Return of the Lettercol

[doc]

I've tightened down the security and upgraded everything to the latest and greatest code. There's one lingering bug I can't quite get my head around, which is that the CSS for the boards isn't displaying properly in Mozilla-based browsers. The lettercol is fully functional, but Everything's in black and white. I have a support query open with the developers.

Meanwhile, I took the liberty of removing everyone from the membership roster who had never made a post. There were a lot of attempts by spammers to sign up, and I wanted to clear that off. If I accidently deleted a legitimate user, I apologize. Please re-register and share your comments with us!!

Sorry for the long delay. Recovering from the exploit essentially invovled setting everything up from scratch again, importing the old data, and then going back and tightening up the security, so it took a bit of time.

Now, go comment on those stories!!

[doc]

Rob,

You are the master.  .  .and I worship at the altar of your Geekdom.   What happened?  How many improvements have you made?  

The changes were not made out of choice but necessity. Unfortunately, someone figured out how to compromise the security of the lettercol and replaced the normally erudite discussion here with an advertisement for a gynocology textbook. I corrected this and it was hit again within hours, so I made the decision to pull it down until I could get it upgraded and locked down.

All I know is that I couldn't access from work and now I can from home on my MAC.
If there is more info out there, I have yet to find it.

We put a note at the top of the zine page to let people know, but that's the only real place you could have found out, aside from e-mailing one of the editors.

I was afraid that someone on our contributor list might have been some super secret AI so they shut us down.  .  .

I Like the new look.

Gonna guess you're using Safari then. :)

I like the new look too, except on Mozilla browsers where it's not quite rendering properly. Hoping to get that fixed soon.

See you on Saturday?


Bill
[/quote]

[Megawatts]

Too bad these 'Hacker' don't spend their time writing! If they would turn their energy to writing, we would have some great stories 'popping' up!!

[kailhofer]

The changes were not made out of choice but necessity. Unfortunately, someone figured out how to compromise the security of the lettercol and replaced the normally erudite discussion here with an advertisement for a gynocology textbook. I corrected this and it was hit again within hours, so I made the decision to pull it down until I could get it upgraded and locked down.

As someone who checked the lettercol in a very public workplace just as the gynocological pic went up on my big screen, thank you for fixing it. I had to move very fast to close the offending image before any more people saw it.

I may not like my job, but I do need to keep it. :-[

Nate

[Robert_Moriyama]

I'm using Netscape 8.0.3.4 'based on Firefox' ... Mozilla/5.0 ... and it looks fine. Maybe it's post-5.0 Mozilla that has a problem? :question

[doc]

I checked to see what all the fuss was about. I confirm that Firefox 1.5.0.5 fails to render it properly. I saw what looked like some odd commands in the page source... I figured FoxV1.5 didn't get one of them, therefore the entire color scheme doesn't take.

I'm not the world's greatest CSS expert, so if you see anything that jumps out at you, I'd love to try and fix it.

[doc]

Wooot!!

The lettercol now displays properly in Firefox/Mozilla. The problem turned out to be a MIME type definition on the server, which I was able to fix by adding a directive to our webspace to define it properly. (Mozilla turns out to be very picky about what it's handed, while IE and Opera are apparently more forgiving.

To my knowledge, this was the only outstanding issue of the upgrade. Probability level has reached 1:1. We have achieved normality. Anything you can't deal with is therefore your own problem.

*NOW* I'm ready for the party!

[doc]

Only one more problem, or rather two ;) Your picture seems to be MIA Doc, at least all I can see is the little red 'x' icon.

Sadly, my webserver is down, and that's where the photo was being hosted.

Also, some pictures (notably my own) seem to be scaled differently on the two axis', making me look somewhat squashed, like a Don Martin character in reverse.

For best results (and to save the bandwidth of people viewing the lettercol), it's best to resize your photos to 100x100 pixels. That's the largest it will allow to display in any event, and it doesn't seem to be very smart about constraining proportions.

On the other hand, we now have pictures :D All in all, I have to congratulate you Doc, it must have been a helluva job putting everything back together again from scratch. Three cheers for the webmaven!

It was an interesting project, and I owe a debt of thanks myself to the YaBB support team who patiently helped me work through the problems, and to all of you for your patience and encouragement.

Yay! I've lobbied (is that the correct word?) for the retirement of the "New" lettercol redirection page a couple of times. I guess my nagging paid off Grin

Well, to be honest, it didn't get moved for laziness on my part, really. But when I was having to change the links *anyway*, I figured I may as well make it a straight link. The old blub was mostly to explain why we were now requiring actual registration with valid e-mail addresses when we never had previously.

I'll be looking at some of the other new features to see what, if anything, we want to play around with. I really like that it tells you how much of the 25k maximum message length you've used as you type. :)

[doc]

Hmmm, one other thing about the new interface. It seems to stick an awful lot of empty space into very short posts. Look at the two previous posts here, they're mostly empty space. Is that adjustable, somehow?

- Wishbone

It has to put in enough space to render the stuff on the left hand column.

[doc]

Not really. There's about a line of blank space between the last element in the left hand column and the signature field.

It's working just as it should.

[doc]

Shiny! We have pictures, and we have frames, and... :D Now begins my campaign for custom smilies, with beer steins in their hands :D ::)

You mean like this one? [smiley=beer.gif]

- Wishbone, granter of wishes

Or like this:

Added in, just for you. :) The keyword is iainbeer :)

[doc]

Several people have had this problem. A shift-reload seems to fix it in most cases. (Hold down the shift key and click the reload button).

[doc]

Also, some pictures (notably my own) seem to be scaled differently on the two axis', making me look somewhat squashed, like a Don Martin character in reverse.

Okay, the image problem appears to be a matter of browser settings, or possibly browser version. It looks fine when I log on from work, but from home, the image looks somewhat squashed. I run IE both places, but two different versions.

- Wishbone

Well, now, that's passing strange. To be honest, I thought it looked ok on my screen (runniung Firefox), so I wasn't sure what you were complaining about, but...

But I've discovered that no matter what you do, different browsers will do unpredictable things with the simplist of code.

[Robert_Moriyama]

Silly question -- would different screen resolutions and/or screen types (regular vs. widescreen) make a difference? The common resolutions (800x600, 1024x768, etc.) for a non-widescreen monitor work out to 1.333... to 1; but on a widescreen monitor, the ratio can be quite different. Hence the 'shape' of a pixel might vary considerably between two displays ...

Robert M.

[Robert_Moriyama]

... and yet, on some widescreen TV sets (not a good analogy, I know), a 4:3 image DOES look vertically squashed because the hardware stretches the image to fill the screen. Does IE do that? It's a Microsoft product, so I wouldn't rule it out.

::)

[Robert_Moriyama]

None of the links at the end of the stories take me to the new Lettercol. Is that just me? Nobody else seems to have mentioned it, though this is a big chain and I may have missed the answer.

Gareth

Crap. I copied them from previous months' stories, forgetting that the link has changed. I will fix this tonight (Eastern North American time, that is).

Robert M.

[Robert_Moriyama]

Okay, I just uploaded all 9 short stories with the Lettercol link corrected. They SHOULD work now, so go forth and pontificate!

Robert M.