Lord of the Rings Fanatics Plaza

Turns out that contorting a modern phpBB forum into a retro 2003 plaza clone is not the most seamless thing ever.. especially if you've never worked on either before. Please post any bugs you find in the site here and I will try to fix them -- or at least, I'll try to be nice as I dash your hopes and tell you I can't fix it..

Right, my ip has been permanently banned for some reason. I’m posting on my phone. I sent an email with my up address to administrator via the provided link by this site.

You are officially unbanned! Sorry for the tricky signup, I wish the birthday didn't default to 2020 - I'm sure that's gonna catch a lot of people up. I'll see what I can do about that.

Thank you, Narv for unbanning me! Hopefully I remain unbanned for a long time

Wild and good to know. All my testing has been on Firebox on Ubuntu, so Windows / Mac versions are all a mystery to me

Anyone else on a Mac able to confirm this?

From what I'm seeing, it's possible that it's a Firefox version issue. I have a pretty tenuous grasp of SSL details but my guess right now is that the certificate the site uses for HTTPS (which we definitely want) isn't compatible with that version of Firefox - I think they're up to version 76 or something now.

If someone happens to also be running Firefox on Mac and has the plaza either working or not working, that would help narrow down the problem.

Reporting my own bug: when people add icons to their threads the text overlaps the icon and it looks like trash

case in point: the Art/Poetry forum

Tried to fix, failed, took the nuclear option of disabling topic icons for now.

Forgive me, topic icon lovers

Not sure if it's a bug or not, perhaps there is a perfectly reasonable explanation, but I've noticed some posts that have been edited have a little blurb at the bottom saying when they were edited and how many times. But there are also posts that have been edited and the blurb doesn't appear. I can link to some examples if you don't know what I'm talking about.

My Bug Report

My favourite bug is the amblypygi. It isn't actually a bug because it has more than 6 legs. In fact it has 8 legs. It is an arachnid. It looks like nightmare fuel and most people would hate it, but it's actually a really nervous little critter. If you see one you should give it a polite wave and get on with your business.

@Dwim I had exactly the same confusion and did some research a couple days ago. The phpBB post editing setup is an arcane science, but this is my understanding of it: editing time is displayed only for (1) non-admin users who (2) edit one of their posts that is NOT the last post in a thread. I guess their thinking is that if you quickly edit a post before someone else posts, it's no biggie, otherwise it'll show the edit time. Does that explain the weirdness you're seeing, or have you noticed instances of invisible edits that don't fit with that?

@Li oh fredegar why did you make me google that

Li, I think your bug report is great and the amblypygi sounds like a really interesting arachnid. I have given your report a stamp for your hard work:


Your report still needs to be graded by Narv though.

Narv, that does seem to explain it and I don't seem to be confused anymore. That system makes sense to me. It is likely that any of the invisible edits I've seen were edited when that post was still the last post in the thread.

Narv wrote: ↑Sat May 16, 2020 3:50 am @Li oh fredegar why did you make me google that

I'm on @Dwim's side for this. I also googled it and colour me impressed. Next time my wife says she wants another cat I will have a counter-offer.

It has... whips.

@Narv i don't know if this is a bug or intended but deleting a post is -1 pt. On either 2 or 0 pt posts. So you could technically keep posting and deleting for 1 positive. Just fyi.

@Narv Possibly you know about it but, I keep getting logged out. I log in, type a post then when I click submit, I get told to login again and my post disappears. Also, when I do login in again, I get a "this form is invalid" error message.

@Oro cool trick... we will fix it.

Thorin and I are debugging his login issue - if anyone else is encountering problems staying logged in please do post here about it (or send an email to the admin account by clicking 'Contact Us' down below). That would help determine if this is a board settings issue or something just affecting certain setups.

Not sure if this is a bug or not but I have noticed when doing a post up in the editor. The website tends to refresh and you either are lucky to gain it back or it just disappears all together. I have to do the codes and that in wordpad before posting now, it's becoming too consistent to edit in there.

@Liläth thanks for letting me know - so the page is just refreshing randomly while you're on the "Full Editor" screen? Sounds very annoying - are you on mobile or a computer when this happens? If you could pass on what browser you use (Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari etc.) that would help me too.

@Narv so it is on a windows laptop. I use the windows internet explorer that came with it but it has happened in chrome as well. I can try the opera one but that is frustrating to use.

