Guinea Pigs' Feedback
On this page you can share and discuss your thoughts about SL's technical features.
An index for discussions on other topics is at the Library Lobby.
2006-12-27
axd: Recently switched to SuSE 10.1, and have a minor problem when viewing pages in Firefox (2.0.0.1). Pages appear rendered with my chosen sans serif font, while the edit preview pages (as well as diff-in-page viewing) correctly use my chosen serif font - the one I would have expected to see while browsing SL. As if normal SL pages put Fx on the wrong foot about which font serif or sans serif) to use. Anyone any ideas on this?
axd: doing some research with the
Webdeveloper toolbar, the culprit seems to be "font-family: sans-serif;" in the embedded style sheet (-> see also the page source). When I disable this line, pages look as (I) expected.
Arno: actually, it is intentional: browsing is sans-serif. Diff mode should be monospaced font, as it shows the source of the page and not the rendered version. Preview is inconsequent: it should be sans-serif as well. Maybe I'll fix this.
[OT?] axd: Looks like this is an Fx issue? Now it strikes me that most sites I visit, e.g. Wikipedia shows the same behaviour. But: Wikipedia's main.css style sheet contains body { font: x-small sans-serif; } . I don't know enough of HTML to say that this is intentional (looks like), but I'm surprised a website uses a sans serif font as default (if I understand matters).
axd: Ahem... Can someone using Fx 2.0 on Linux (if possible SuSE 10.1) confirm what font (s)he sees when browsing (1) normal SL pages, (2) diff-in-page (3) preview? Is it the browser's 'serif' or 'sans serif' font that is used? In my case, it seems to be the sans serif font for (1) (which is odd) and serif for (2) and (3).
2006-12-08
anonymous: Do we really need a referrer for full-text searches? I find it annoying that these pages don't load from a bookmark entry or when restoring a browser session (when referrer information is not sent).
Arno: create an account, keep the cookie and it works without referrer.
anonymous: Great, thanks.
2006-12-07
nando: I believe I understand now what is happening with those recent problems with character encodings. It seems, the pages are all meant to be encoded with ISO Latin-1, since the pages are sent to the browsers with:
<META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
But the server currently (maybe there was a recent change here?) also sends following in the HTTP headers:
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
According to W3C, a well-behaving user agent (browser) should give priority to the HTTP header when present. This is currently causing problems in SL, because characters directly encoded in ISO Latin-1 (like the tonal-marked vowels in pinyin) will mix with the following (or previous) character to produce a bogus UTF-8 character.
Dave: According to the mod_perl document
Issuing Correct HTTP Headers,
"Content-Type should be included in all messages according to the specs, and Apache will generate one if you don't. It will be whatever is specified in the relevant DefaultType configuration directive or text/plain if none is active." (emphasis added).
In addition, guideline 10.2 of the W3C document
Common HTTP Implementation Problems mentions,
"Note that The HTTP/1.1 protocol ([RFC2616], section 3.7.1) mentions ISO-8859-1 as a default character encoding when the "charset" parameter is absent from the "Content-Type" header field, but it is now not recommended to follow this practice.
The recommended practice is that the character encoding be both specified be specified in the META declaration, and the "Content-Type" header field."
nando: I just wish, we would know "on which foot to dance" (french saying). Example: the last edit of ChineseGoTerms by tderz was encoded in UTF-8 and went so in SL's database. This is fine, as long as the web server continues to send charset=UTF-8 in the HTTP headers. But those characters will be butchered if the server is reconfigured to send charset=iso-8859-1 or to send nothing and let the PHP-script decide, which currently means it would change to iso-8859-1. Could we have a statement from the admins about this ? If it stays the way it is now, we could start fixing those pages with iso-8859-1 encoded characters. Mostly, these are pages with french or german content (example: the ç of Français on the main page) and some with pinyin.
RueLue: I changed this on pages Augsburg Go and KGS-Rooms / Deutsche Ecke: german 'umlauts' (special characters) to ae-oe-ue-ss. This is best for pages with displaying problems. French language pages should also get along without éèê etc.
blubb: Using ae-oe-ue-ss certainly is a sufficient workaround for now, but it's no solution. Special characters worked without problems at SL for years. It would feel about as odd as ironical to me if the move to unicode effectively made us go back to ASCII.
Encoding those characters in numeric entities (like I did in ChineseGoTerms) fixes the problem, but I don't think this is a proper solution. For one, it isn't very natural to input accentuated charaters as &# numeric entities, specially when you have keyboard keys or shorcuts for them. And they seem to be ignored in some cases (links for instance)
Arno: fixed. The issue was caused by an upgrade of the web server.
