Eka's Portal

Good News Everyone!

The forum, gallery, and interactive story system have been moved to a new container with updated software! This required upgrading various parts of their code to account for changes, which took much longer than expected. It also has introduced a few bugs, but is overall good because:

A) Security updates are nice to have and now we have them.
B) More future proof, we are no longer so many versions behind!
C) Most interestingly: Being on old versions was blocking new development.

Yes, there have been several improvements I've wanted to make to the gallery and such that I've held off from doing because we really ought to have completed the move to the new versions first. That turned out to have taken quite awhile, but now that it is done, I've already started on some and have more.

Things this has paved the way for:
1) You know how the tags and search pages have been super slow and bogging down the whole site so sometimes we have to turn them off? Well I have a plan for using a different storage backend that should make them faster.
2) You know how the search page returns poor search results? I have a plan for improving that too.
3) Move interactive story system out of the bronze age.

However, in the meantime there are a few things that are currently broken as a result:
- Document conversion for gallery uploads for few document types: PDF, RTF, MOV, MKV, FLV is broken.
- Formatting on some bbcode tags in gallery and/or forum.

Since the move I already have fixed a few things too which I should probably mention:
- Fixed persist of user filtering on tags page, and added feedback for when it is active.
- Fixed persist of "No Tags" checkbox on search page.
- Fixed the "error: success" message when deleting comments!
- Improved appropriate caching of changing thumbnails.
- Addressed minor HTML errors on several gallery pages.
- Various hidden code errors and warnings

Thank you for all you do for this site.

OH! Change to the interactive~ If you're overhauling the interactive section of the website can I suggest a type of tag system, favorite system linked to the author of the creation and a view system linked to the author? I've always wanted to dip my toes into interactive storytelling, but the muck and mire that the section currently is, as well as the system not connected to views favorites or any other account binding system can potentially have someone write amazing things but the content is never discovered, or it's discovered but because views and favorites don't exist people might not give credit to the author for creating something the community enjoyed.

My two cents! Keep up the wonderful work Leshana! <3

There's still issues with posting replies and such; sometimes it'll just pop up a long string of code at the top of the page but still load, other times it'll just return a white page with two lines of code strings; I have to press F5 to refresh the page.

I'm sure you're aware of these, just thought I'd share to make sure.

I'd like to see an interactive list sorting system, but that's something I'm sure has been suggested before.

Cheers for the predator who eats bugs for breakfast!
...sorry, I’m a computer nerd too, how could I resist this once in a lifetime chance to make a combo computer-vore joke?

Good Work Leshana. Cheers for Technical Maintaining the Portal :3

Nice work!

Great to hear that updates are being made Leshana!

Is there any estimated time period for how long the document conversions will be down? While I don't want to be a bother, this could be a very big issue for myself and other writers who rely on those listed formats to upload our work, and a timeframe would be lovely!

Thank you for all the hard work you do!

Can I request some way of differentiating between stories with a thumbnail and images?

Baz wrote:Can I request some way of differentiating between stories with a thumbnail and images?

I'd like that as well. For my stories I make the thumbnail explicit so users aren't teased with an image only to get words when they're looking for pictures! It'd be great if there were some way to differentiate the two when viewing galleries/searches/etc.

Apologies if this is the wrong place to ask this, but I thought it might've been because of the upgrade - but are the current uploads for the site stuck in an archived mode?
I assume it is temporary if its the case, but when I look into the tags and new uploads I noticed that the most current ones are actually old ones - in fact for one such tag I noticed something I had uploaded wasn't on the first page of the uploads, but it is still seen as posted in my gallery.

Is this just a bug on my end, or did something happen during all the big changes / downtime from yesterday?

Uh, I think something got borked with the search function in the gallery. You know how it usually displays everything from most recent to oldest? Yeah, it’s not doing that anymore and there’s no option to turn that function back on without manually inputting the dates and even then it’s in a random order of what you get within the dates specified. Could we get that fixed please?

Celestia wrote:Uh, I think something got borked with the search function in the gallery. You know how it usually displays everything from most recent to oldest? Yeah, it’s not doing that anymore and there’s no option to turn that function back on without manually inputting the dates and even then it’s in a random order of what you get within the dates specified. Could we get that fixed please?

This, currently you are limited to browsing by tags

Tags should work properly now.

Can confirm that the tag search sorts properly now, as does search by owner. Search by text still needs to be fixed to sort from newest to oldest though as of typing this.

Search on my end appears to currently only show the first 200 pages of whatever you are searching for (looking at the digestion tag which I believe had over 900 pages before)(I like to search for the very early stuff by common tags and I can't right now) and doesn't show everything that is posted by everyone (looking at search by owner "Tyslan03" which only shows 13 things despite there being more than a page of stories if you are in the gallery for "Tyslan03").

TheVoreEngineer wrote:Is there any estimated time period for how long the document conversions will be down?

RTF files are now operational. Video files will be awhile.

Leshana wrote:RTF files are now operational. Video files will be awhile.

Thank you for keeping me updated. Is this intended to be the final version of RTF conversion? I have tested uploading in the format, and many of the previous formatting settings that were displayed with those documents are no longer functioning. These include...

• Line Spacing
• Text Indentation
• Text Alignment

Apologies for the further bothers, as I would just like to clarify if possible.

More feedback on the RTF submissions:

* The font family is screwing up. In my test, the "font-family" CSS is being set to "Calibriserif", but in the previously-uploaded RTF (pre-transition) of the same document, the family is correctly set to "Calibri, serif" ( Font family screenshot example )
* Bold and italics seem to work fine. Even when combined (not in screenshot)
* Headers behave as expected ("Chuolf Pack Hunt" in the screenshot below)
* Footers, for some reason, appear right next to the header. (In the screenshot below, the copyright line is the footer)

I've modified the RTF-to-HTML conversion library we are using to support paragraph formatting, adding

• Line Spacing
• First Line Indentation
• Paragraph Left/Right Indentation
• Text Alignment (left, right, center, justify)