Report bugs for the new site here! 🐛

[cjmacie]

@Vimala

@sujato

Please note that the main site (suttacentral.net) and this forum are completely different platforms. For now we are mainly focussed on the main site, so don’t worry too much about problems with the new theme on the forum just yet.

Thank you for reporting this issue. There are more issues with the theme’s layout, but we will not be dealing with the CSS of the Forum Theme just yet. This is just a theme, nothing has changed other than the looks of the forum. Bhante Sujato will take care of the CSS in the next few weeks. In the mean time, if you have problems, you can revert back to the old theme in your preferences.

But…
Since 8 hours ago to so, the forum pages show no icon to log-in. Futzing around I found two invisible buttons on the top bar, to the left of the menu and search buttons with visible icons. (iMac OS 10.8.5 using Firefox 48.0.2) And they seem to be gateways to sign-up and log-in (???)

Something broken? Or new, “secret-handshake” policy?

(And still, REPLY and CANCEL buttons are only top-half visible at the bottom of the window.)

[Vimala]

@cjmacie

Since 8 hours ago to so, the forum pages show no icon to log-in.

That’s bizarre. I have not changed anything and I not upgraded anything either. I checked on my Chrome in incognito mode and I see the two icons clearly:

Have you tried the app?

‎Discourse Hub

@cjmacie

Or new, “secret-handshake” policy?

Yes, we’re only a secret club for those who are initiated

[Vimala]

I have the feeling that this theme is not so good on mobiles. What happens if you turn the phone? Can you see the two icons then?

So either never log out or change the Theme back to legacy is all I can suggest at the moment. This is a bit of a bigger bug than I imagined and will take some time.

[cjmacie]

@Vimala

I have the feeling that this theme is not so good on mobiles. What happens if you turn the phone? Can you see the two icons then?

So either never log out or change the Theme back to legacy is all I can suggest at the moment. This is a bit of a bigger bug than I imagined and will take some time.

I have a “mobile phone” but use it only for telephoning, voice-mail, and the Square credit-card processing app. (When V. Sujato recommends not using Facebook, I find that’s not radical enough, just a subset of the overall iPhone-type device addiction and mental corruption problem.)

That is to say I access SC/D&D only from a PC and iMac.

Now that I know about the “hidden” buttons, and can get to the function-buttons I need that may not be totally visible, all’s well.

(After 30 years spent in the software/CS profession – but ended ca. 20 years ago – having to do QA with software and find work-arounds is second nature; no problem.)

[cjmacie]

Further notes:

1: On PC (Vista, c Firefox 52.0.1) the top-right buttons that were totally invisible on the iMac (10.8.5, Firefox 48.0.2) are partially visible. That is, the person-profile icons appear partially on the left of the location. And, curiously, the leftmost one (Sign-up) disappeared after some poking around but prior to actually logging-in.

2: Can one change the “theme” here?

3: While I’m at it - A suggestion irrespective of the new stuff:
It’d be helpful to have the “Log-out” function as one of those buttons on the top bar. As it is (and was), one has to open the menu at the user avatar-button AND scroll it down to get to Log-out way at the bottom (unless one has a rather huge screen and window). That is two extra user operations vs having a button always visible on the bar. (Back in the “old days” of UI design, it was considered generally preferable to minimize user steps.)

That would also be consistent with having sign-up and log-in there.

[edit] 4: Having reminded myself (#3 above) of the principle of minimizing user bother… Is there a way of forcing Discourse to download the whole thread into the browser, rather than piece-at-a-time?

Just now, loading this thread and wanting to see the bottom / last posts, it took a minute or so of coaxing the scrollbar to get all the way to the bottom – a waste of time, basically.

Downloading the whole ball of wax can’t be that taxing: 1) time-wise, as when forcing it to print whole to file (CONTROL-P) it doesn’t take that long; 2) memory-wise either, as most devices these days have 8 GB or more “main memory”.

[sabbamitta]

I just have to say: I would like to express my deep appreciation & gratitude to Ayya @Vimala and Bhante @sujato who relentlessly and patiently, day after day since the relaunch of the website, are looking into all our bug reports, answering our questions and explaining things. Their replies here in this forum are only what we can see of all the work they are doing. Besides they are still working on the website itself, communicating with the dev team and doing other things in the background we can’t see. And on top of that I know that there are still other tasks they are taking care for that have nothing to do with SC altogether…

So a big SADHU to you!!!

And take some deep in- and out-breath in between…

[sabbamitta]

Only now did I see this in the top right corner of some of the Sutta cards:

If you hover with your mouse over them they are telling you something.

Just sooo cute!

[Vimala]

@cjmacie

I have a “mobile phone” but use it only for telephoning

Very wise!
And sorry, my bad. Bhante Sujato will have a look at the CSS for the forum more closely but we ourselves lack all the equipment (i.e. different machines with different OS / browsers) to test everything. So your feedback and those of others is very valueble.

@cjmacie

Now that I know about the “hidden” buttons, and can get to the function-buttons I need that may not be totally visible, all’s well.

Maybe for you, but not for other people. So we have to do something about it anyway.

@cjmacie

2: Can one change the “theme” here?