2006-10-12
(Moved from coffeemachine. -- RueLue)
Ruediger from Luebeck: There is the question, who changes old links on the pages.? I do not mean one, two, three, but hundreds. The server change for Kiseido go-server made many links to game files, rank-graphs etc. wrong.
Some examples:
kgs.kiseido.com/servlet/graph/...
kgs.kiseido.com/en_US/gameArchives.jsp?...
kgs.kiseido.com/fr_FR/graphPage.jsp?
or the main adress itself: kgs.kiseido.com
I think, the admins here have a tool to change the links all together? No?
Phelan: I don't think there is any tool to change those old links, they have to be changed by hand, nor anyone in charge of that. blubb has updated most that weren't on homepages. As for admins being able to do that, librarians can't do it, you'd probably have to ask Mortarno.
unkx80: Forwarded the KGS link change request message to Arno.
Other question (also Ruediger): there are many links on these pages, which don't work anymore, and there are no other pages with same content for changing adresses. There could be a remark near those adresses. But before, there could be a tool to check all adresses to see, if there is still the server alive. So the remark could be 'page dead'/'no server response'/'server dead' or something like this. (Of course this would be something on SL-server's side and by admin.)
-- the following is obsolete (someone already has managed):
And the next question by Ruediger: when I search for 'deutsche ecke', the only page found is KGS Deutsche Ecke (which has newly got the orphan status), but i want to find 'KGS Rooms / Deutsche Ecke'. I need to know that the desired page is a sub page of 'KGS / Rooms' or I will never (or only by chance) find that page. Also something for the admins? Or only (for KGS Deutsche Ecke) changing page type to Alias? Does that page still need to be linked by other pages to loose the Orphan status?
-- the preceeding is obsolete (someone already has managed), and...:
-- the following is obsolete (new search software):
RueLue: it took me 2 years to find out now, that on the search results page is a checkbox 'include sub pages' :-(. So not really admins were needed. But...couldn't subpages be included by default (for all readers).
And idea by RueLue: On the 'Title Search Results' page could be a button 'Search full text'.
-- the preceeding is obsolete (new search software)
2006-07-17
jfc: Is there a page for SL bugs? I edited SekiWithEyesQuestion2 and the resulting output is bad -- a diagram overlaps some numbers in an enumerated list.
Arno: Actually, this is a bug in Mozilla/Firefox. See bug 57882 in their Bugzilla database. I haver not found a satisfying solution without detrimental effects to other browsers.
jfc: cool! Hopefully they'll fix it one of these days.
blubb: That page looks ok in Opera 9.
2006-03-23
Hicham: Would it be possible to get something like the GoDiscussions? forum has to replay games? That would be a great step forward in showing lines of play. The way it is now, with all the different diagrams and all that is quite demanding on the deshi's. I know that I often do not comment , 'cause I o not feel comfortable with the way diagrams work here.
2006 May 4
unkx80: In page diffs, due to HTML conventions, multiple spaces in ASCII art are displayed as a single space. See this for an example. Would be appreciated if the diff system can be modified to output HTML in the form of " " instead so that multiple spaces will be displayed as such.
2006-03-30
Hicham: Could we get a "Blog" keyword? With all the blogs around this seems like a good idea.
2006-2-3
I have edited the tartrate page. Didn't check minor edit. Yet it doesn't appear in the recent changes???
Xanthus: It's the 'Online Go' keyword filter, it does appear at: RecentChanges/OnlineGo.
2006-01-30
blubb: I've just added a line to KGS server status and subsequently, was quite puzzled when I didn`t see the change mentioned at RecentChanges. It took me quite a while to figure out that even with the filter being NONE, some non-minor edits are hidden. Meanwhile I could find the complete RC at RecentChanges/All, but the policy to use both filters and extensions simultaneously is confusing.
Besides, I do understand the argument that the extent of noise at RC requires countermeasures. However, that particular page has a rather low edit frequency, and it becomes almost useless if noone is given notice of the usually acute messages there. Hence I`d kindly request to re-include KGS server status in the standard RC view.
2006-01-28
impu1se: There's a bug when viewing SL with Firefox 1.5 and having an X composite manager turned on - scrolling smears the menu bar across the page. Temporary fix: put a line like "#toppane { position: absolute !important; }" in your userContent.css file.
2005-11-20
Jared: Big Pictures placed in sidebar boxes can overlap the right side of the box. (using Firefox 1.06 on a PC)
- (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050716 Firefox/1.0.6)
- see the ?new? picture at Hikaru no Go
2005-10-27
unkx80: Edit summary "restore deletion" for my +229 edit for GoHistory does not appear on its page info.
