By Aaron Blumer on
SharperIron
Image of open sign

Welcome to the latest iteration of Sharperiron.org. Since nobody knows what iteration we’re actually on, ‘23 it is!

First, thanks for your patience over the down time. Second, thanks for your continued patience as we work out bugs, finish construction in places, and tidy up a lot. Third, thanks for being a Sharper Iron reader, or—if the shoe fits—participant.

If you’re new to the site and attempting to register, the process may move a little slower than normal for a while. Though we’re working on our email configuration to eliminate things that tend to trigger spam filters, be sure to check your spam folders and mark SI emails as ‘not spam,’ if your email app has that feature.

Sundry Notes

  • Foundry and New Posts: Both of these sets of lists and filters are now on the Forum home page. New Posts has been renamed Recent Comments.
    • The New Posts RSS feed has also changed. See About Feeds.
    • Forum home has lots of little filters and such, so check it out.
  • Forum categories: There are no longer a bunch of ‘containers’ you can’t select with selectable sub-lists of ‘forums’ within them. Instead, we have seven broad Forum categories. You use tags to narrow your post down further.
  • The “Like” and “Dislike” response links available to logged in users have been replaced with upvote and downvote icons. The up/down vote concept is less feeling-oriented and a bit more vague. That’s the intent. Alas, the old like/dislike tallies have not been migrated. (This is not impossible, though, and might happen retroactively down the road.)
  • Flag for moderator attention: This is on the “won’t be long” do list.
  • Search still has a page and currently appears, a bit awkwardly, in the Forum menu. As of this writing, there is no comment search tool and no user search. These are on the “won’t be long” do-list. The page is designed as a single search field with facets for narrowing down results. The search tool has roughly a gazillion configuration options, with lots of opportunities to make it powerful or break it. So you all are beta testers.
  • Polls: All polls from the old site are closed, but aggregated in the Forum. New polls are created separately, then you make a forum post and add it to your post. Some instructions are included on the Add a Poll form.
  • Notification and registration emails: This seems to be working now, though we’ll know for sure after more people use it. As in the past, you have to post a comment to check the box for notification of future posts. Changing that is still on the long-term do list. A simple subscribe checkbox is more complicated than one would think.
  • Private Messages: The new system is under construction, but should mostly work. Improvements are on the to do list. You’ll see your old messages there marked “imported.”
  • RSS users: We won’t really know if those are working until content starts posting and some time passes for things to queue up and be processed. So we’ll see what happens and, no doubt, tweak. Since Facebook and Twitter get their SI stuff via RSS, some of that might look a bit wonky for a while.
  • Also on the do list: Build a tags page of some kind.
  • If you have difficulties or see problems not already noted here or in the comments, or have suggestions, feel free to post in the comments. If you can’t log on, and the contact form isn’t working, send an email to [email protected] — or just wait a couple of days, if you don’t mind. Things will slowly normalize.

Thanks again for your support of SI and for your patience over the coming days as we get settled into the new platform.

Discussion

Fri, 02/24/23

So far, steady as she goes! A few things glitching here and there intermittently, so… watching for patterns.

Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.

Fri, 02/24/23

The site is attractive and uncluttered. Thank you for all this hard work to benefit this part of the Body of Christ. So appreciated.

"The Midrash Detective"

Fri, 02/24/23

Glad you like it. I appreciate the feedback!

Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.

Fri, 02/24/23

Thanks much for all your hard work in providing this resource for us.

Fri, 02/24/23

I just want to see if I can post an emoji here. On the old site, something about collation didn’t allow that.

Here goes… 👍

Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.

Fri, 02/24/23

I got this when I hit the back button after reading a recent forum comment:

An illegal choice has been detected. Please contact the site administrator.

It might be illegal, but hopefully not a crime!

Update: it might be just when I am clicking on the Forum Home option above.

Maranatha!
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3

Fri, 02/24/23

I found it in the log. It actually happened about a dozen times in rapid succession. Something is glitching in the Recent Comments block day range filters. And the error doesn’t show until a bit later.

