The Countdown

[Craig Jessop]

[T]he text of the question is stuck underneath the bar to the side (the one with "home" "I'm Board" etc).

Could you give a link? Also, what browser (including version) are you using, and what operating system? (I haven't seen what you're describing, but certain browsers [*cough* Internet Explorer] can have odd bugs sometimes in how they show a page, so knowing this helps with tracking down the problem.)

I use Internet Explorer, okay? Gosh, you'd think that one could live in the Stone Age in peace!

[Yellow]

I'm very impressed! I have two things that I would like to see fixed (though that might not be ther right word). First, the text of the question is stuck underneath the bar to the side (the one with "home" "I'm Board" etc).

Yeah, that was something I broke earlier today; it was only bad for a couple hours, and should be fixed now.

[Craig Jessop]

Oh dear. I just went on the Board to see if it was true that it updates throughout the day and... I just found myself a new time killer/waster. I give mad props to whoever it was that had such a fly idea!

[mic0]

BTW, it didn't work in Safari earlier today, either. It probably works fine now, but it wasn't just IE

[Hypatia]

Chrome was having issues too. I had to dust off Firefox this morning.

[bobtheenchantedone]

I was all excited to come home from camping so I could see the new Board!

...okay, so there were more reasons than that, but I am excited to see the new Board. Looks great, guys! It'll take some getting used to, but that's how change is.

[Dead Cat]

I was going through some of my old questions and discovered that clicking on a link to a specific Board question didn't work, nor did searching for a question number. Am I alone in this?

Oh, and I really love the new look and whatnot! It really does shine!

[Yellow]

Could you give me an example of an old board question whose link doesn't work?

[thebigcheese]

Heh. Congratulations! You found a bug!

So the colored bars and the stars are actually for internal use; they show the status of the question.

For the colored bars: Red means unanswered, orange means partially answered (someone has written an answer, but nobody has declared the question done), yellow means answered but not yet approved for posting, and green means all done, just waiting for 100 hours to come around. (Further answers could still be added after it goes green.) There's a key for all of this in the question inbox, but obviously you don't have access to that.

For the stars: it's a link that lets writers keep track of questions they want to come back to later. For readers, it does absolutely nothing.

Obviously, since the star does nothing for readers, we shouldn't be showing it to you. We hadn't intended for the colored bars to be visible either; we'll have to evaluate what we want to do there. It could be fun for readers to see that, but we'd also rather not have to deal with emails from readers like "Hey, my question is at 90 hours and it's still red! Aren't you going to answer it???!?" You can see why that would be annoying. (And yes, we do get emails similar to this.)

Anyway, there will probably be more bugs found in the coming days. If you find things aren't working like you'd expect, or especially if you find that you have access to information that you don't think you should, please let us know. You can email me at yellow@theboard.byu.edu. One of the most exciting things about Board 5.0 is that it's 100x easier to fix problems like this without breaking other parts of the website, so you're a lot more likely to see things get fixed a lot faster, and you're more likely to see new features crop up from time to time.

Looks like you guys fixed the bug. Unfortunately, you also fixed the hour-count. I kinda liked being able to see the number of hours for each question...

[Dead Cat]

Example:
https://theboard.byu.edu/questions/53266/
has a link that yields this:
https://theboard.byu.edu/53153/
which, as of now, the Board says doesn't exist.
I'm guessing it has something to do with the <^#####> method of linking to other questions, because other links work that do not have it.

[Yellow]

Example:
https://theboard.byu.edu/questions/53266/
has a link that yields this:
https://theboard.byu.edu/53153/
which, as of now, the Board says doesn't exist.
I'm guessing it has something to do with the <^#####> method of linking to other questions, because other links work that do not have it.

Huh. It actually has to do with the https on that link; if you change that to "http" (no 's'), then it redirects correctly.

Thanks, that's helpful in tracking it down. This should be fixed in the next couple days.

[C is for]

I do, unfortunately, have one complaint: I find the new Board rather difficult to read, especially to skim. The scrolling's wonky and my eyes don't like Arial. Any chance we'll be returning to Palatino or another serif font?

[Yellow]

I do, unfortunately, have one complaint: I find the new Board rather difficult to read, especially to skim. The scrolling's wonky and my eyes don't like Arial. Any chance we'll be returning to Palatino or another serif font?

I'm curious what you mean about the scrolling being wonky.

As for a serifed font, we're planning to add various themes in the future; it wouldn't be unreasonable to have a theme with serifed fonts. And if everyone turns out to be in favor of having serifed fonts, we might even change the default as well. It's not out of the question, but I wouldn't plan on changing it just because of one complaint. So if everyone dislikes the sans-serif font, please speak up.

[Imogen]

yeah the font is kinda bleh. let's use comic sans!! (j/k. i hate that font)

[C is for]

The scrolling appears to be on a slight delay. I also noticed that as I scroll through the site Firefox's CPU usage goes up, more than it does when browsing other sites (like this one).

I just tried it with Chrome; same thing! Not sure that "delay" is the best way to describe it. Maybe "choppy" and "not responding the way I'm used to"? But I'll get used to it.

[Gimgimno]

Guys--I tried to fight for serif fonts but was shot down when I asked (though it's still not entirely out of the question). Please raise a huge fuss and make me feel like my crusade wasn't in vain, plz

[thebigcheese]

Guys--I tried to fight for serif fonts but was shot down when I asked (though it's still not entirely out of the question). Please raise a huge fuss and make me feel like my crusade wasn't in vain, plz

This is what I'm picturing right now...

Gimgimno walks in and says, "Yellow! You've got to put the old fonts back up! Serif is way better, and you know it!"
Then, reaching for his gun, Yellow says, "Tough cookies, Gimmy. I'm the man in charge."

POW! POW!

(music starts playing)
"I shot the serif..."

[Gimgimno]

But he didn't shoot the Gimminy?

[Attolia]

Why not include a feature allowing registered readers to customize how they view the page through javascript? Make the text larger, change fonts, maybe even change the colors? It would be a nifty thing to store each reader's preferences, or for the remainder of their session, but at least the index page!

Also from a CSS standpoint, must all the boxes have rounded corners and be at full width? If the header or title bar divs had a smaller width, I think they would look nicer (and stop giving me a rounded corner overload headache).

[Unit of Energy]

While I love that questions actually post at 100 hours now, it has kind of thrown my morning routine off. Oh well.