Arno: it's a known problem: the latest summary is not shown in the page info. Will fix some day.
2005-10-24
Bill: Diagrams generated by SL seem to show the played stone when a stone is played where a previous stone has been captured, rather than the original stone. The standard is the opposite.
OC, no diagram can show both stones, but see this diagram from Small Nadare Exercise 1.
Showing rather than
gives the mysterious impression that Black is for some strange reason just making a dumpling. The previous diagram clearly shows the capture.
I urge SL to generate standard diagrams. It would also be nice if it marked the captured stone where a stone is played later and generated the accompanying text, such as @
.
2005-10-10
blubb: I have written a contribution to t:42. Now that I've saved it, the previous two posts have become empty. I don't believe that Charles and Bill have deleted their content, let alone both at the same time when I started writing. Furthermore, all previous posts are assigned to 69.105.0.25 now. What happened?
Arno: no, according to log files 69.105.0.25 (which is Bill I guess) deleted the posts.
Bill: Sorry for any confusion. I thought I would get with the new program and copied material from the Komaster /Discussion page to the forum. JuhoP caught my error, which was to forget that the original authors could not edit their forum posts. So I deleted nearly all the stuff I had copied and organized the original discussion page.
After your comment, blubb, I restored my own note. Charles's comment is a good one, but I don't want to cause a problem by copying his note again.
Arno: the drawback (of original authors being unable to make edits) is inevitable when moving discussion pages to forums. But I wouldn't mind: if they want to change/delete their text, they can always leave a note and the librarians/admins can make the change. Maybe I even allow librarians to attribute postings to other accounts - that would solve the problem as well. So I suggest you go ahead.
Bill: That's rather a lot of power for a temporary situation.
Charles Matthews I have to say I'm completely confused as to what's going here. I suppose things I wrote in 2003 might still be worth reading.
Bill: I would like to read (or reread) that. :-) How about a link or two, Charles? Thanks.
unkx80: Bill: Just search his name? There are tons of results.
Charles: See Meta Discussion / SL II?
2005-10-06
(moved from MetaDiscussion)
Velobici: Is it possible to change the code so that null diffs, identical content but someone hit the Save button, are silently rejected. For an example see: phpwiki:?diff=4464Enclosure33Invasion&new=45
Bob McGuigan: I inadvertently created a "null difference" page when I made an edit, saved it, and then thought better of it and deleted it with a minor edit. Should I have handled that differently?
Bill: There are some problems, I think, with referencing diagrams. I noticed it acutely in a recent discussion with TDerz on a page with several diagrams. What do you do when you want to talk about a diagram that does not currently appear in the browser window? We sort of solved the problem using footnotes, but there is a problem with that when the same footnoted diagram is referenced in more than one place. How do you get back to the right place after viewing the diagram?
In a recent discussion with RobertJasiek I just copied the diagrams. I suppose that's better than footnoting, but it does waste space.
I think this problem will get worse with forums, because people will refer to diagrams that are even more distant from their text than they would have been before forums. Should everybody who refers to a diagram copy it to their own post? That could lead to a lot of copying!
So I am wondering if there isn't a better way? Like maybe a reference to a diagram that makes it pop up in its own window? Then it would be visible as long as the reader needed to see it. And the reader might be able to use the pop up to reference the diagram in his own writing.
2005-5-31
Blake: Instead of applying the WikiOrphan text box to any page linked from that one, it seems that an extra step--checking to make sure that the page in question is, in fact, an orphan--is advisable. I have removed links to several homepages, and the homepage page itself, because they were incorrectly being flagged as orphans. Failing this change, perhaps a discussion page should be opened up in order to collect comments.
2005-5-29
mAsterdam: When viewing Get Strong at Kibitz with Mozilla or Explorer the image ( html source: <img src=" http://holosys.co.uk/go/gsak.jpg" ALT="
http://holosys.co.uk/go/gsak.jpg"> ) displays ok. However,
Firefox (1.02 and 1.04) does not show it. I don't know why it does not, but an ALT-tag with the same value as the src-tag in the img does not seem right.
gedh: It seems to show up ok with Firefox 1.04 at this end.
2005-04-14
Is it possible to change the way monospace lines are displayed such that the leading spaces are hidden? That would be particularly useful in case of code snippets if intended to be C&P-able. Where leading spaces were needed, they could be added, anyways.
