Bug Reporting Thread

Body, style and base have already been added to the HTML filter list for the Christmas release. Thanks for finding these!The base tag currently placed in message pages is not present in the Christmas release, so your bookmark example will be working soon.I need help testing and coding. Your email is private, so if you can help please send an email to Admin.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

Very weird bug, can't imagine how it might be happening. Please keep you eye on it and let me know if you pick up more threads that you haven't contributed to. There's got to be a clue in there somewhere.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

Yes, you've got it, there's reuse of topic numbers! Also, I see Member Message Lists aren't being updated during archiving.The latter is already fixed in the new release.The former, I can't see where it's happening. It's on my list, though.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

The dynamic menus that appear at the top of most pages will be going away with the new release. I wanted to keep them, but as the board software may be going commercial it was important to purchase the rights to the original menu software. The purchase price for a license allowing redistribution of source code was $160,000. Needless to say, that's a bit beyond the budget.I would like to restore the dynamic menus, and I'm currently investigating other alternatives. I'd develop in-house, but dynamic menus are written in JavaScript, which is notoriously browser dependent. It isn't the implementation that is difficult, but getting it to work across all the widely-used versions and flavors of browsers.Loss of the dynamic menus is being balanced by additional links, including a drop-down for the forums at the bottom of most pages.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

Good catch! You're in the running for Golden Glove! Filtering out renegade HTML and JavaScript is a challenge. Short of getting rigorous and adding an HTML parser, it's sort of catch as catch can.There's one new feature that I'm not sure anyone has taken a careful look at yet. There's an "unread messages" indicator in the form of a little blue dot that appears in the left hand column next to threads and forums. For a forum, the blue dot is turned on when the forum has threads with messages newer than your last visit to those threads. For a thread, the blue dot is turned on when the thread has posts newer than your last visit to that thread. It appears to be working, but I haven't been using the board very much.As near as I can tell, this "unread message" indicator represents an innovation in the bulletin board software genre. Most boards will give you an indication about whether forums and threads have new messages since your last session, but they won't turn the indicators on and off during your session as you read messages and as new messages are posted.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

All static user settings, like "topics per page", are now saved in persistent storage with the rest of the user profile.All session related settings, like user name and session start time, are stored in cookies.If your "save login" setting isn't being followed when you set it on the login page, then this is a bug. If I can reproduce this problem I'll fix it tonight.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

I'm in a very busy period, but short requests like this are a nice change of pace. The problem should be fixed, let me know if you notice any similar problems on other pages.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

This is an interesting one. The Perl function "gmtime" returns a flag that is set for times that correspond to periods when Daylight Savings Time is in effect. But now that I think about it, my recollection of GMT is that it has no Daylight Savings Time (can someone confirm?). This would mean that during the winter, British time and GMT are the same time, but that during the summer British time is an hour ahead of GMT time, and naturally the rest of the world has an equivalent discontinuity. It also means that time calculations based upon GMT won't change when Daylight Savings Time changes. So what the heck is the Daylight Savings Time flag of gmtime for?There are a variety of solutions available, I'll get this fixed soon. In the meantime, EvC Forum has not yet switched to Daylight Savings Time.This message has been edited by Admin, 04-06-2005 03:15 AM

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

This is a known bug, but it's low in priority. The reason it gets interpreted correctly is because when links are parsed by browsers and web servers, this happens: One way to avoid the problem is to instead use dBCodes, e.g., [msg=-19,-270,-1].

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

I noticed this when Lam first posted that message. There are two things happening, one that I understand, one that I don't:

1. http:/// doesn't seem like it should go to the same site as http:///, but it does. When you type "google.com" into the brower's address box, it brings up Google". So when you type "" into the browser's address box, it should either bring up http://, or it should bring up http:// which is a different site, but it should not do what it's doing, which is going to http:// while displaying the URL in the address box as http://.
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2. The problem with not being logged in after leaving http:// and going to http:// is well understood. The name after "http://" is called the domain name, and cookies (which is how the software knows you're logged in) are stored by domain name. You're now in domain "" instead of domain "" and will have to log in again. Of course, what you should instead do is simply add the "www." to the URL, and then you'll be logged in again.

I'd welcome any explanation for #1. My guess is that my domain registration company is doing me a "favor" by including the shorthand address in the tables it distributes to other Internet servers.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

Let's see how much time it takes for someone to figure out which one.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

Obviously I have to fix more obscure bugs or provide more obscure clues!I fixed this bug because I could only fix the next bug if I fixed this one first, but now I can't remember what the next one was. When I remember that I'll probably remember what I did with the prize. And whether it was made of chocolate! Folks, the fix for Daylight Savings Time isn't perfect. The board now will switch to and from Daylight Savings Time when the server the board runs on switches. As long as you live in the US, or you live in a region of the world that switches at the same time as the US, then you board will switch at the same time you do. If you live in a region of the world that switches at different times, I think a week earlier and a week later for both England and France for example, then you'll be off for a week or so around the switches. This only affects displayed times, of course. All stored internal times are GMT.There's some discussion here in the US to dramatically extend DST, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

I'll mention this the next time I have lunch with the Japanese prime minister.In the longer term, I plan to add manual setting/unsetting of Daylight Savings Time to member profiles, and an option to follow the Daylight Savings Time setting of your own computer instead of the server. This latter will have a latency of one access to the board before the setting kicks in. The first time the board is accessed after a change in DST would set a cookie to the new DST setting, the next access would send the cookies new value to the server.While this is klugey, you can, of course, change your time zone setting to make the time come out correctly.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

I believe you're right, GMT does not do Daylight Savings Time. GMT never changes ahead and backward. I asked about this once before in one thread or another but didn't get an answer, can you verify this is absolutely the case? If so, I'll add this to the bug list. When fixed, the TimeZone line that currently says "Greenwich Mean Time: Dublin, London" would become two lines, one for "Greenwich Mean Time" and another for "Dublin, London".

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

Alright, alright, I'll look at it. Searching simultaneously by words and member also doesn't work, I'll check that out, too. The bugs manifest themselves only at the website, not on my development system, so I suspect a Perl version difference.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director