Comment Pages in S2: the old becomes new

[fu]

One of our long-running projects is to remove the old crufty code written in BML (our old templating system) and replace it with better alternatives throughout the site. And the coding for talkread.bml -- which is what is used any time you load up a site-skinned comment page -- is a particularly painful example.

Add to that, having the site-skinned comment pages be written one way, and custom comment pages another, makes it likely for one to lag behind the other. For example: site-skinned comment pages show the link for entries with screened comments as: "x visible | y screened". But S2 comment pages didn't have that information until this code push!

So I'm really happy to say that we have a new version of the comments page which uses pure S2, so now site-skinned comment pages and journal-styled comment pages are formed the same way on the backend even if they don't look the same. exor674 worked hard on the backend to make this possible, then momijizukamori came through with some spit and polish (with some help from kunzite).

The idea is for the new version to look as much as possible like the old version, though there might be a few discrepancies, because the backend is so different. momijizukamori has done her best to mimic the look and feel of the old comment pages. But the comments page is one of the most used pages here, so we'd like you all to come and give it a good shakedown.

Turn on beta testing for the "New S2 Comment Pages" -- and let us know in comments if you find anything out of the ordinary.

List of known issues.

Comments

Re: tracking comments

[cheyinka]

Yep, right-click then open link works fine!

Re: tracking comments

[momijizukamori]

Yeah, in that case it sounds like Chrome changed something with how they register on-click events in Javascript :\

Re: tracking comments

[cheyinka]

It is just the new comment pages; new comment pages off with beta JS on still works, but new comment pages on with beta JS off doesn't work. (Well, it works except for this one tiny thing! Otherwise, the new pages look extremely similar and the one difference I notice is (in my opinion) an improvement.)

[Edit, 2012-10-10: Same behavior in Chrome (well, "chromium") in FreeBSD; still works in Firefox in FreeBSD.]

possibly slightly off-topic? style=site on recent entries

[kimira]

So, maybe it was already possible to do this and I just never noticed, but I just realized that anyway now that S2 pages are being used for comments, you can also throw ?style=site on a journal's recent entries to view them that way. Example: http://dw-news.dreamwidth.org/?style=site

I think that's pretty fabulous and a nice alternative to style=mine and format=light (much prettier than format=light), but it seems to have some bugs right now:
1) throw a clear:left on .entry-wrapper so the "Previous 20" at the top isn't pushing the icon & username over.
2) the memory/share/track links are showing up twice, both at the top of the entry in the center, and at the bottom in a line with the comment links. I like them at the bottom but I guess it'd work either way. If the ones at the top are kept, there's an extra border around .action-box ul that should probably be ditched.

Anywho, maybe this did already exist and I never knew about it. Maybe it's not connected to implementing S2 on comment pages and I should submit this to help/support to have it marked as a bug instead? I'd also be happy to throw up a patch for those CSS things if it is posted as a bug or something.

Re: possibly slightly off-topic? style=site on recent entries

[denise]

Been there for a while! foxfirefey is working on it, I believe.

Re: possibly slightly off-topic? style=site on recent entries

[kimira]

Ahh, cool, thanks. I couldn't find it in bugzilla anywhere (but it can be kind of hard to search for things there). It's looking quite nice so far!

[moptothehead]

Have all beta features turned on for this (paid) account. Seeing links in a long nested comment thread collapsing into text further down! Here are screenshots:

http://i.imgur.com/TwV14.png
http://i.imgur.com/5Whxs.png

(It's a private post, but it's currently at 262 comments, with 260 in the featured thread.)

[momijizukamori]

That.... is certainly an interesting bug. I'll have to see about replicating it to dig into the problem. If you have time, could you cycle through having only one beta feature turned on at a time, to see if it's a specific one causing vs a combo?

[moptothehead]

Only seems to happen with S2 Comment Pages turned on, regardless of other combinations.

[momijizukamori]

Good to know! If you can do me a huge favor - can you set the journal it's in to use journal-styled comment pages (it's in account settings... um, somewhere) and tell me if it's still an issue there? Trying to figure out if it's a general S2 problem (ie, it affects S2 journal styles as well) or just something specific to the S2 site styles.