The Theme can be changed once logged in in your personal settings - PREFERENCES → INTERFACE. Then you can choose the Legacy Theme and SAVE.

@cjmacie

It’d be helpful to have the “Log-out” function as one of those buttons on the top bar.

I’m afraid we do not have the possibility to change these things because it depends on the Discourse platform itself. We can only change the theme. Other things would be overwritten again each time Discourse upgrades. But suggestions like that you can make at https://meta.discourse.org/

@cjmacie

Is there a way of forcing Discourse to download the whole thread into the browser

Again, I don’t think so but maybe if you want to search on meta there might be other people who are interested in this. I would not want to do it as a default because that would take too long download time for some users on some of the threads.

[Yasoj]

Not sure if this has been reported (or if it’s a even a bug), but when pasting a link of a SC webpage, the display is always the same, e.g.:

The display seems to indicate that the link is for the home page and note for the specific webpage (here the Suttanipata webpage). Not a big deal though.

[Vimala]

We are working on it but it’s a difficult problem. For some reason the meta tags are not registered.

[frankk]

@Vimala

On the old site, the SN was divided into 56 Samyuttas. Now these 56 are (numbered) inside the respective vaggas where they belong. So yes, this is one extra step there. But you can then click on that same Samyutta as you were used to and get the list for all the suttas within that Samyutta just the same as the old site.

Ok, I see if I want to get to any particular samyutta, such as SN 47, I can directly pull that up by typing the web address instead of navigating through the menus. And I just tried out and saw I could get any sutta in any nikaya by typing it in the web address line. Very handy! As long as that feature is there, that’s what I’ll be using most of the time.

Some feedback on the menus though, even though I don’t plan to be using them much:

On SN 47 for example, but this applies to any nikaya, here’s what I miss from the old suttacentral. I like being able to see a compact list of all the suttas, with the modern numbers prominent, so I can get a scope of what’s there, how many suttas are in that samyutta, and quickly with a birds eye view glance through the whole list.

On new suttacentral, the modern sutta numbers are buried in under the english title, I have no idea how many suttas are in the samyutta, to find out I have to click the arrow on the first row tile. As I scroll through the list of the suttas I get lost, don’t know what sutta number I’m on, where I am. On a small android screen, this would be even more of a feeling of being lost in a dense forest, whereas the old sutta central I feel like an eagle looking down at all the rabbits scurrying around in the field and I can quickly pluck what I want.

one way to fix this, to get the best of both worlds:
By default, don’t expand out the cards for each sutta, so I can see a compact list like this:
(trying to cut and paste from new sutta central SN 47, doesn’t work, so typing out by hand…)

SN 47 satiptatthana samyutta (arrow button )
(contains 104 suttas)
ambapali vagga (vagga titles in small faded font as to not confuse with suttas)
47.1 ambapali
47.2 mindful
…
2nd vagga, etc…
47.50 taints
47.104 ogha vagga

and only if i mouseclick or touch screen tap that arrow button on top, THEN it expands into the dense forest of sutta cards with explanatory paragraph about that samyutta.

B.Bodhi’s book version of SN, I didn’t read it for a long time for a very sad reason. Because of the complicated numbering system (one numbering system in archaic, PTS, modern, in various round brackets, square brackets, etc), I could never keep track of where I was, where I left of reading, and where to continue. I was always getting lost. On the old sutta central, problem solved. I knew there were 56 SN, and within each of the 56 SN, I could quickly see how many suttas were in it.

The new sutta central, I think people are going to feel lost, just like I did in the days of the book SN. Keep in mind I am one of the most motivated sutta readers on the planet, I am pretty familiar with much of the SN structure by now, and I am tech savvy. If I can feel lost scrolling through a samyutta in SN today, with no idea how big the forest is and where it ends, how is a beginner going to feel?

Just my opinion, hope it helps. The new system does look slick and from another perspective is very simple and intuitive, so I don’t mean to make it sound like I think you guys did anything wrong in your design.

[Vimala]

If you go to SN47 (either through the menu or by typing the URL) and you expand the Samyutta explanation at the top, it will tell you that this Samyutta contains 104 suttas together with a more detailed explanation of the Samyutta itself:

But like I said somewhere before, questions/feedback about design I refer to Bhante @Sujato, who designed the site based on Material Design (I’m really no good at anything creative myself!!!).

[aconlan]

The issue I was having with Chrome started happening on other websites as well. Not SC related. I installed Chromium instead and the issue went away.

Also, the Grammarly plugin only seems to create a problem with D&D using Firefox. It works fine on Chrome and Chromium.

[Sineru]

I’m using an Android device, an oppo a57. I often use my Google Search widget to open suttacentral. Unless I open suttacentral in chrome suttacentral does not stay open in a tab when minimised, it dissapears. This website is the only one that I have encountered so far that simply vanishes. I may be in the middle of writing a message. This does not appear to happen when a Sutta is open, only when I am in discuss and discover.

[cjmacie]

@Vimala

@cjmacie

Is there a way of forcing Discourse to download the whole thread into the browser

Again, I don’t think so but maybe if you want to search on meta there might be other people who are interested in this. I would not want to do it as a default because that would take too long download time for some users on some of the threads.

