Cap'n Refsmmat

Oops. Yes, it does. Should work now.

Whoops. Somehow it defaulted to not being allowed. Should be fixed now.

Could you be more specific? Your account here is already activated; which forum are you trying to access?

26 minutes ago, Moontanman said:

Is there some reason why when I click on unread content it doesn't take me to the last post in that thread? 

Click the little bullet/star before the title and it'll take you to the first unread post. They had to hide it for some reason.

24 minutes ago, Moontanman said:

Oh yeah, is the blog gone? 

Nope, the blogs are still around! Nothing about them has changed, and you can log in as before. Just remember that blog accounts and SFN accounts are separate now, so changing your password on one doesn't change it on the other.

Apparently every website now needs to be like a social network. Soon you'll be able to see pictures of every meal swansont has.

I know, I don't understand it either. To make it a bit easier I added an "Unread Topics" link under My Activity Streams, which takes you to see all unread topics, condenses the list, and has links to take you immediately to the first unread post. Is that more helpful to you? I'll be sure to add a separate "Swansont's Lunch" feed later.

Okay, I tweaked our settings and it seems a lot better. We didn't have any of the AMSMath extensions loaded, so a lot of commands weren't available. Also the latex BBCode wasn't working, just the math BBCode.

There are some tabular environments that don't load, but I don't know how that worked in the first place -- everything is in math mode.

Let me know if there are other examples of commands that don't work and I can find which extensions I need to add.

Could you give me a link for an example of a particularly bad thread with messed up math? I can play with the MathJax settings and try to make it work well.

From the Unread Content stream, for example, clicking the topic titles does what you say. But if you click the little "56 minutes ago" text, it'll take you directly to that post.

Not super-obvious, but it works. Not sure why they felt the need to change it that way.

You should be able to choose whether to receive notifications for quotes in your Notification Settings. I may tweak the default options a bit.

Update: All posts have now been indexed and search results should now be complete. You should be able to search your own content, find old threads, and anything else. Let us know if you hit any problems.

Good point on post numbering. It seems that Invision in their infinite wisdom thinks post numbers are confusing because us moderators see different posts -- we see deleted and unapproved posts, and they don't know how to make the post numbers come out consistent. That's never been a problem for me that I can remember, but post numbers were removed nonetheless.

However, if you click the little "Share this post" button at the top right of a post you can get a direct link to it. Less convenient, but it always works.

1 hour ago, studiot said:

"you are not allowed to give reputation to this user"

Could you not soften this message to something more human?

Some of the other messages are more like from a Victorian germanic schoolmistress, rather than seeming to want to be friendly and helpful.

You should just be glad it didn't rap you on the knuckles with a steel ruler for being impertinent.

I'll look into it.

There doesn't seem to be an option for this anymore, or if there is, I can't find it. I can let you disable the "this post has been edited" message, but without a time limit, so you could edit a post hours later and still avoid it, which isn't desirable. Seems odd they'd remove this feature.

Looks like the new software defaulted to not letting anyone use signatures. (It actually turned off signatures entirely, which I fixed yesterday, but I didn't notice that permission to use signatures had been taken from every group.)

You should have permission to use signatures now.

As for the 502 error -- that may crop up at random for a while. Just refresh the page and it should go away. PHP has been crashing with SIGBUS errors, which is pretty unusual and causes the 502, and I need to figure out what's going wrong.

3 hours ago, fiveworlds said:

There should be a button which looks like Σ to insert a mathjax equation instead of having to use bbcode (which I can never remember) but you might have to download this plugin to use it.

http://ckeditor.com/addon/mathjax

To add buttons there should be a configuration file (*usually called config.js) the above example looks like this. It may be called something different on the forum software.

Thanks, we'll take a look to see if we can add this directly. I think the version of CKEditor used here may be custom, so we'll have to see how to add MathJax in.

As for "necessary" vs. "just happened": we were on IPB version 3.6, which was no longer supported. No bug fixes or security patches were being released. If any problem came up, like the occasional malware issues we had, there would be no fix.

