Apr 2020 22:18 I appreciate the question, but I hope you'll understand that I don't wish to talk numbers. I pay for the site, and always have. It's not peanuts, but it's not the largest of my bills either, to put it that way, and it's not an issue that's causing me any trouble. I have not considered talking to the LCS about anything, really (I'm honestly not very familiar with them).

And since you ask, I do have considered making a Patreon page for the CBB, for anyone who might feel like helping out. But it hasn't been high on my to-do list, mainly due to a) never finding enough time for anything these days, b) because it's not a very big deal, and c) because it seemed a bit like bad timing during a pandemic... 😅
No worries!

Re: Forum News discussion/feedback thread

Posted: 27 May 2020 20:11
by Sequor
Ossicone wrote: 27 Apr 2020 23:51The urls have been updated now.
Although, the url formatting you show is not correct and it likely represents an older version of phpbb.
Did you write a script to walk through every single post to replace the URL? [:D]
Aszev wrote: 28 Apr 2020 22:18.
By the way, I just logged in here from a Windows computer, and... I was surprised to see that Microsoft has finally fixed the problems with Unicode combining diacritics that the Trebuchet MS and Verdana fonts used to have. It used to be, for the longest time, that e.g. <q̃> would not show up with the tilde ~ on top of the <q>. Even my Windows 7 machine received an update at some point in the recent past with the fix!

I was bracing to make a post here asking you to change the CSS font-family (currently: "Lucida Grande", "Trebuchet MS", Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif), but it looks fine with the fix. Can't say I'm not happy. I got zompist to change the ZBB's CSS a couple years ago, at a time when Microsoft hadn't released this fix.

(Sadly, the CBB looks bad on the latest Firefox running on Linux, but this is due to a bug in Firefox: it refuses to use the configuration you give it for default overrideable fonts, even though supposedly it should allow me to. It does allow me to force a sans-serif, a serif and a monospace font everywhere to "fix this", but then every website shows up with the same three fonts. If I visit the CBB on the Chrome-based Chromium and Iridium browsers, everything looks fine though.)

Re: Forum News discussion/feedback thread

Posted: 08 Jun 2020 12:15
by Ossicone
Ser wrote: 27 May 2020 20:11
Ossicone wrote: 27 Apr 2020 23:51The urls have been updated now.
Although, the url formatting you show is not correct and it likely represents an older version of phpbb.
Did you write a script to walk through every single post to replace the URL? [:D]
A simple sql query was all that was required. Calling it a script seems... grandiose?

Re: Forum News discussion/feedback thread

Posted: 09 Jun 2020 02:05
by Sequor
Ossicone wrote: 08 Jun 2020 12:15A simple sql query was all that was required. Calling it a script seems... grandiose?
Oh! I didn't know that SQL (even SQLite SQL!) has a REPLACE() function that can be used as "UPDATE tablename SET colname = REPLACE(colname, old_substring, new_substring);". Oh, the horror. The horror that I didn't know this, that is.

Re: Forum News discussion/feedback thread

Posted: 06 Aug 2020 00:16
by Khemehekis
A thought:

Does the CBB House Rules post need a mention of bringing drama from other conlanging communities like the ZBB or the Conlang WorkShop over here? From what I recall, there used to be a part of the "Be Civil" rule that read, "Don't go posting that some random dude you met in another forum is an idiot". There's no mention of that anymore, which makes me wonder if the moderators' attitude towards flaming people who aren't members of this site has changed (although given some recent posts by mods, I'm guessing it hasn't).

Do other people on this board think there might be some value in mentioning this again in Rule #1?