2005-03-02
axd: While reading RulesOfGoIntroductory, I wondered if there is any intention to introduce the cross and triangle symbols? I know this is not urgent, but it would help standardise their uses; now, we use circles and squares from more meanings. For example, in the diagram Black captures three stones, crosses would be more handy to mark dead stones. (See also Symbols.)
2005-02-16
tderz's question about "Generate Diagram From SGF" pruned, answer:
Arno: several issues here: as Morten pointed out:
- unsupported board size, currently only 19x19 supported
- unsupported compressed lists (the [jb:kb] is valid SGF)
- a bug that seems to be unable to handle a file containing only one node
I'll put all 3 issues on my TODO, but I'm rather busy currently. And this fix is not high-priority for me.
2005-01-27 - Special Joseki Pages (Templates and more) - In theory
Alright, this touches even those of you who don't really care about the Systematic Joseki project. (Not that I understand why... If you have actual reasons and it's not just a "i don't liek the name" or "that actually requires... work!", would really help if you mentioned them at the discussion... (So that we could prove to you that it's worth the "trouble";)
Could the Joseki pages (call them corner situation /whatever as they aren't meant to be purely a joseki dictionary - we have enoguh of those, around...we'll have other tools to help people;), be special pages? Special pages as in pages with a certain template and pages which don't display the parent node as a refferer and more? By having the parts in them seprate(would help alot to the manual input process) or even auto generated upon creation or from an sgf, we would save a lot of time. And maybe even have the posibility of generating an sgf from the dictionary as a whole... And an easier generation of show all position by result (Helping to chose joseki) and retrieving problems from sub nodes and more... Reuven
(This is a purely teoretical question at the moment not a specific one. Details are still a bit blurry - If it's possible we'll start working on the details)
2005 January 14 -- Cut and Paste for Diagrams
JoelR: Often I want to paste a diagram from one page onto another. For example, from a problem to the solution subpage, or from a page to its discussion. My technique has been to edit the source page, copy, press cancel, and then edit the destination page. This seems inelegant, and likely to cause mistakes. Is there/can there be a better way?
2005 January 01
Dave: I was a little surprised that it is seemingly possible to create subpages for main pages that do not exist. Is it possible to create a warning when this is about to happen? Also the "subpage" header in the upper right corner of the page shows the non-existent main page as a real link rather than as a non-existent ("page name?") link. Should this be corrected?
unkx80: I have a similar comment for the Discuss Page link on the top as well.
2004 December 24 -- "my" edits
SGBailey: Is there a way of listing the pages that I have edited? A bit like the recent changes page, but of (say) the most recent 100 edits I've done (with next link for edits 101-200 etc).
It is just a nice feature to easily pickup where you had got too on some thread you were following and /or to see what has happened to edits you have done. Compare with the wikipedia function http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=SGBailey
2004 December 16 -- Bookmarks
axd: I wish I would be able to add pages I sometimes come across to some kind of Favorites/Bookmarks space (similar to the watched pages list), so that later I can come back. This is especially interesting because I browse SL from different places, so apart from editing the limited links on the left side, there is no other option than to edit my homepage and add the link, or e-mail the URL to the other computer.
2004 November 22 -- Search for patterns; exclusion of words in results
Gronk: Has there been discussion or consideration of the possibility of a pattern match search on SL? A few days back I had wanted to find discussion of a certain corner position. I knew I had seen it on SL but I could not recall the page name or enough about it to do a sensible search. But, were there a pattern match search I could have searched for the position (much like on GoBase).
Dieter: Yes we have debated it. Arno would see if he had time/desire to implement.
2004 November 10 -- Allow "?" in diagrams
(Sebastian:) Allow entering a ? on an intersection in a diagram so it can be used for undetermined intersections, such as in Introduction to the 'press' tactic / Discussion.
(later:) This has become unneccessary now for the intended purpose, since we agreed to use underscores to express undetermined intersections. However, it would still be nice to have if we could enter any character into a diagram, e.g. by "escaping" it with a "/" in place of the preceding space.
2004 November 1 -- Hide Vandalism in Recent Changes list
(Sebastian:) Can we please have an automatic feature that removes entries from the Recent Changes list when they have been identified as vandalism? It is really annoying and a huge loss of time if every well-meaning deshi has to
- open each suspicious diff,
- examine it to find that it's vandalism,
- edit the page to revert, (Necessary because we can't see any evidence that it has been taken care of since most of the time both the reversion and the entry in WikiVandals are minor changes)
- only to find that it already has been edited.
This could be implemented by just hiding all changes by a IP address that has been blocked from the Recent Changes list.
