So I clicked on the bilara link, https://bilara.suttacentral.net/, in another post and noticed that I was logged in already through github. I did login using my git account a while back. However, I was surprised to see that my user icon (which I had never set on github or bilara before) was change to Bob Ross:
Ok, strange, but ok. He seems like a good guy. Sometimes platforms will assign a random user icon. Bad idea, but ok.
Then I noticed that there was a link to youtube associated with the image and user name. YouTube
Yeah, I got RickRolled. Have you been hacked? Was this a joke?
(this doesn’t seem to be a problem with my github account. Things look fine when I login there.)
(OK, this is unrelated to the above, but not worth a whole post. I noticed this on that same bilara page:
I see this kind of “cutesy” thing all over web applications and I’ve always found it strange that developers would not consider that non-native English speakers would have no idea how to understand what these things mean. I would respectfully suggest that a translation web app not include idioms like this. I work a lot with non-native English speakers frequently and find these things frustrating. Especially this one because it is double encoded with an emoji, so the earnest reader couldn’t even google the phrase. Any way, my $0.02) (See what I did there?)
I used to have the same user icon at some point, but didn’t dive into investigation as you did. I don’t know what caused it to appear, nor do I know what made it go away—for the latter most likely an intervention by @blake.
It’s a joke in the development environment, the avatar is Bob Ross and the link is rickroll (implemented by @sujato, I must assume to rickroll me since we are the main two developers, but he also rickrolled himself later after forgetting he implemented it). However in the case that Bilara gets confused about your logged in status it will fall back on these defaults even in production.
Most likely you’re using stale credentials from before a major update to Bilara (due to Bilara being in an “alpha” status changes between versions have not been handled super gracefully), log out and log back in and your user status should appear correctly. A hard refresh might also help. Let me know if these things don’t fix the problem.
By the way we sometimes use an approach of “fail obviously” to help ensure that bug reports happen. If something is going wrong with the software, we want that to be obvious. Admittedly, this choice is… eccentric.
(OK, this is unrelated to the above, but not worth a whole post. I noticed this on that same bilara page:
Indeed. Might want to revisit as the project enters production. As Sabbamitta’s post indicates, it is an unreliable method. But I get the concept.
EDIT: Yes, logging out and logging back in fixes it.
Also not worth its own post… The how to drop down contains more text than can fit on my screen. Perhaps it started small and then just grew. Perhaps it is time for a dedicated how to page, or shorten this drop down to essentials with a link to a fuller page.