[moptothehead]

No worries! Just did so, and it seems to eliminate the problem; the comments are back to links and there's no block of text. The style being used is Flexible Squares.

I can get a screenshot if you'd like.

[momijizukamori]

Oh, hmm. That wouldn't actually check for the bug - Flexible Squares (and all other LJ import layouts) are based on a different core layer than the DW official layouts, including site views. So they don't use the same code. I'll figure out a different way to poke at it *g*

[ruriair]

S2 comments beta seems to be causing a... weird issue. When reading wankgate, all the comments appear bolded after this thread where, as you can see I asked, apparently someone put a bold HTML tag in their comment to allow a subject-only reply - at least that's what I think. It's affecting everything below it, as well as the post, reading page, inbox, etc. links in the site header.

When logged-out or when all beta testing is off, only the particular comment itself with the emoticon in its subject appears bolded. At the moment I don't know if it's because the anon didn't close their bold tag or what, having no reply.

... I only read that meme when I'm super bored and don't condone most of what goes down there. It's kind of like a trainwreck syndrome.

[denise]

Almost certainly an unclosed <b> tag, yeah. The old version of site-skinned comment pages are built with HTML that causes most browsers to auto-close any unclosed formatting tags; the S2 site-skinned comment pages are constructed with HTML that many browsers don't auto-close tags inside. So it'll be all up to the individual browser how it interprets an unclosed tag.

There's not much we can do to fix something like that -- our HTML cleaner does somewhat attempt to close unclosed tags, but it's not perfect -- so if it's really annoying people, the journal owner can delete or screen the comment to prevent the bold from overflowing. (Or, if you post a comment beneath it with an unmatched closing </b> tag, that might help.)

[momijizukamori]

Hmmm that is good to know - I know the unclosed tag thing is fairly common in RP circles to get a blank comment (though I'd assume having a closing tag instead would keep it from happening, and you can do it with just the opening angle bracket because it's assumed to be HTML).

I will see about spreading the word on that one.

[instantramen]

Something about the new beta comment pages is messing with the beta icon browser. I use Gradation Vertical for my site skin, and before I turned on the New S2 Comment Pages the beta icon browser appeared in dark colors matching the Gradation color scheme. When I turn the new comment pages on, it's suddenly colored to match the light site skins, but if I go back to old comment pages it's normal again.

[momijizukamori]

That is... interesting and unexpected! I'll conference with fu and see if we can figure that one out.

[momijizukamori]

So, congratulations, you found a really weird bug in core2 XD It /does/ seem to be Firefox-specific (possibly only to newer versions, too, but I don't have an easy downgrade method to check), so swapping back to the old comment pages or a browser other than Firefox will get the comments to look fine. Fu and I are digging into the code, so this should be fixed by the next push :)

[hermitsoul]

Very minor, but with the new version, page titles are 'username| subject' instead of 'username: subject'. Will this be permanent once the changes goes live?

[momijizukamori]

Most likely - the aesthetic change is minor enough that its not worth making the code base more complicated to change back.

[hermitsoul]

Thanks for letting me know - quite a few of us use scripts to help create fandom newsletters, and this change breaks all of mine. I guess I better start updating them!

[denise]

The good news is that we have quite a lot of useful things in development for newsletter assemblers, and eventually (sadly not soon soon, but eventually) you won't need your scripts at all. :)

[hermitsoul]

That's great to hear! Now, if I can just figure out an easy way to deal with LJ... :D

[musyc]

I'm picking up an interesting and random quirk with the new comment pages.

Screencap! - All DW betas are on; all userscripts and etc were off.

It's appearing on both Firefox 3.incrediblyold.butpryaddon.fromcolddeadhands and Firefox 17.wants.updatesevery.freakingnightwtf, about once every couple of weeks, but I cannot even begin to guess what is causing it.

[momijizukamori]

Hmmm. Is this all threads, or just some, and do you have a different browser on your computer you can check on? (I'm not getting it, so investigation is required *g*)