Huge Bug, cost me a long letter...

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Hi,
I just found someone I wanted to send a private message to, I clicked the PM button on one of their posts. WHY would a general PM button be put on EACH person's messages. Shouldn't the PM Button, IN A PERSON'S message, automatically copy the personal username to the recipient field? I typed a very long letter to another user, and when I clicked send, it said, no recipient. WTF? Why the heck is this a bug? How no one complained about this? Or is it a feature, that isn't clear to me.

Sorry, I'm a bit peeved, that I lost all that letter to the ether. I even copied it into my clipboard, figuring it would be zapped, when i clicked back to get the user name...but even then I couldn't get the username without copying it OVER the letter, mistakenly.

Please fix this issue.

Thanks.

It's a bug and going by the active development of the forum software ("none") it's unlikely to be addressed.

To PM someone click on their avatar and use the PM button shown there instead. Using the PM button on a post fails to automatically copy the member name to the "To" field, as you've found.

When copying an in-progress message always paste it to an external plain text editor (say, notepad), and always save it periodically. Just using the clipboard is not enough because something else might get copied and over-write what you'd placed there - again, as you found unfortunately.

Thanks, that does work.

What do you mean it's no longer in development, aren't websites ALWAYS able to be improved?

Or are you saying that the development team was disbanded at some point, and no one is supporting the message board code?

Yes, websites are always able to be improved - just... not this one.

Wrong Planet runs on the phpBB forum software which is itself still being maintained and improved, but there is no drive to keep this site up to date with the newer releases - or correct some of the bugs due to customization. It took what, ten years plus before it was upgraded to this relatively new version and while that killed off a host of really nasty bugs, it also introduced a few new ones. That change happened in 2014, and here we are still.

It's rarely straightforward to migrate a large and well-established data set over to newer forum software - especially if it's coming from a very old and customised version, as was the case here.
So while there are some irritating bugs and annoyances the improved performance and stability gained was ultimately well worth the effort.
I guess Alex would rather have the system running in a stable state, if a slightly imperfect one - and despite the irritations, that does make sense.

If you know how to code you could use something like Greasemonkey or Tampermonkey to hack around it with Javascript.

The fix would be local to your browser - unless you shared it.

Just about any buggy web site can be fixed this way - if you have enough time and patience.

(yeah - that time thing)

Screwing with the DOM won't fix PHP bugs.

I'm surprised there hasn't been a revolt yet. How can autistics stand such errors? It would drive me crazy if I was really active... I guess this will motivate me more to work on a Wrong Planet replacement, as well as replacing Facebook, Reddit and dating sites.

You should have seen the irritation the earlier version caused!
Er actually no - I wouldn't wish that on anyone...

Correct - but they can correct the symptom. If you cannot cure the common cold you can at least treat the symptoms.

Answer these three questions:
1) What were you doing?
2) What did you see?
3) What did you expect to see?

The problem as stated is that on some pages some icons / text leads to a page starting a new PM, but does not include the "to" in the new PM form as expected.
The work around is to click on another page and get a different result that does include the new PM with the "to" in the form.
So the PHP can create a new page with the "to" filled in if it is sent the correct information - the functionality is there in the PHP but the redirect / form target / href doesn't include the correct information - this is a glitch in the HTML of the page before the form is displayed. messing with the DOM can obviously work-around the giltch. The Javascript hacks can detect the page name with a REGEX pattern and patch the on-click or what-ever.

So you just need to specify which page and then study the HTML and see what is being passed to the form in the case of it not working and making it work like the case where is does work.

If someone wants to actually implement this PM me.

If you just want to complain then keep posting "someone should do something".

User as name doesn't work, but user as numeric user id does work.

Compare

with



And the link above the user icon contains the numeric id the the user who posted



So you just have to hack the DOM to replace the "user_name=ssssssss" with "u=nnnnnn" and you are done.