I wish the change didn't have to be so big and disruptive, but the people who make the software need reasons to keep you paying for it...

7 minutes ago, TakenItSeriously said:

BTW, another change I noticed was that my origional user name was different from my display name "TakenItSeriously". My login was always the origional name.

Yes, IPB no longer has a difference between Display Name and Login Name, so you'll have to use your display name from now on.

7 minutes ago, TakenItSeriously said:

How can I guarantee that this is not a more extensive form of that kind of hack which could monitor or even limit or edit to misrepresent me and my free speech capability?

Thanks for your time and attention.

You can compare the new SFN to the forums run by the maker of our forum software, Invision: https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/

Those forums should look and behave broadly the same, apart from the logo and minor tweaks.

There's an Unread Content button under the Activity tab at the top of the page. Looks like it's only caught up with the past day of posts though. That'll get better soon.

I am serious. And don't call me Shirley.

As noted in the announcement, the search features, recent posts, and so on will be broken temporarily while IPB reindexes all old posts. (All 900,000 of them, apparently.) That's happening right now, and may take a little while.

Sorry about the notification popup -- that annoys me too. I'll see if I can do anything about that. Not sure about other issues, but hopefully we can figure out version 4's issues soon.

You should still be able to use the math BBCode tags: [math]x = {-b \pm \sqrt{b^2-4ac} \over 2a}[/math]

Could you be more specific about the other issues you're experiencing?

Looks like there's also a "Content I Started" tab under the Activity tab at the top of the page, plus a button for following a topic to get notifications for new posts. (And a "Content I Posted In" link hidden under "My Activity Streams".) Hope those options are useful to you, once the search system has reindexed old posts.

You beat me to the announcement by about two minutes. We announced the upgrade earlier this week.

Apologies for any inconvenience as we work through the new software. I am, though, pretty sure the "Find Content" feature is still available:

However, it may not show complete results for a short time, because the software has to reindex all the old posts. That's happening right now, and hopefully the results will fill out over the next day or so. Let me know if you experience any other problems.

Hi everyone,

We've upgraded SFN to version 4.1 of our forum software, and things are looking good so far. Take a look around and enjoy the new features, and post here if you experience any weird problems. Some things to note:

• You may enjoy the new Activity stream, showing everything that's happening on SFN in real time (the page automatically updates).
• There are some minor updates to the LaTeX rendering we now use, which are detailed in an updated thread in the maths forums.
• The search system and "Unread Content" button may not work correctly for a day or so -- the system has to reindex all the posts and topics, so search results won't be correct.
• There's no longer a difference between "Display Name" and "Login Name", so if you logged in with a different name than was shown on the forums, you need to switch to logging in with the display name.
• The new site should look and feel much better on phones and tablets.

There are more new features than I can describe here, but hopefully being on the latest supported version will reduce spam, improve security, and eliminate old bugs. Possibly while creating new ones. We'll see.

Many thanks to Klaynos for the upgraded SFN logo, tweaked for the new look.

This weekend -- likely on Saturday afternoon, Eastern time -- we will be upgrading SFN to the latest version of our forum software, IPB. It's a big update, from version 3.6 to 4.1, and will involve big changes to the look and features of SFN. The theme will be upgraded to look better on phones and tablets, the text editor will be upgraded... basically everything will change.

Naturally this will involve some disruption. We'll try to minimize it, but SFN will likely be down for a few hours on Saturday afternoon, followed by a period with some bugs and kinks we'll have to work out. As always, you can post here or in the Suggestions, Comments and Support forum if you experience problems after the upgrade. We'll keep you posted on the process as we work through it.

Not this again. Sigh.

I've removed it, for like the third time. There seems to be some kind of IPB vulnerability that's letting this happen; we're gonna have to update to IPS 4 at some point to see if it'll stop then. If any of you see something like this again, send me a PM to make sure I'm notified to remove the malicious code.