The new forum software is defective, much worse than the old one from the point of view of users attempting to post comments, but what I find really intolerable, and indicative of serious misconceptions about the nature and purpose of this kind of forum, is the pathetic limitations to search. Why can't I see all my posts? Is SELECT… ORDER BY a lost art?

P.S. Bug of the day: I lost a reply draft because DEL and BACKSPACE stopped working in the reply box and I had to reset by reloading the page. It takes a lot of misguided effort to make this kind of trouble possible at all.

Aressera said:
Total fail @khawk and all involved.

I'll take credit. It was me. Throw the vitriol my way.

Aressera said:
Copy/paste is still broken

Where? What are you trying to do specifically? Is this with an old or less-used browser?

Aressera said:
and the whole experience is way more crufty than it used to be with the old software.

Could you expand in what way? What would make it less “crufty”?

Aressera said:
I'm still getting jarring ads placed directly in the middle of people's posts

This isn't because of the platform software, but noted. I'll keep messing with the ad settings to find a better balance. I'm not particularly happy with how ads are placed in content either.

Aressera said:
while using as much crappy javascript/CSS as possible

Actually… it's using less JS and CSS than previously… although to be honest at this point I wish it was React/Vue/Angular.

On the one hand, I agree with you that most of the site doesn't need JS/CSS. I mean, when the site started JS in browsers wasn't even a thing.

Except it's 2020 and people want notifications, select-quote, drag and drop, image uploads, and responsive feedback.. so JS is kind of a requirement these days.

LorenzoGatti said:
Why can't I see all my posts? Is SELECT… ORDER BY a lost art?

Topics started can be viewed through the Dashboard, but forum replies need to be added. Just an oversight.

LorenzoGatti said:
pathetic limitations to search

Is this a matter of more search filters than currently exist?

LorenzoGatti said:
P.S. Bug of the day: I lost a reply draft because DEL and BACKSPACE stopped working in the reply box and I had to reset by reloading the page. It takes a lot of misguided effort to make this kind of trouble possible at all.

The editor is CKEditor, just like the previous platform, and I'm not sure why it would hang up like that. But the point of losing a reply draft is noted and draft saving is on the list to add soon (also recently brought up in a separate place).

In general, I'm sorry the platform is not what it should be. All I can promise is to continue to improve it with regular, nearly daily updates. If there is something missing, something that doesn't make sense, or something that needs improvement then please share.

Green_Baron said:
The editor autoformats any sense away (for example underscores and ampersands are usual characters in code oriented posts, who had the idea of giving them a format meaning ?)

Alberth said:
Using common code characters is indeed a major nuisance, you can't even type “2 times 3 times 7” (where ‘times’ is the usual multiplication character), as it ends up as 2 3 7 (even if you add spaces all over the place, which I often don't).

This is auto-markdown, and it's possible to disable this in your settings.

Green_Baron said:
stupid ad links are inserted into posts as if the user had put them there

This has actually been around for years, so I'm not sure why this seems more prominent now. There is also a popup when hovering that shows the link as an affiliate, but probably need a solution for mobile to make it obvious it's an affiliate.

Dawoodoz said:
Using Chrome on Android (most common)

I'll admit mobile gets less attention. 10% of GameDev.net's traffic is on mobile, and with limited resources it's just a priority call on where to spend time. But I'll look at a few of these since they look fairly straightforward to resolve.

Juliean said:
Well here is one example, which I suppose eigther went unnoticed or at least didn't get a response:

It was noticed. You want automatic code formatting for pasted code blocks.. which unless someone wants to point me to a way to some code to do this will take time to figure out. If anyone is feeling altruistic, specifically we will need CKEditor5 Javascript plugin code that converts a paste operation to a code block if it's identified as code.

In the meantime, the way I'd handle this is to create the code block in the editor then paste the code. One extra click.

Alberth said:
Lacking that I haven't found a way to go to the last post directly.

The gray double arrow takes you to the last reply in a topic.

It's still on the list to show read/unread.

Alberth said:
Front-page, bottom tutorial column has a “see more tutorials” link, except it points to news.

Thanks.. fixing.