Could be a user-preference feature.

[dzt]

Not sure if it was reported, but lookups (pali -> whatever) do not work in Firefox for me (latest). I’m pretty sure they worked before. They work in Chrome.

But in Chrome web-fonts are not kicking in (which is not a big deal for me). It says:
Refused to load the stylesheet ‘https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Roboto+Mono:400,700|Roboto:400,300,300italic,400italic,500,500italic,700,700italic’ because it violates the following Content Security Policy directive: “style-src ‘self’ ‘unsafe-inline’”.

And another thing, more like a UX one: in lengthy lists, like Samyutta Nikaya, it is not possible to collapse long sections, like vaggas, on mobile. So you have to scroll&scroll&scroll to get to where you want…

[Vimala]

@cjmacie

Could be a user-preference feature.

I’m afraid it’s not. I cannot find anything in the admin panel either. But if you want, you can see if you can find a solution for this on meta.discourse.org and see if they know if it is possible and where it is. I’m afraid I really don’t have the time right now to look into this in detail.

[Vimala]

@dzt

Not sure if it was reported, but lookups (pali -> whatever) do not work in Firefox

We have a bug-report for lookups in Firefox after you do click on next/previous at the bottom. But if you restart the site and avoid those two buttons and just go to the next sutta via the menu, it should work.

@dzt

But in Chrome web-fonts are not kicking in (which is not a big deal for me).

Is this for the main site or for the forum? It sounds like this is on the forum and as we don’t actually use Roboto anywhere, it should not be a problem. But I will see where it tries to load this and take it out.

@dzt

And another thing, more like a UX one: in lengthy lists, like Samyutta Nikaya, it is not possible to collapse long sections, like vaggas, on mobile

The next version to be rolled out this week will have SN disabled completely so you can only go to the sections and not load the whole list. Same with other long lists.

[musiko]

@cjmacie

1: On PC (Vista, c Firefox 52.0.1) the top-right buttons that were totally invisible on the iMac (10.8.5, Firefox 48.0.2) are partially visible. That is, the person-profile icons appear partially on the left of the location. And, curiously, the leftmost one (Sign-up) disappeared after some poking around but prior to actually logging-in.

Maybe the issues you describe are due to browser versions? I see some seriously outdated systems above . Usually the first thing that support will tell you to do is to update your system/browser to latest version and then try reproducing the issue. In my experience this solves 90% of all user complaints.

@cjmacie

It’d be helpful to have the “Log-out” function as one of those buttons on the top bar. As it is (and was), one has to open the menu at the user avatar-button AND scroll it down to get to Log-out way at the bottom (unless one has a rather huge screen and window). That is two extra user operations vs having a button always visible on the bar. (Back in the “old days” of UI design, it was considered generally preferable to minimize user steps.)

Well, times change I guess Nowadays there are so many form factors people use to view content that it would be nigh impossible to develop UI for each of them individually. Hence the responsive web design that accounts for different screen sizes and orientation and dynamically adjusts the UI. You will probably agree that there is much less space for the navigation elements on the mobile phone so the design usually compensates for this by hiding some functionality to second tier.

@cjmacie

[edit] 4: Having reminded myself (#3 above) of the principle of minimizing user bother… Is there a way of forcing Discourse to download the whole thread into the browser, rather than piece-at-a-time?
…
Downloading the whole ball of wax can’t be that taxing: 1) time-wise, as when forcing it to print whole to file (CONTROL-P) it doesn’t take that long; 2) memory-wise either, as most devices these days have 8 GB or more “main memory”.

I’m afraid that is a very PC-centric view and I can assure you that this would be absolutely horrible for someone that switches form factors on the fly (I respect that you don’t use mobile devices to view content on the internet but I assure you this is a path less travelled these days). And because of this you are probably unaware that mobile devices are still very much underpowered in comparison with PCs and also rely on mobile carrier data for internet access (which is usually much slower and more importantly limiting in amount and in price per MB).

Of course modern web apps like discourse have all this in mind so there are many technologies built in them to facilitate different devices and modes of access: just-in-time loading of posts is one of them. This could cause problems with searching or printing using Ctrl+F or Ctrl+P in the browser (which only applies to currently loaded part of the page) and this is why discourse hijacks these shortcuts and prepares the data internally for search and print of the entire thread.

Loading the full thread is therefore undesirable because otherwise the app would constantly need to check the form factor and the connection type to load the page appropriately.

@cjmacie

Just now, loading this thread and wanting to see the bottom / last posts, it took a minute or so of coaxing the scrollbar to get all the way to the bottom – a waste of time, basically.

Perhaps this is due to using browser UI elements to navigate the thread. In my experience moving to and fro inside the thread is instantaneous if using the app scrollbar instead of the browser one. And if you are more comfortable using keyboard: the list of shortcuts is available by pressing the ?.

[Wulee]

I have same problem. I can connect to discourse but not sutta central.net. I’m using iPad mini iOS 10.3.2 with Safari.

My MacBook MacOS Yosemite safari is fine.

Regards,
Andrew