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Shaun's tried to post this on the Boot's thread: Philosophy is not dead, it just smells funny. I see an "Approve" and "Reject" buttons - not sure why - but Approve doesn't work. Did it trip a spam checker?

This topic was created by Andrew Orlowski.

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WTF?

Sumfin's up.

Dunno what's happened today, but the format on the User Forums section and its dependants has gone fubar in IE8 (yes, I know).

<Quick check>

Oooo, Chrome too, so unusually it ain't an IE thang.

The bit with the boxes and ads on the right is overlapping the main section with the headings and forum stuff on the left. Looks like someone's got hold of the fixed-width bit and squeezed the two sides together, if you see what I mean.

(Written by Reg staff) Gold badge

Re: Sumfin's up.

Ok - we'll check it out.

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Re: Sumfin's up.

Not certain where TeeCee's looking, but at the moment I see the same thing only in this location:

http://forums.theregister.co.uk/section/forums/vulture/reg_stuff/

(Copy & pasting the link is faster than making it clickable by hand ...)

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Re: Sumfin's up.

And that's the only place I see it today, whereas yesterday it was in many places.

Odd. I wonder if it's the removal of HTML parsing in topic titles producing some long, spaceless titles which force the title box wider?

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Re: Sumfin's up.

For the record,

http://forums.theregister.co.uk/section/forums/vulture/reg_stuff/

is still rendering funky.

This post has been deleted by its author

This post has been deleted by its author

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Any chance of shuffling "locked topics" to the bottom of the listie?

Only stands to reason.

While I'm at it, how about changing the "locked" icon to a picture of a lock with the universal red circle with a slash through it over a lock. Not all of us have perfect vision, c.f. ElReg commentards regarding this article

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Re: Any chance of shuffling "locked topics" to the bottom of the listie?

Come to think of it ... Add an icon at the bottom to view the "locked topics". There is no real reason that they should be viewable, unless the viewer is interested. Save us all some bandwidth.

posting pages to google+

When posting links to ElReg articles to google+ an image appears that has no relevance to the article. A quick X dismisses it but it would be nice to include the correct pic when posting.

example

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/07/windows_xp_two_years_until_support_ends/

not sure if its a Register or Google+ issue but it should be looked into.

Top articles - keep up the good work.

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Re: posting pages to google+

Hmm. We don't do anything for Google +, so I am guessing G+ is grabbing. We'll have to look up.

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Navigating [and bloody login cookies!]

My two biggest gripes:

1: Navigation between "my posts" and article comments

Can you do something to improve this, so it's less of a ball-ache to view comments I've made "in context"? If I login and visit the "my posts" link, I can view all my inane comments and see the upvotes/downvotes. However there's no way to easily return to view that comment in the context of the article itself. eg. to see if there have been replies. Clicking on "posted on..." links back to the comment's upvote/downvote page and there are links to the article itself and the beginning of the comments page, but the obvious link to comment in context is not there UNLESS my comment was a reply to someone else's comment, in which case there is a wee curly arrow reply icon next to my comment which DOES link back to viewing the comment in context. It's all very inconsistent and confusing.

2: Login cookie:

I've tried this across umpteen browsers, a couple of OSes and several devices and I can never stay logged in for more than a couple of hours. Can you either fix your login cookie, or replace the accompanying text to better reflect reality. Maybe "Keep me logged in for a random short period of time"?

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Re: Navigating [and bloody login cookies!]

I guess we are going to have to look more closely into login cookies. Trouble is, they work just fine for me and for the devs... we'll think of some tests.

On navigation - we'll put our thinking caps on.

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My posts / posting in context - your wish is granted.

In my posts Click on the "posted" timestamp link to see in action.

This post has been deleted by its author

Anonymous Coward

Broken link?

Is the following article accessible for anyone else? It just results in a "Connection closed by remote server" here, all other articles are unaffected.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/19/googleio_code_jam/

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Re: Broken link?

It is accessible to me. Browser issue?

Anonymous Coward

Turned out to be a mis-firing ad/spy blocking filter. The 'googlei' portion of the url matched a block list.

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Cool - one less bug to hunt down!

Unhappy

White Paper discrimination

I am unable to download the white paper on cloud security because I am retired and I must supply my business address. Why am I barred from finding out how to secure my data?

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Re: White Paper discrimination

Unintended consequence, Andy. We have a number of cloud security papers. Tell us which one you want and we'll email it you. Meanwhile, we'll figure out a better way of handling download requests from retired people.