@Liläth I wasn't able to track this down, sorry - my hope is that it's something related to the rube goldberg machine of cheap Amazon Web Services configurations I'm running the site on right now and that it and other login / refresh / cookie related bugs we've seen pop up will fade upon arrival at a proper home.

@Narv All good. Thank you for taking the time to look into it.

Plaza isn't always working, I often get the timeout message, could it be you need to set the traffic allowed higher?

We're doing quite well on resource usage right now so I don't believe it's a traffic issue. My #1 suspect is DNS propagation, for which the only cure is time, and #2 suspect is URL redirect configuration, which I'm investigating now.

Just want to report relatively smooth sailing on my part. I’m running this site on an oldish IPad

Heads up (to myself?) that I just got a 503 Server Busy error randomly. Looks like I'm the only one to get it so far according to error logs but if it keeps happening I'll have to have a little bandwidth-themed discussion with the new host. So please let me know if you get that error code, anyone (it's a big grey screen that says 503 on it).

@Narv I got a timeout error coming back to the index after taking the knowledge hall quiz but wasn't smart enough to screenshot it before clicking away.

Thanks - sounds like it was at about the same time as mine. Hopefully just a server hiccup but I'll keep an eye out for any more such shenanigans.

So, I'm not sure if it's a bug or just a feature not in yet, but I noticed I can't edit my profile. Like my birthdate, etc.

Hi Joel, it's a 'feature' in the sense that the surest way for me to keep potentially personally-identifying info like your birthday, real name, photos etc. etc. safe, is to simply not collect that info in the first place, so I didn't include it in profiles.. and it turns out once you remove that stuff there's not really anything left in that 'Profile' tab to edit. You'll see a 'Birthday' field in a couple places which should always say 'Not entered' or something to that effect - that's just an artifact of the age checking mechanism used at registration, and your birthday isn't actually stored anywhere (per the privacy policy). Perhaps it's overly cautious (and obviously I'm not going stop anyone from saying their birthday or posting selfies on here, unless they're a child) but my philosophy is to just not actively collect info about people that I don't actually need.

Now if people really really want to be able to add profile type info, I could add some of that stuff back.. but I'd kinda just rather not.

That said I see that it's a pretty brutal tease to have an "Edit Profile" tab that you can't actually do anything with so I removed it just now - other profile-esque settings like your password, email, and signature should all be editable in that UCP 'Profile' tab.

Thanks for the explanation. I don't care either way, but you are right - that was quite the tease *g*. Thanks for taking away that dangling carrot

I have been informed that it's "Orc Chieftain" not "Orc Chieftan"

this will be fixed sometime in calendar year 2020

Orc Chieftains and Dúnadan (Dúnadans?) rejoice: you are now spelled properly, I think

(as a bonus, so are Chieftains of the Mark, for whenever one of you gets to Rohan Rank 11 - next week I assume)

If/when anyone finds more typos lemme know and I'll get on em

Plural for Dúnadan is Dúnedain (Thank god for google as I know nada :P)

Minor bug report: The "Notifications" drop-down seems to give everyone a candle icon.

Note: This is not a request to fix said bug. This is a labor of love. Not going to ask you to dedicate time to fixing things that aren't causing problems!

In addition to Túrin's report, I will add that everyone is showing as a New Soul on the points overview page:

https://lotrfanaticsplaza.com/forum/app.php/aps

But again, not such a priority I am sure.

We're all new souls at heart and sometimes need a little reminder

(but yeah thanks for pointing those out, they're on the todo list to fix, either by showing the right icon or by just not showing icons.. but as you say they're pretty low priority)

They are also showing as new souls in my notifications.

Yeah - since the ranks & icons are my own extra creation and the mentions & points extensions were designed to work with an 'unaltered' phpBB forum, the places where they interact (like icons in mentions notifications, or on the points overview page) don't always play nice together. We'll see what we can do though - but that might just kinda be the way it is for a while unfortunately.

THEY ARE ALSO SHOWING AS NEW SOULS IN MY NOTIFICATIONS. OH HO HO.

The New Souls should now be mostly exorcised from places they weren't welcome and replaced with adorable little one rings. Let me know if they show up in other annoying places or if any New Souls that should be showing are gone.

(PS thank you to @Tarawen for volunteering to chip in with coding stuff and actually fixing this - I just gestured confusedly at the GitHub repo on this one)