Lord of the Rings Fanatics Plaza

It's not a big deal, but the "remember me" functionality doesn't work for me. I need to login every time.
I am blocking third-party cookies, so that might be relevant.

What browser do you use @Galastel ? And can you go into your ad blocker and give plaza permission?

I am almost certain it is the cookies @Galastel

@Sil it's third-party cookies the plaza uses to keep me logged in? Not first-party cookies? Why? I mean, third-party cookies are all about transferring my data to a third party.
@Winddancer using Chrome. I can give the plaza permission on my ad blocker, but what do ads have to do with my login?

@Galastel the Remember Me cookie is a first-party cookie. I believe it's a persistent one though, so perhaps your blocker may be stopping it on those grounds? Thanks for letting me know, I'll look into it a little more when I have some time.

Thank you!

What's this about party cookies? And where are they? Did you eat them all, Sil?

Not sure if this is a "bug" or not, but when I'm on my phone's browser and hit "submit" in the main thread, it bounces me to the Full Editor & Preview, then I have to hit "submit" again to actually post. (Also possible user error that my phone is registering my finger as hitting the wrong space on the screen)

In case it's helpful to flag, I don't think that's ever happened to me, although am just testing again with this post.

Edit #1: Can confirm that did not happen for me on my phone browser.

Edit #2: more to raise this because of my own curiosity on the matter - but something I have noticed (not really a bug, but maybe of potential interest?), is that unless this edit is about to prove me wrong, I think when I edit my posts on my phone it doesn't show them as edited in the way it does when I do it on a laptop.

Edit #3: yeah I don't think it shows this post as edited? At least it doesn't show it for me.

Edit #4: this makes a lot more sense to me now.

Edit #5: I have nobly decided to leave myself looking foolish for posterity

It wont until someone posts after you and THEN you edit :) @Nia

Ohhhhhhhhh

Thanks, Windy

I can't do anything about any of these things but it's good to see we are all learning

Update on the "remember me" issue: right now, being logged in and having written quite a long post, I tried to submit it. Suddenly I need to log in again, post lost.

I made the login cookie non-persistent, but it seems that didn't solve the issue (though clearing your cookies locally might help that take effect). What are you using to block cookies? Is it an extension, or do you have specific Chrome settings set? If it's free, I'll get it and see if I can reproduce the issue.

Omg Gala! Sorry you lost your post, I hate that! <3

@Narv I'm just using Chrome's settings to block third party cookies, not an extension. (Also using Adblock Plus extension, but that shouldn't be relevant.) I'll try clearing my cookies, will see if it helps.

Sounds good - at the bottom of the board, I think you should also see a "Delete Cookies" button that should delete just the cookies this site gives you - I haven't used it much but it might be worth a click as well.

I just flipped that switch on Chromium (not quite Chrome, but the closest I can get on Ubuntu) and I'll see if it keeps me logged in or not over the next couple days. At the moment it seems like it's letting me have all the cookies I need, but I'll see if any get deleted or blocked or if I get logged out too.

Galastel, oi that happened to me once maybe a few days ago. I was able to hit the back button to return to the previous page in my browser and my post was still there. I selected copy, re-logged in, and then pasted the comment. So, at least I didn't lose the entire post. I'm not sure if that only worked because I was on my laptop though.

@Galastel - Tarawen and I did some digging on this this weekend and have made a slight tweak in our settings that might help with your logout issue. Please let us know if you encounter further problems with getting logged out with Remember Me checked.

This is more of a heads up than anything: as I have now discovered in my name changing journey, names with apostrophes in them have some issues. When I was logged out and tried to log back in, I couldn't type my name in (Sil's Fool), but I could copy paste.

I think this is a fairly common problem - if your attempt to log in used an apostrophe with different encoding than the one in the forum database, you wouldn't be able to get in. This would likely explain why copy/paste worked whereas entering it manually didn't. Definitely something to note for anyone considering usernames with apostrophes in the future! :smiley10:

Thank you Narv.

@Tarawen are you supposed to be "Scholar of ImlADMIN"?

@Narv speaking of names and apostrophes, if I were to try and name myself "Galastel' DROP TABLE users;" we wouldn't lose the plaza, right?

@Galastel yes! It is my super subtle admin rank :)

@Galastel Right. You'd just have a rather silly username. phpBB3 (what we're using) is much improved over its predecessors in terms of handling SQL injection attempts out of the box.

@Narv Just poking around trying to understand the flicker I see when the site loads in, looks like a few things are happening that could be causing it:

A few assets are 404ing, I think they're all just old/bad references to things that have a different name. Don't think it's slowing things down significantly, but since it returns a full html 404 page for each of them it bloats the response a tad. They are:
https://www.lotrfanaticsplaza.com/forum/styles/lotrplaza/theme/en/stylesheet.css?assets_version=100 (note the /en) This one just looks like a duplicate and the correct one is loading correctly without the extra directory
https://www.lotrfanaticsplaza.com/forum/styles/lotrplaza/theme/images/no_avatar.gif This doesn't seem to find anything at all, might just be a missing asset?
https://www.lotrfanaticsplaza.com/forum/styles/lotrplaza/theme/header.css Also just not present, but there's a /forumheader.css later that I assume is the one you actually want?

Also of note, you have /stylesheet.css importing several others, which is causing a short-but-noticeable gap of time in the pageload timeline. I'd wager that this is why it seems to flicker, since it's the header and sidebars that are moving around for me. I don't know how phpBB handles assets, but is it possible to merge all those files into the main stylesheet.css?