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front page now broken with jscript disabled

As it says, really. Looks fine in IE8, opera, & FX10 with noscript disabled. With noscript working, top part is a bit of a jumbled mess.

Something linked to your new datacentre section?

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Re: front page now broken with jscript disabled

thanks for the pointer - fixed a few hours after you posted.

Unhappy

BOFH Broken?

With the new structure, I can find the BOFH collection (under the data centre) but it does not list the entire archive anymore. (Episodes 13-17 of 2011 are gone).

(Written by Reg staff)

Re: BOFH Broken?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/data_centre/bofh/ should be there

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On the "my (open) topics" page, I've been seeing a lot of ...

... indications of new posts, but with no new post. Are phantom posts a bug? A feature? Here's a link to the latest "open topic" that displayed this behavior:

http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2012/02/13/jake_Last_game_I_played_was_Wumpus_/

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Another here, today: (was Re: On the "my (open) topics" page ... )

http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/latest/2012/03/30/jake_Gnawing_on_blubber_And_still_testing_the_forum_/

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Two more.

http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/latest/2012/04/03/Joe_17_TomTom_Leap_Year_Bug/

http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/latest/2012/03/26/Toxteth_OGravy_Warlord_of_Mars/

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Three more (probably).

I say "probably" because I haven't gone looking ... might help with the debug process. Gut feeling is it's a calendar issue; it seems to be following itself up the backlog. Maybe the "read thread/subject" flag is resetting itself after 180-ish days?

http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/latest/2012/02/26/JustaKOS_Could_vegetarians_eat_a_test_tube_burger/

http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/latest/2012/03/21/Drewc_Forums_front_page_flipped_to_httpforumstheregistercouk/

http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/latest/2012/02/13/jake_You_mean_like_Self_Storage/

As a side note, what kind of sad person marks down posts specifically trying to help the staff perfect a forum that the thumbs-updowner seems to enjoy? For shame.

(Written by Reg staff) Gold badge

Re: Three more (probably).

Thanks, jake.

We will can thumbs down voting. Not going to waste our time policing saddos like this.

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Re: Three more (probably).

If you choose to get rid of "down", there is no need for "up". Get rid of both, and bring back the banter.

While I'm at it, bring back "Most Read/Commented" ... Same reasoning.

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Re: Three more (probably).

> what kind of sad person marks down posts specifically trying to help the staff

As I've said elsewhere, there are certain individuals who will downvote anything they find in your posting history.

Whilst I like the idea of voting, I'd also like to see a public list of who voted for what; a "put yuor money where your mouth is" approach...

Vic.

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@drewc - Re: Three more (probably).

Are you seriously considering canning voting because one twat seems to have the hots for jake?

Shame if you do - downvoting at least allows the option of expressing displeasure with an idiotic post in a way that doesn't derail the thread.

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Downvotes

The trouble with downvotes, is the tendency of people to mark down posts they disagree with as opposed to posts that are trolling or are idiotic.

The downvotes-war-by-proxy then spills into comments as in "all those people who downvoted me / you are sad windows lusers".

Now, we could make people say why they are downvoting a comment - but isn't that a bit creepy, or we could suspend people who misuse the downvote - as with the guy picking on jake - or we could limit the number of downvotes someone can use in a month, or turn it in to some site currency game - e.g. you pay to downvote, you are are paid when you upvote. Or we could just drop them altogether. Many big sites just have upvotes - it just might just make the atmosphere a little better.

Maybe an "unfollow / ignore" button would work better - although how that would work with anonymous cowards, I have not tried to figure out.

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Pint

Re: Downvotes

"The trouble with downvotes, is the tendency of people to mark down posts they disagree with as opposed to posts that are trolling or are idiotic."

Interesting observation. Speaking for myself, all are valid reasons to downvote. The saddo serial downvoting me, even, is making a valid protest in the great scheme of things.

"Now, we could make people say why they are downvoting a comment - but isn't that a bit creepy"

As a long term moderator of mailing lists and Usenet, no. Just no. Entirely too creepy.

"or we could suspend people who misuse the downvote - as with the guy picking on jake"

No. If downvotes are allowed, my fanboi should be allowed. No skin off my teeth.

"or we could limit the number of downvotes someone can use in a month"

Only if you similarly limit upvotes. And even then, what with proxies ...

"or turn it in to some site currency game - e.g. you pay to downvote, you are are paid when you upvote."

That'd start another element gaming the system, just because they can.

"Or we could just drop them altogether."

