Forum software is awful

Lmao good catch! :person_facepalming: on my part

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Yet another software crime from MS :slight_smile:

There are none that I know of. I have forums on my own web-sites, and I’ve over the years done a fair bit of searching and tried a fair few forums. They’re all far too high-fat and complex.

In the end, about a year ago, I switched over the NNTP. I now run a news-server on the back-end and wrote a simple web-based front-end for it (I looked for an open source front-end, but no luck).

I think NNTP is a very sound technical choice for back-end, the issue is getting a web-based front-end.

So, something for the forum admin.

When I come to log in, there are fields for username and password.

I fill them in, hit submit, and this ALWAYS fails, because the captcha has not been completed - but UNTIL I hit submit, the captcha is NOT ON THE PAGE.

So now I hit submit on empty username/password, to get the captcha to show up, and then fill it in, and the username/password, and log in.

Hi Xenophon, are you using adblock or noscript like things in your browser? These will interfere with the way captcha text and windows work.

Nope. I use a bare, current Firefox, on Debian, for the forum. No extensions at all. (I can’t use Tor browser, the Google captcha never completes for that browser).

Ok, then my only other suggestion is that your internet is going through something like pi-hole or another DNS solution which is filtering or impeding the captcha traffic. Outside, I have no idea why you specifically are having this problem. I have Debian running on a MNT Reform and a Librem 5, and I can access the forum with no problems. I’m using Firefox ESR on them though, so maybe that matters, but I wouldn’t think so.

Nope - none of the above. Just a normal internet connection. I think the web-site has a problem =-) after all, web-browsers are complex, and I think it in effect problematic to know exactly how a site will behave for any given user.

I really wish I could block users.

A problem that only you are having, which makes it very unlikely to be the website. I know that is not helpful, but I hope this helps efforts nonetheless.

Just chiming in to say that discourse, the forum software this forum is using, is one of the better ones actually.

It’s not only easy for the admins but easy for the users as well while still being useable on each end device without any modifications of the operators.

@Xenophon if you’re having trouble maybe you could tell us more about your setup so we can replicate it and/or even submit an issue ticket on the github repository.

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I’ve just discovered another annoyance.

I posted a solution to a graphics problem, and there are three threads where people are having this problem, so I thought to reply with the same one-paragraph solution in each of them.

“You cannot post, your post is too like one you’ve just made.”

I had to reword the post three times to get it posted.

Annoying. I’m not a spammer, if I’m posting the same content a few times it’s because I know what I’m doing.

Well how should the system know it?

The real problem is people opening the same topics over and over again.

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I think that Discourse’s topic template feature helps to improve the duplicated topics issue. And I suggested using the feature at Please Tag Your Posts And This Read Before Posting a Support Question - #4 by junaruga

The dark mode on PC has got better, but on smartphone the topic titles on the front page are still illegible.

It’s black text over dark gray background.

Really ?? This is using Win 11 > Normal Res > Dark Mode

I have this (Linux, Chrome):

As I said though, on my smartphone it’s like in your screenshot, illegible black on dark.

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I also have this issue, and it occurs on several other websites (both large and small). I don’t know whether the issue is with the websites that have it, or if is due to the way Googles garbage reCapatcha works.

Maybe your OS, Browser settings . . . . I have no such problems, ever, with all versions of Windows or Ubuntu, and Firefox

You can ignore users. But I think you need to be a certain trust level to do it.

I haven’t been here long but haven’t found anyone I’d want to ignore.