Or maybe the glitch happens when returning to it.

Will put the bug analysis hat back on (not that I actually took it off!). There’s another way to do that block and I may just build it over the weekend and see if it behaves better.

Edit: If you notice a pattern to it, post your observations here. That will help, I’m sure. I just tried to make it happen and couldn’t.

Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.

Fri, 02/24/23

I started getting that error also. Definitely the date range filters on Recent Comments. For now, I removed.

(The filters only become important when there is a single discussion with quite a lot of comments. Then you only see one thread for several pages, and you can’t see recent comments on other threads. So, the filters will be back soon.)

Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.

Fri, 02/24/23

When you get the date range filters figured out, I would prefer that block to be at the top of the page, but I am sure there are reasons for everything. Just putting my vote in!

Maranatha!
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3

Sun, 02/26/23

Don Johnson wrote: I would prefer that block to be at the top of the page

Will think about that… anybody else prefer that? It’s easy enough to move around.

In any case, that block/list has been replaced with a different design now that a. doesn’t error and b. makes the whole page load quite a bit faster.

One issue I noticed a bit ago… the “Who’s New” block on the Forum Home page is going to be wonky for a while. It looks at an access timestamp that that wasn’t migrated, so pretty much everybody is “new,” I think. It should start to make sense as actual new accounts are added.

Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.

Mon, 02/27/23

It would be helpful for me to have a New Posts link that worked like it did before. I had a shortcut set up to that page and it was very convenient for me to use that to see what was happening comment-wise on the site. Now, I have to go to Sharperiron/forum and scroll down to see Recent Comments. But then, if I click on the most recent comment, it goes to the top of the original post and not the new comment itself. So, that has been a bit frustrating to me from a user standpoint.

unsearchableriches.blogspot.com

Mon, 02/27/23

AndyE wrote: Now, I have to go to Sharperiron/forum and scroll down to see Recent Comments. But then, if I click on the most recent comment, it goes to the top of the original post and not the new comment itself.

The link issue should be fixed now so it takes you to the comment.

I think it might also be possible to make the old link work, which would have the additional advantage of reducing our 404s a bit. Will look into it.

Meanwhile, we have two votes now for “Recent Comments” at the top of the Forum page. … anyone else got an opinion on that?

Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.

Mon, 02/27/23

Personally, I like the format of the view at the top of that page rather than the way the “Recent Comments” section works (which only shows a couple threads and you have to go page by page). However, I’d prefer that all the posts with recent comments filter to the top, rather than mixing in with recent Posts that don’t have any comments. I’d rather those came after the commented posts. So in other words, sort by last time commented first rather than last time accessed or similar. Or, if it’s not too hard, at least make that a view option.

Dave Barnhart

Mon, 02/27/23

dcbii wrote: So in other words, sort by last time commented first rather than last time accessed or similar. Or, if it’s not too hard, at least make that a view option.

Food for thought. I don’t think it would be hard to do. If it’s an option, it should probably be a sticky option so people don’t have to keep messing with it.

The downside of that is if someone posts a new discussion thread, it might not show, so new discussion could tend to get buried by current/older ones. But there may be a way to do both without cluttering things up too much or slowing the page down too much.

Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.

Tue, 02/28/23

/new-posts now takes you to the forum page, though, so far, I can’t get it to jump down to Recent Comments.

So, for now, it comes down the best set of tradeoffs in moving it up the page vs. not moving it up the page.

Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.

Thu, 03/02/23

It would be nice to know how many views each thread has had, as the site previously provided. Is not having that info in the new version intentional or unintentional? If it's intentional, I'd be interested in learning the rationale for not providing that info.

Fri, 03/03/23

View counts (aka “hit counts”) aren’t showing on anything yet, including forum threads. But it shouldn’t be too long before that’s working again.

I believe all the counts will start over at zero, so that’s just something to keep in mind.

Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.

Fri, 03/03/23

Aaron Blumer wrote: View counts (aka “hit counts”) aren’t showing on anything yet, including forum threads. But it shouldn’t be too long before that’s working again.

