Site_Feedback

John wrote:

Quoting that for a reply is fun.

Foxhack wrote:
There used to be an issue where if you tried using emojis or certain special characters, at least via the app, the result would be an odd mix of characters instead.

John wrote:
What in the world? How'd you do that?

It's actually just a weird side effect of using letter accents. You can actually use (many) more than one per letter -- and get crazy stuff like that.

Here's a summary of issues since the UTF-8 upgrade.


o The app was garbling special characters.
- I think this is now fixed (thanks again, nonamesleft )

o Emails had garbled special characters
- Fixed, (thanks again, Foxhack)

o Images on the site were a bit wonky. For example, games with names that end in '?' didn't allow for an image to be uploaded for the item page.
- I tracked this down to an image system I've used for decades. I'm not sure why, but it was unable to open files reliably. This morning, I switched it to an alternate image system that works fine. So, I think this is now fixed too.

Current Issues

o Server is getting wedged
- This is tricky to understand and I'm not sure it's even because of utf8, but the server has been getting into a state where it doesn't serve pages. I have a system in place that will restart it automatically after 5 minutes, so it's not terrible, but not as good as it was before. I don't see how this could be utf8 related, but it started since I went to utf8.
- I'm trying various changes to the server configuration to try to eliminate this.

o Some of the tables didn't convert to utf8. These were not important things, but I'd like to be 100% utf8.
- The tables are storing IP addresses as strings, and utf8 strings have some effects on them that prevent the conversion.
- I can store the IP addresses as an integer instead, though. So, that should get around utf8 and may even result in faster tables. But, it will take some work to convert over to using the integer-format ip addresses in my code.

I'm going to shut the site down for 5-10 minutes in order to update the way IP addresses are stored in the SiteLog (mentioned above).

ok, done

Reverting back to the old FastCGI server seems to have resolved the "server getting wedged" issue I was seeing the last couple days.

I don't understand why starman (FastCGI alternative) was getting stuck like that, but I also don't need to use it. Oddly, starman had worked fine for a couple weeks. It only seemed to have trouble since I updated the site to utf8. *shrug*

The tables are all converted and Host-based sorting is faster too.

So, I think I'm done debugging stuff related to the utf8 update. I may still do some code-clean up later (some functions I have that used to translate utf8 can be removed).

In a month or two I will start working on upgrading the OS GameTZ runs on from CentOS to Rocky Linux. That's mostly me setting it up and trying it out on a test server for a while, but eventually migrating the live site to a new server will be potentially disruptive.

Bill: Couple of posts with weird content in them here: https://gametz.com/General/need-help-internal-ssd-...

Wasn't sure if it was related to the UTF-8 stuff or not? Not sure if you can tell more from your side. If it was just one person, I'd think it was them and a weird copy/paste or something -- but two people are showing odd characters there...

Thanks for letting me know.

I had made a change this morning related to UTF-8 stuff that seemed to fix another issues.... but, clearly, it's triggering this now too. So, I just reverted it. I think it's OK again.

The issue I was fixing was more or less just a warning in my logs, so I can just ignore that.

I have one more thing I can try... maybe later I will, but I'll recheck that topic if I do.

https://gametz.com/General_Marketplace/interest-po...

Title is glitched when browsing the forum (Pokemon displays as "Pokémon"), but shows up fine when you click on the actual topic.

Well, I can't explain that one. But, I'll look into that too. Thanks.

I’m seeing a fish?

ryanflucas wrote:

That's the April Fools gag for this year. Guess Bill hasn't turned it off. :)

Foxhack wrote:

I'm also guessing they only show up in your own posts?

Nope, I saw them in random posts by people over the past week.

I was seeing them on everyone but me.

@ryanflucas https://gametz.com/?A=FunFun ...click a fish to get on the board, find them all! You get an icon with a percent.

Not many people found it on April 1st, so I extended its time on the site. I keep checking to see if people have stopped fishing, but it's still happening. So, I haven't shut it down yet. It will end by the end of the month either way.

Note that you can turn it all off if you click "April Fool's [on]" in the menus/footer.

"First To The Key! First To The Egg!"

Should have said “it’s carp” instead of “it’s crap” in the flow chart.

Foxhack wrote:

I looked into this and here's where things seem to stand.

The New Layout has a first post preview feature. When you hover over a topic from the forum's list, it shows you a pop-up with the text from the first post previewed.

If the subject or first post contains special characters, they can get garbled (as you showed). There's your case where the subject of the topic has special-chars and they are shown in the list as garbled. Then, the other case I know of is if the post itself has special characters, they get garbled in the preview pop-up. I can fix either case, but it causes the other case to break.

A month or so ago, I "fixed" the case where the preview case garbled chars. But, this caused the topic list garbling you reported. So, I've reverted that (seems more important that the topic list looks right as previews are less seen).

I have no idea why this is happening, which is disturbing, but not the end of the world.

I'm tempted to simply remove post previews entirely. Most people use the Old Layout and Mobile layout anyway. And, I suspect not many New Layout users really care about the feature.

I'm still looking at it, so maybe I'll get a clue and really fix it, but it seems unlikely.

Well, just after I wrote that, I tried something that seems to work better. Basically, if the preview is text-only (no HTML), I can avoid using something that messes with the utf-8 characters. Thus, both cases seem to work. But, the preview is plain-looking (seems fine). So, let's run with that for a while.

We you, Bill.