New Home Page

[banthafodder]

Liking the new homepage. Where is the Flickr feed located now?

[PurpleDave]

Where are the links from articles to their associated forum topics? I can't even find one for the article about changing the front page.

[rodiziorobs]

[dWhisper]

While there is talk about doing something different with how the comments work, I can promise that we won't go to a Facebook only commenting system. That was vetoed by everyone on staff from the outset a few years ago when discussions started about changing how we do things.

As for the link to the forums, that was really a hack in our old theme. It used a plugin that stopped working right a long time ago; we tried to keep it going as well as we could, and that's why the posts still show up, but embedding it into the new theme is kind of dicey. phpbb, which drives our forums, has also been very slow at adding any new features, and they haven't delivered a lot of the APIs and hooks to make things like the old plugin work without hacking it up.

We haven't made any decision on what to do... the forums are part of the fabric of FBTB, but at the same time, they've also died off a lot over the years. Nearly all forums have in general, not just here, as comments showed up.

[PurpleDave]

Is that why I was always seeing a note at the bottom of every article stating that comments were closed even when the forum thread was fairly active and accepting new posts?

[dWhisper]

Yeah. We weren't using the internal Wordpress comment system, but every time they patched or changed something, they would try and reactivate it and mess up the plugin.

[Bellicose]

Could you fix this somehow? Every time Ace makes an editorial, there is no way to comment or contribute any info to it - the comment box up at the top of the article does not work, click on it and nothing happens.

It'd be nice to be able to point out that, say, Lego stores have had a sign-up list for their Millenium Falcons for over a month now and that people on the list have 48 hours to purchase theirs from the notification.

[PurpleDave]

Sometimes when an article is posted, they start a forum thread manually, but often they don't. You still have to go digging the hard way, but given how few posts are made that's not very hard.

But yeah, it'd be nice if the threads were automatic and the articles linked to them again. You know, so it would be possible to point out that there's only one minifig in CMF TLBM2 that never actually appears in the movie, but that several of the accessories are totally bogus.

[banthafodder]

I know it's been pointed out already, but can the site be fixed so we can comment on the homepage or the items get transferred over to the forums? I like all the content that's coming out but it is frustrating that comments can't be posted on half the stuff.

[dWhisper]

We've been working on the commenting since the new homepage went up. Just as an FYI, it will be likely moving to comments on the homepage, as there isn't a great solution for integrating WordPress and phpBB (sad reality is that phpBB is kind of a zombie platform, and their schema makes writing plugins very annoying).

We are trying to make sure we filter out the spam and fluff (there's actually quite a bit of spam that you guys never see because of the approval rules we have), so I don't have a date, but it is coming.

[banthafodder]

I notice that when you hit the comment icon on the homepage it now at least goes to a log in screen but doesn't recognize my log in

[PurpleDave]

You can click on a comment icon? On the front page, I can't even see anything that looks like a comment button. On an article page, there's nothing but icons for other social media sites at the bottom of the page, and just underneath the title there's a tiny little icon that looks like an eye (seems to count page views) next to a tiny little icon shaped like two comic strip speech bubbles. Clicking doesn't seem to do anything. Right click, open in new tab just brings up the same page again, but with the page view counter up by one.

Anyways, as has been made known before, the website itself has commenting software built in that they chose not to enable. The forums are a different software package, which is enabled. So, you have a login that works here, but probably nobody has one for the main page except the site staff. And they probably only have one because they have to be able to log in to post articles.

[banthafodder]

So when I click on the comment icon it takes me to a page that says log in to leave a comment but can't get beyond that.