Sounds good. Thanks.

Sat, 03/04/23

Lots of mostly small things are still going on (and will be for quite a while). A couple recent ones to note:

  • Counters are working now (see above).
  • The ‘new’ indicators and new comment counts on the Forum page now clear after visiting the discussions then returning to Forum Home and refreshing the page.
  • ‘Belgium’ no longer appears as a forum category in the dropdown when you create a new forum post. (All those posts really didn’t want to leave Belgium, but they have been repatriated.)
  • There’s a shortcut to ‘Messages’ (aka Private Messages) now in the Account menu, for logged in users with access.

I need to thank folks in general for feedback and thank Dave (‘dcbii’) in particular for doing a good bit of testing and reporting of issues.

Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.

Mon, 03/13/23
  • Recent Comments should be grouping and filtering a bit more intuitively now (there was a sort problem)
  • ‘Discuss’ links on Filings on the front page now work.

Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.

Thu, 03/16/23

Hi Aaron, it looks like your titles are showing up twice on the Facebook feed. Here is an example:

SI Filings - Should a church administrative assistant be a member of the same church, or is it better to hire someone from outside the church?: Should a church administrative assistant be a member of the same church, or is it better to hire someone from outside the church?

“This debate has gone on for years. … Here are some of the arguments I’ve heard on both sides.” - Chuck Lawless…

See more

Maranatha!
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3

Fri, 03/17/23

Thanks, Don.

I haven’t figured out yet why it’s doing that, but hopefully soon. This one will apparently require larger quantities of coffee.

Edit: I think that might be working better now, for Filings at least. Probably Articles also.

Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.

Wed, 04/05/23

Hi Aaron

I noticed something this morning with the "recent posts" section.

The previous version of SI would show only those posts that came up in either the last 24 hrs, 3 days, or 7 days, depending on which filter you set.

Now what shows is all the posts in a thread, whether they meet the filter or not. So for example, the Pettit resignation post has lots of comments of course. But when someone makes a new comment today, that thread pops to the top of the list and to find other comments made on the same day, you have to page through several links to get to another thread where there is a post today.

I noticed that when I saw Mike Osborne's post on the Pettit thread this AM, but didn't see your post on the G3 article which I had seen earlier in the day. I had to page through several pages of Pettit posts until I got to that one.

Just wanting to add to your work load!!

Edit: Ok, I see what is happening. Maybe it is just that you have the Recent Posts set to only show a limited number of posts, so one can crowd out the others. I guess all the posts on Pettit don't show, but there were quite a few yesterday plus one today, so it pushes the G3 post down the list on another page.

Maranatha!
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3

Wed, 04/05/23

I appreciate the feedback.

Yes, what’s happening is that there’s a max # of comments per page, and if one thread is really busy, it can fill the page up, even filtered with different time range filters.

I think the comments per page can probably go up a bit without breaking anything. Will do some experimenting.

Edit: well, that thread is so busy, it still comes out pretty messy. There is definitely some room to improve that, though. Just have to study it a while and wait for the eureka light bulb to come on.

Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.

Sat, 05/13/23

The main search tool is now capable of searching for phrases in quotation marks.

Example: “pastor shortage”

Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.

Tue, 06/06/23

On forum posts, logged in users now have a sidebar block on the right that lists any Polls you have created. These have edit links in case you want to reorder the possible answers, add a possible response, etc.

(It’s probably a good idea to not add new response options after people have voted though)

Anyone who can post in the forums should be able to also created a Poll. If you want to do it and have any issues, PM me or use the Contact form.

Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.

Mon, 07/03/23

I just noticed that there is no longer a "quote" option at the bottom of each comment like there used to be. Is that something everyone is experiencing or is it just my view of the forum? My first thought was that I wasn't logged in, but I checked that. (Even when I had the "quote" option, I could highlight a whole paragraph, but only a few sentences of the highlighted part would show up in the reply field when I hit "quote.")

Mon, 07/03/23

Unfortunately a recent update broke that module. There should be a new version or a patch pretty soon, and we’ll get it back.

Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.