vBulletin - Miscellaneous Questions

[Wil Cambrae]

minor thing, but I get email notifications of posts made after mine. When someone uses a () in the title of a thread, the link is broken at that point in my email.

Dear Wil Cambrae,

Blu al'Eloquene has just replied to a thread you have subscribed to entitled - just for Fun lets list our favorite......quotes!!!! Tee Hee - in the Frivolous Fun forum of The White Tower.

This thread is located at:
http://www.tarvalon.net/showthread.php?7868-)-just-for-Fun-lets-list-our-favorite-quotes!!!!-)-Tee-Hee&goto=newpost

Here is the message that has just been posted:

It will still take me to the thread, but to the beginning, not to the newest post since I last visited.

 

[Azi al'Thone]

minor thing, but I get email notifications of posts made after mine. When someone uses a () in the title of a thread, the link is broken at that point in my email.

It will still take me to the thread, but to the beginning, not to the newest post since I last visited.

That's because the link is not actually a anchor link, I think, but rather your email client is turning a plain text URL into a link and doesn't realize the brackets are part of it. Which make sense, because they should be encoded. As a workaround, you can copy/paste the URL or you can use the "First Unread Post" in the top bar of the topic.

 

[Wil Cambrae]

yeah, that's what I've been doing and after a couple times, I just type the first couple characters, and autocomplete will give me the rest of it.

 

[Aavyn Eirinon]

I don't think this has been brought up yet, but maybe I'm the only person with the issue as I haven't seen any mention of it when I search on Google :P

When I'm on my desktop or laptop, the forums display fine. When I'm on my phone, however, the font in some posts are large and in others is so small I have to zoom in. When I look at the same thread from a computer, everything appears normal. This seems to be a vBulletin thing, as it happened at a random forum I came across yesterday.

If it helps, my phone is a Droid RAZR M running on Android 4.1.1 and I use the Chrome browser (both on the phone and on computers). Thanks!

 

[Elorenya d'Rahien]

Another minor thing... On both my iPad (running Chrome) and my MacBook (also running Chrome; all versions are the most recent, both browser and OS), I've noticed that the little blue icon that's supposed to take you to the most recent unread post seems to not be marking which post number I've read up through correctly. It doesn't matter which thread it is, or whether or not I've posted in the thread. I've tried clearing cache, but not changing browsers; Chrome is my preferred, especially on the iPad. This does NOT occur if the newest post I have actually not read is on a new page; then, it appropriately takes me to the first actually-unread post.

To take a hypothetical example: Awesome Thread has 50 posts. I read it, reply to it or decide not to (post #51 if I do reply), and wander off. I refresh the site later, and Awesome Thread is marked unread because it now has 55 posts (so far so good). I click the little arrow to skip me to the first unread post. It takes me to post 44, even though I've read through post 50 (and potentially made post 51 myself).

An actual example: the 100th page thread, which just took me to the already-read Post 1319. My first unread post was 1324, and the most recent was 1325. I pasted in the URL that the little arrow took me to in the link.

What other info would you like from me?

 

[Azi al'Thone]

Restart it. 3 times. :scratch Honestly, Elo, I don't have an answer for that as it works perfectly fine for me. I would suggest trying in another browser, maybe Firefox or Safari on your Macbook. Also, does this happen every time consistently? Is there a discernible pattern?

I'm afraid it might just be vBulletin itself. It always comes up with these weird stupid bugs :\

 

[Elorenya d'Rahien]

Hahaha, I've rebooted and cleared cache several times in the past couple months; it's occurred for as long as I've been here. It doesn't happen every single time, but it does happen frequently.

I'm trying to narrow down repro steps, but wanted to get the issue posted in case someone already knew about it -- I think it has something to do with when I mark a forum as read (even though I actually read the threads I'm going back to). What I think the repro steps are going to look like is something like, based off my usual browsing habits:

1) View Forum A with at least two threads with unread posts
2) Open one thread with unread posts and read to the end; close tab
3) Mark forum read via the menu in the upper right
4) Wait for more threads in Forum A to become unread due to new posts
5) View Forum A with at least two threads with unread posts (including the one you read in Step 2)
6) Open thread from Step 2 again -- you'll see you've been jumped up above the previous read posts by a few (~5).

Note that this is NOT canonical repro steps; it'll take me some time to confirm them. But, intuitively, this is what appears to be happening, and I suspect the issue is probably in how it's marking the forum Read when that menu option is selected -- perhaps wherever (in presumably my user account) it's storing the last-viewed post number, it's overwriting the value from the viewed threads when the menu option to mark-as-read is selected? I'm not sure that the post it's jumping me back to ISN'T the first previously-unread one I'd read on the previous session, and this would make some amount of sense from a programmatical standpoint as a bug. This is blatant conjecture, of course; I've never so much as glanced at vBulletin's code.

It may be browser-based, though, as mentioned, it IS happening across two devices. Problem with testing another browser is, I have to transfer all of my forum viewing to that other browser until it either reoccurs or fails to. :\

 

[Azi al'Thone]

Well, I can tell you're an IT person :P Thanks for the extensive thought! Unfortunately I fear it may be some elusive bug buried in some combination of caching, browser behaviour, random PHP issues, and black magic.

I've never so much as glanced at vBulletin's code.

Believe me, you don't want to.

 

[Elorenya d'Rahien]

:shifty I'm perfectly sweet and innocent in every way. ... Seriously, though, I've worked in the industry for the better part of a decade, lol. I'm a SAHM now, though.

And, no, I definitely don't, haha. I'm a couple years out of practical practice at this point. :P Good enough for simple perl/cgi/php scripty things, but wading into serious stuff... well. I could, but it'd take me forever, relatively speaking.

Back on topic, I think you're probably right; it's a minor inconvenience/irritant, and I figured I'd bring it up just in case someone else had already seen it and knew a fix, etc. D'you want me to go through and find you exact repro steps, etc?

 

[Azi al'Thone]

:shifty I'm perfectly sweet and innocent in every way. ... Seriously, though, I've worked in the industry for the better part of a decade, lol. I'm a SAHM now, though.

And, no, I definitely don't, haha. I'm a couple years out of practical practice at this point. :P Good enough for simple perl/cgi/php scripty things, but wading into serious stuff... well. I could, but it'd take me forever, relatively speaking.

Back on topic, I think you're probably right; it's a minor inconvenience/irritant, and I figured I'd bring it up just in case someone else had already seen it and knew a fix, etc. D'you want me to go through and find you exact repro steps, etc?

If you want to, I'd appreciate them. I don't know where I can go with this otherwise, because the use case you specified above I do all the time and never have issues. One thing that I will mention is sometimes the page will skip down to an already read post, but that's because it's not fully loaded yet. Once the page completes loading it will go to that post. And, since you said if the new post is on a new page, it works fine... that might actually be the cause. Maybe not even that it's not done loading, but that when Chrome loads the page and reads the anchor, it scrolls to that anchor, but the page isn't done loading yet so the content gets pushed down further and Chrome doesn't realign.

 

[Keladria Tulin]

I can't find the link to the pre-vBulletin forums D: I had it bookmarked on the computer that is now fried... a whole lot of good that does me :tug

 

[Kelgan al'Moranwin]

http://archive2012.tarvalon.net/phpBB3/

 

[Keladria Tulin]

Thanks

 

[Kelgan al'Moranwin]

You're welcome