2004 October 21 -- Footnotes[1] and diagram title position
Robert Pauli: The TOC shouldn't show footnote links: it's ugly and for no use.
2004 October 12 -- Pruned Advanced Search
rubilia: KGSWishlist probably is about to get split into several main pages (for details, see KGSWishlist/discussion). Thinking about how to encourage users to look for already filed wishes, first: Would it be possible to get a pruned advanced search implemented at the entry page to that future page structure, showing just the "full text search" line, but restricted by default to all pages containing a particular identifier (KGSWish..., e. g.)?
Arno: I don't think I implement something like that. The next wish is to have the functionality of AdvancedFindPage and I don't want to implement that. I am going to improve sub-pages one of these days, so that is your best guess (i.e. a TOC directive that spans all sub-pages, a directive for the order of sub-pages within the TOC, and maybe as well a search restricted to the sub-pages)
2004 October 7 -- a way to save text files as-is
(Sebastian:) Should we offer a way to save text files as-is? E.g. when someone posts an SGF file such as KGSTeaching Ladder Games List it displays awfully, and it clutters the UndefinedPages list.
2004 August 22 -- Bias for Random Page
Bildstein: The "Random Page" option generally seems to take you to an element of a long list - a BQM, a go problem, a glossary item, etc. I find this slightly frustrating, because generally what I want to see is a new idea. I was thinking that it was inevitable, but now I'm not so sure. I assume that "Random Page" is implemented as randomly choosing one page, giving each page an equal likelihood. But what if it was implemented by traversing the tree of pages, giving pages a lower probability of being chosen if their parent has many children? I know this is only a half baked idea, but perhaps someone else will pick it up and run with it.
2004 June 23 -- Request: Source Text of Earlier Page Versions
rubilia: Sometimes it would be useful to have (read-only) access to the source text of earlier page versions. E. g., right now I'd like to re-include some recently deleted diagrams to a particular page in a changed manner. Maybe in the "view version" view there could be a "show source" link instead of the regular "edit" link in current pages?
2004 June 20 -- shortcut keys don't work correctly; Request: Link to RecentChanges
rubilia: Arno, I didn't want to bother you with this marginal stuff while you were dealing with the structural change of SL pages. Maybe now it's the time: The shortcut keys 1 to 9 in diff-in-page views don't really work the way they should, yet. Also, it would be nice if there was either a link or a hotkey to jump immediatly back to RecentChanges after reading a series of diffs. Right now, one has to ask the browser history, which is a little awkward.
2004 May 26 -- watch pages and subpages
axd: I often want to watch pages as well as some of their subpages; (un)toggling the watch status requires a lot of clicking around. So I wondered if it would be possible to list not only the page, but also the subpages on a page's watch status page; each (sub)page would be a line with the current watch status, hyperlinked to toggle that status (similar as in the current "To undo, ..."). This would avoid one having to go to all subpages and (un)toggle there.
Bill: I would find material about subpages and how to use them helpful. :-)
Hu: About Sub Pages? should be a sub-page of SL Conventions.
2004 May 15 -- Extend stone notation to W20/B20
Blake: This is a very minor feature request, but I was wondering if "small stones" notation could be extended to W20/B20. There seem to be a decent number of "W11"/"B11" references, especially.
2004 April 16 -- Request: SLWishlist
axd: (BTW - I still think we could use a SLWishlist? page)
2004 April 16 -- Requests: Diff view
I perceive the "diff in page" view as a remarkable enhancement to the "standard diff" view, because the context of changes is shown entirely and correctly. However, there´s a disadvantage: in big pages, it´s a little awkward to find relatively small changes - although highlighted -, and even harder in cases the changes are spread over the whole diff. Wouldn't it be possible to add floating "jump to next/previous change" buttons, or (supposingly more realistic to be implemented ever :)) make two SL Shortcut Keys working that way?
Arno: Unless I add Javascript this function will not work - and I am not too keen about that. Maybe I can think of something else.
2004 March 4 -- Request: Display stones in diagram titles
mAsterdam: I copied this from the sandbox:
Why don't
![]()
![]()
become graphics here in diagram titles?
2004 February 1 -- track searches that have zero hits
bojo: Is there a way to track searches that have zero hits, and rank them? It would be nice to grab the higher ranking negative hits and create aliases to real pages for them, so people searching have a better chance of finding what they were after (hopefully).
Previous Versions
This page has been pruned and master edited several times. Old versions: 2005-09-17, 2004-12-19, 2004-04-25, 2003-12-10, 2003-10-01, 2003-06-26, 2003-04-01, 2002-11-30, 2002-11-02, 2002-08-04