Obviously this is pretty minor in the whole "make the site function" hierarchy, but I figured putting my web-developer powers to work might be useful. Let me know if there's anything I can look at/bash my head against; I don't do phpBB but I am a php/wordpress dev by day.

@Azdiur - thanks so much for looking into all of this! Is this issue different / separate from slow load times for you? Put another way, how often is this happening for you? I haven’t seen the behavior of the header moving myself, so as much info from you here about what you’re seeing will help us figure it out.

We can look into the asset compilation for sure.

I guess depends on what you consider slow, but what I see is the initial assets load and then there's like a 300ms or so delay before the ones referenced by the stylesheet.css load in, and when that hits some things wiggle into their final place.

Here's the pageload waterfall with a couple notes. Without caching, the stylesheet.css loads in at about 350ms and finishes by 400, but the ones that it calls start loading at 575ms or so, so when they finish the page has to repaint after at least 200ms of being visible without them. Either bundling them all or even just having them load directly instead of being included via url(...) would probably smooth things over, and I bet it would get rid of the flicker I'm seeing.

Also re: flicker, it may be mostly a Firefox thing? I see a bit in Chrome, but it's certainly not as noticeable, so I bet it is either just doing the page painting faster or is more aggressive in how it caches things?

Picture for reference:

Passed it on to Narv and Tara, thanks @Azdiur :D

@Winddancer Thanks, meant to tag again but I don't think my brain will ever fully grasp "The Plaza but with Twitter-mentions" as being a valid construct :P

Any of the above can feel free to reach out via Discord if there's anything else I can do to help!

Yea just ignore me, cause I didnt see you were already talking to Tara

@Azdiur - I guess I was referring to the significant slowdowns that some have experienced lately (I know you mentioned a timeout on Discord, too). This doesn't seem on the same order of magnitude, but it's still something we can look into. I just tried loading the site (no caching) in Firefox and have not run into the flickering issue yet, but this is a helpful reminder to me to test things in other browsers. Thanks again for bringing this up!

@Tarawen Yeah, this is different, I've actually not seen any of those today but I haven't been on as much as the first day. This is a persistent flicker I've seen since I started, which I first assumed was something jQuery might be doing (like it looks like the page is ready and then something goes and makes changes). I took a video that shows a little bit:

https://jmporch.com/content/scratch/plaza_flicker.mp4

Here's another without the devtools open, showing more visibly what I'm seeing:
https://jmporch.com/content/scratch/plaza_flicker_2.mp4

Thanks for these, @Azdiur! We'll keep you updated here.

When I'm using my work laptop, about 90% of the images people post inside posts seem to appear to me as a little error 'image' icon (including photos I myself have posted). I never have this problem on my personal laptop (both are windows and I use Chrome browser on both), nor on my android phone or tablet. I kinda assume maybe my work laptop simply has privacy or admin setting which is blocking them / the powers that be are telling me (probably quite rightly) to get back to work, but given I just saw someone (@Lirimaer) comment about this happening to them on one of the art threads in CoLP, thought I'd message here just to check.

@Narv @Tarawen Thanks for mentioning it Nia, I did think it was odd when Ears couldnt see it, passing it on :)

Thanks Winddy and @Nia! Adding it to the todo list to investigate.

(I have to say, I thought it was something to do with the website it was uploaded to rather than my machine, but then it worked a couple of days later and I had checked/changed nothing ... so I still don't know what the problem was.)

Thanks @Azdiur! Your diagnoses (some missing assets and nested stylesheet imports) are both correct - as you can tell I'm decidedly not a web developer so didn't clue in that those could cause page loading hiccups. I'm away from keyboard for a couple days but if Tara doesn't beat me to it I'll try to fix these things later this week.

Re images, I have a feeling it might be your work laptop blocking cross-site image loading, and if so there's not much we can do about it.. just a hunch tough so we'll check it out.

There are some giant bugs in this thread viewtopic.php?f=5&p=17168#p17168

@Narv Great, no rush on my end, was just bored and figured I'd use my powers for good ;) Or evil, if that's easier for you to stomach :P

Mojo wrote: ↑Mon Jun 29, 2020 4:30 pm There are some giant bugs in this thread viewtopic.php?f=5&p=17168#p17168

Killed em..

Separate from the above, I just got a "The submitted form was invalid, try submitting again" message when attempting to post. I was able to his "Submit" again and it worked, and the page had been sitting open for a few hours, probably, so I suspect they were related. Is that a known issue, or is it something worth experimenting with on my end?

Had that one too Azduir, figured my session had just timed out somehow.

It's happened to me also, and yes, I think it's a time out issue. Especially if you're like me and tend to have four different pages of the plaza opened to keep track of all the different RPs you owe posts in. If you've logged out/timed out on one of the pages, it might cause a minor freak out when you try and submit. Always copy/paste your post somewhere before clicking submit, especially if it's a long one.

@Azdiur - this is almost certainly form token expiration - forms must be submitted within two hours per the settings we have on the board right now.

This happens to me every major post ... clearly I am spending too long on them!!

Yeah, I'd definitely recommend that @everyone compose long posts in another editor, then copy and paste into the forum post box when you are *really* ready.

In short, token expiration is a security thing meant to keep the site more secure so our form posts aren't hijacked by bad actors, so I'm afraid it's something we will all have to live with unless all the hackers ever are kind enough to go away

Mojo wrote: ↑Mon Jun 29, 2020 4:30 pm There are some giant bugs in this thread viewtopic.php?f=5&p=17168#p17168

Not gonna lie, my heart rate shot up when I saw that you posted an entire thread was full of bugs And then it stayed elevated because I was tricked into looking at some literal bugs