My vote. They are pretty meaningless, when you think about it. Or leave 'em be, if they aren't causing you lot at ElReg too many fits. There is a reason I've never emailed you about this stuff, and kept it in forum ;-)

"Many big sites just have upvotes - it just might just make the atmosphere a little better."

All bright & fuzzy unicorns, rainbows & stars? Are you channeling HappyNet[tm]? Techies hang out here, for fsck's sake! Most of us have thicker skin than that. Hazard of the profession ...

"Maybe an "unfollow / ignore" button would work better - although how that would work with anonymous cowards, I have not tried to figure out."

Bozo filtering begins and ends with wet-ware. I suspect that if you were to point out that the ACs aren't actually AC, and that you have their IP addresses, some of this silliness would stop. But then again, there are always proxies for the truly determined ...

Ah, well. Relax & have a homebrew. Works for me :-)

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Six months later (was: Re: On the "my (open) topics" page, I've been seeing a lot of ...)

See: http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/containing/1777092

Year old unsquashed bug ...

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Re: Six months later (was: On the "my (open) topics" page, I've been seeing a lot of ...)

jake, this is a weird one. We are not ignoring you - but have been unable to reproduce this bug. This means assigning more time to hunt down - which we will do, but not yet!

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Two more.

Definitely following the calendar.

http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/latest/2012/03/03/Dominic_Connor_Quant_Headhunter_What_jobs_in_2020_/

http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2012/02/24/Haku_Comic_Book_Men/

Anonymous Coward

Hmm

It's a strange little metagame, replete with features without interface. I suspect that people raging about it probably need to relax a bit. The levels of sheer silliness, banter and facetious comments on what is far from a serious site mean that comments are a bit of a rough and tumble rather than a serious critique of the validity of complex ideas, anyway. Hell, most of the articles are rather silly and fall notably short of journalism (often on purpose, admittedly, so no fault and no blame there).

TL;DR: Y SO SRS?

Anonymous Coward

Re: Hmm

It'd probably help if I specified that I was talking about the vexed issue of downvotes, rather than anything else. Duh, apologies.

FAIL

BOFH broken

Hi

BOFH is not sorted in chronological order and so is difficult to find latest edition

(Written by Reg staff) Gold badge

Re: BOFH broken

hmm. Maybe hit shift reload, clear cache? We moved BOFH column to a different section - and different layout template. That was the case for two weeks.

As of yesterday 10 October, BOFH is sorted in reverse chronological order, just like it was before, only this time you can trawl through 10 pages to access every column we have published on The Reg.

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not exactly a bug but unwelcome behaviour nonetheless

at least if you're interweb paranoid like me.

Just posted on <http://forums.channelregister.co.uk/forum/1/2012/11/06/dont_bet_on_microsoft/>, found I had to enable javascript to do this. Precisely, I had to enable js to enable cookies. If you wish to (IMO unnecessarily) link cookie setting to JS support then I shan't argue, but it did surprise me.

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Possible issue with the "edit" time window

I think you may need to stick some extra time into this process.

I started editing a post, but the "submit" was rejected because the time limit had expired. I think there needs to be an extension of the edit window once a user starts the edit process or the function may not be that helpful :)

FF

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Re: Possible issue with the "edit" time window

You can edit it for 5 minutes after posting, but starting to edit doesn't extend that currently. The simplest thing would be to up limit to 10 minutes.

Added to the list.

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Re: Possible issue with the "edit" time window

> You can edit it for 5 minutes after posting

How?

Vic.

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Re: Possible issue with the "edit" time window

Vic,

There's an edit button next to the Reply button. But you apparently only get it if you're a gold-badger. I guess they hadn't rolled it out to silver-vultures yet. Ten beta testers instead of a hundred or so.

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Re: Possible issue with the "edit" time window

> But you apparently only get it if you're a gold-badger.

Ah, right. The email I got said it was available to Silver Badgers as well - but I can't spot it :-)

Vic.

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Happy

Re: Possible issue with the "edit" time window

Sadly silver badgers have to make do with this, until El Reg's elves have got themselves sorted out.

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Re: Possible issue with the "edit" time window

Drew,

Just tried to edit a long post, realising I'd run out of time, I made 2 changes then hit submit. No probs, then went back and did the same. OK. The third time I tried it timed out. So the limit is 5 minutes from original post. The real answer is I should have proofread it before posting, as it was a touch long.

10 minutes seems a reasonable compromise.

Although even though it's only 5 minutes (maybe 10), should there be an automatic thingy added saying edited by user?

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