It's been a long time coming, but personal signatures are finally separated from content on the site. Now, when you create a comment, your signature will not appear in the box. It will appear below your comment once posted, though. And, when you update your signature, it will update across all your comments.
The signatures are also displayed in a smaller italicized font to make it more clear that it isn't part of the comment itself, making it easier to follow along a discussion. This also makes any lines of characters people add to signatures to separate them redundant.
There will be some growing pains in relation to this as all the older posts have signatures included in the actual content of the post. This is an annoying holdover from the way Druapl (our CMS) handles sigs. But it will make things easier for us going forward. It will even improve the way searches work on the site (since right now it's also indexing your signature in every comment you make).
I've also added in a homepage link next to your username when you post a comment. This is pulled from your profile. You can enter a personal homepage or blog address and it will automatically appear with all comments you make site-wide. All of these links are using rel="NOFOLLOW"
to keep people from using them to improve search engine rankings, too, making us a less attractive spammer/SEO target.
PLEASE UPDATE YOUR SIGNATURE AND RECENT POSTS
As a result of these updates, the signature guidelines have changed. Lines of characters to separate your signature from your posts aren't necessary and should be removed. Also, as the homepage link is now a part of all comments, the homepage link within the signature is redundant and should be removed. Please be sure to update your signature appropriately.
Also, it would be a GREAT help to us if you could go through the last two pages of recent posts and manually remove your signature from any posts that haven't been replied to yet (once someone replies, you can't edit any longer). I'm going to ask the other mods to assist with this where comments have been replied to in recent posts so we can have our currently active threads looking better. Just the last two pages should be good. And if an older thread is resurrected, we'll fix it. This is now done. Mods will update older topics that are replied to. Please don't edit any more of your old posts.
Sorry it took so long to get to this point. I know we've talked about it back and forth here and there, but I finally got some time to work on it (actually, I needed a coding break and this seemed like a good way to do it, but that's another post).
Regards,
John
That would be a ton of work John to go back and remove sig's from that many posts. A lot of long time posters here have two or three pages per day that we would have to go through.
Not very realistic.
Just like the great post lock up of last year. Let's just move forward from here.
Life is about the journey not the destination!
The Kazoo Spartan
That's why I said a page or two of comments. That way the current active threads will be clean.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Do what I can.
Life is about the journey not the destination!
The Kazoo Spartan
Cool, I like the new look, it makes them more distinct and obvious that they're not part of the comment.
Also, I've volunteered a couple times to help moderate, and even if it's something as tedious as removing signatures that were posted in the last couple hours, I'll do it. But I never got a response to my post.
Edit My signature doesn't look like the small font it did earlier? Is this just me? I'll try refreshing I guess, though I don't know how that would help. Edit: That did it, I aplogize.
I'm still tweaking the display a tad. I just ditched the italics, for instance, because it looks awful on displays without ClearType. Each time I make a change, I have to disable all the advanced caching features and then re-enable them. And then you'll have to refresh otherwise it won't get the new CSS file until you close and re-open your browser.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
And by the way, does anything you're doing have anything to do with the fact that I've been logged out like three times tonight? Though before that like last 8 months I've never been logged out?
I don't think so... but I'm not sure. It hasn't logged me out.
Ping me via email about modding.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Though before that like last 8 months I've never been logged out?
Strange. My login cookies only last for a month.
Vintage!
Well, I have various re-formats and browser re-installs in between, so that could be why I've never had a cookie go bad.
I did some more tweaks and edited all the posts (and adjusted the signatures) on the first page of the tracker myself just so we can get a proper intro to it. I think with the image, homepage and new sig it looks pretty good and gets just about everything we want in there. And, personally, I like the way it looks now. Thoughts?
PS - Be sure to reload so you have the most recent CSS stylesheet.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
I also like the way it looks. Great work John.
"If knowledge can create problems, is it not through ignorance that we can solve them." -Isaac Asimov
Looks good, better than the old sigs.
Still think the avatars should be slightly larger though :evil:
"Because they stand on a wall and say, 'Nothing is going to hurt you tonight. Not on my watch.'" (A Few Good Men)
Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous.(Albert Einstein)
Did I detect you editing my sig?
Looks good now, but not on this computer. Damn graphics card won't support my new monitor's screen res.
"If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate."
Mine edited as well, went to change it as per instructions here(or was it the other thread?) and the "=============" was gone from my sig.
Went back to a few previous posts and also noticed my sig was changed there as well, guess I don't need to edit it.
"Because they stand on a wall and say, 'Nothing is going to hurt you tonight. Not on my watch.'" (A Few Good Men)
Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous.(Albert Einstein)
https://portableapps.com/node/9449#comment-51330
Life is about the journey not the destination!
The Kazoo Spartan
test. P.S. I've just pinged you about becoming a mod.
Any chance mods can get the "edit other profiles" option? I've seen a few sigs that need to be fixed.
And on the subject of signatures, any chance signatures can be added to the bottom of those too?
"If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate."
Signature edited... and this afternoon I'll check which posts can I still edit by my own...
If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port,
and the bus is interrupted as a very last resort,
and the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort,
then the socket packet pocket has an error to report
Looks fine.
Can't see homepage links in any first post.
Life is crunchy, anywhere
On my screen the sigs are a bit too small for my old eyes. Of course that just encourages me to skip them...
I'd also prefer a bit more separation between the sig and the body of the note. Even a half-line of white space might help.
Otherwise it's a good update for those who think sigs are useful :-P.
MC
Not sure if this has been mentioned, and I don't think there was a post to the official update of the pre tag, so I'll post here.
When on my dads Vista machine with a widescreen monitor, the preformatted boxes always display the largest possible size even if the text is only like two lines. Any ideas?
Can we get a full description of the browser (Name, Version, If extensions are supported specify which)? Also, a screenshot would be good. I'm personally not aware of any that do this, as it specifies a "max-height" which is in the CSS1 specification (AFAIK).
"If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate."
Using IE7 @ work on WinXP SP2 and started browsing these forums from there (they're not filtered yet...yay!). My one line using the pre tag was about 4 inches tall on the screen. I'll try to remember to get a screenie today and post it later tonight.
Edit: Just tried looking at a post of mine using the pre tag and it looked fine here at home on two different WinXP SP2 machines in both IE6 and IE7. Maybe it's an IE7 on a widescreen monitor thing because that's what I have @ work and so does the original person that brought the problem up above. My IE7 @ home is on a normal 4x3 sized laptop screen.
My test thread/post (since I can't login @ work and check my tracker): https://portableapps.com/node/7216
Cancer Survivors -- Remember the fight, celebrate the victory!
Help control the rugrat population -- have yourself spayed or neutered!
I actually 'kinda fixed' this issue in CSS when you mentioned it. The max-height trick doesn't seem to work in IE as it should (it's yet another hack needed to make IE perform semi-adequately). I removed it so now IE will just let pre tags be as tall as they need to be (whereas other browsers will actually work right and limit them to a max of 500px after which there will be a scroll bar).
As always, you may need to hit reload as IE holds onto CSS longer than it should.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!