NI Developer Exchange Wishlist addition.

[Molly K]

Ray -

This would be a great feature for our global community! Taking down the language barriers would make things a lot easier for everyone to share and learn.

I will add this to the list of things to investigate in the future and will recommend that the forum developers consider adding this to their product. The challenge will be to find a translation tool that is good enough to make the translations valuable but it seems you found a good one.

Thanks!

[tst]

About HTML - There is a preference in the user profile for turning off html tags inside posts. I'm just talking about the ability to activate this for a specific thread, just like you can sort a specific thread.

Icons - As a temporary solution I can suggest opening a thread here for this and having people link to those attachments. The problem with this would be a possible address change in the future and that this would be public. We should keep in mind, however, that once you use the icon it is public anyway, even more so if you're hosting it and not NI.

Last thing - I often submit a message (especially with attachments) and get a timeout, so I have to click back and resend. The problem is that when I click back, the post window is empty. So, unless I remembered to copy my text to the clipboard, I'll have to retype. Is this something with your site or with Internet Explorer?

[Johnner]

tst,

I think the something-times-out-while-you-are-posting-and-eats-your-post phenomenon is on the forum side; I suffered the same sort of losses of my slower posts when I first started using the new forum, and I use Firefox almost all the time. It's terribly frustrating to lose that text entirely.

Every time I have a lengthy post now, I copy it out to notepad when I'm done, then go back and create a fresh reply and copy my reply back in before actually posting it. That's a pretty terrible workaround, no doubt, and I'll bet a number of would-be posters have just given up instead of trying to reconstruct what they wrote.

In my estimation, the two biggest unresolved problems in the new forums are this and the problems with previewing (lose attachments, maybe some HTML glitches). I tend to take the view that NI should work out the serious problems here very thoroughly (and I think that includes duplicate URLs and missing URLs in the search crawl) before moving on to attempt to implement almost all of the feature requests that have been made.

Maybe Molly would be amenable to "open-sourcing" her list of bugs and feature requests by posting it somewhere that we can all more readily refer to!

My two cents,
John

[JeanPierre]

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tst a écrit:
Icons - As a temporary solution I can suggest opening a thread here for this and having people link to those attachments.

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Good idea. My avatar is hosted by the Web Server of a LabVIEW application running here. If you want to see at which temperature I work actually, click here. I work in the R&D room.

I derailed the thread. We really need a social board for this kind of stuff...

[Kevin_Price]

Ok, so this comes down to "pilot error" and I'm not sure if a Forum-side solution is possible, but here's the issue: Just a few minutes ago, for the 3rd or 4th time in the last few weeks, I lost a long and detailed reply.

I had started writing it in the morning, then got rudely interrupted by my real job for a couple hours. When I returned, I made the mistake of continuing my reply in the browser window that was still open. When it came time to submit, I got an error window that said something about an expired ticket. It said to use the browser's back and refresh buttons. Well that may have "refreshed" my ticket, but it also blanked out my entire reply. I couldn't find any way to retrieve the text.

So I shoulda learned my lesson after the first time or two. When returning to a potentially stale session, copy all the text, refresh the screen, then paste it back if needed.

However, is there any way that the text can be recovered at that error window? It seems that by the time you're informed that your ticket expired, it's too late. But it also seems as though the raw text of the reply would probably have been transmitted during the "preview" or "post" action. Even if the error window simply displayed the reply text, stating that it couldn't actually post it without a valid ticket, it'd at least be possible to copy and recover the text.

Anyhow, between that and a few minutes writing this, I doubt I'll be able to redo that reply, which is a shame because it was a pretty darn good one if I do say so myself.

-Kevin P

[Molly K]

Kevin -

The forums are set to expire your session after 60 minutes of inactivity. This explains what you are seeing. I remember when we were testing the system, we had this number much lower and it caused this expiration situation to happen more often. We set it to 60 minutes to hopefully give you enough time to formulate your answers, but apparently that's not long enough when you get interrupted by work 🙂

I have bumped it up to 180 minutes as a temporary attempt to cut down the number of times this happens, but it sounds like that wouldn't have been long enough for you in this case. When I am able to test it out again on our test environment, I will set the time limit low and experiment to try to find a better workaround/solution. I seem to recall that if you expired while posting you could click the back button and then forward again to get your message text back, but it has been months since I have run into this so I can't promise that will work. I recognize that it's not a very graceful or intuitive solution, so I will try to find something better.

The reason we don't just set the expiration limit to a really, really long time period is because it will appear that you are still active on the system (on the main page where the Users Online section is), much longer than you actually are if you just close your browser instead of explicitly clicking Logout at the top of the page before you leave the community. I understand that long well-developed posts are more important than Users Online information which is why I bumped it to three hours, but I would like to find a better compromise if possible.

Thanks so much for reporting this and thanks for your patience while we try to find a solution!

[Kevin_Price]

Molly,

Thanks for looking into this. I agree that lengthening the timeout isn't really the best long-term solution -- unless it's the only feasible one. If the "ticket expired" screen can specify the specific set of clicks to recover the post-in-progress (hopefully it'll work similarly for different browsers), then there shouldn't be any problem with a 60 minute timeout.

-Kevin P.

[Ben]

Hi Kevin et al,

Molly is off "hob-knobing with her fellow wizards" for the next two weeks.

She will make an effort to follow-up when she returns.

If an issue arises that demands imediate attention, the "report abuse to moderator" will be handled by her backups.

I am posting becuase Molly (and NI) do care very much about the concerns of the contributors and I did not want a lack of a reply to indicate otherwise.

Ben

[tst]

I just wanted to point out that JLV's request from the first page of this thread has been granted. We now have the ability to edit posts. Thanks, Molly and team. Now, I also want to give her something to do when she gets back, so here it goes - Molly, how long after posting can we still edit our posts, and since I didn't use this feature yet - is it possible not to have the text about the message having been edited displayed? I don't like it and I don't think it really serves any purpose.

[altenbach]

tst,

I have tried it and the timeout is pretty short. The functionality still has a few hiccups. For example I was editing one of my posts and when I tried to submit the edit, I got the error message that the time for editing has passed. For some reason, the edited post still showed up in the thread when I later looked.

I think an automatic edit notice is required and is common practice on boards that allow editing. It avoids confusion.

Imagine somebody already replies to the original post while the original poster completely rewrites the question. The reply might suddenly become completely inapproriate for the new question and the poster of the reply suddenly would look like a fool. If there is an audit trail of edits, things are more obvious. It is possible to identify that a race condition has occurred! ;).