Welcome to Inkbunny...
Allowed ratings
To view member-only content, create an account. ( Hide )
Inkbunny

Inkbunny Site Software Update / T-shirt Contest Final Week!

Hi everyone!

A couple of days ago we updated the site to a new version. There have been about 100 fixes and changes since the last version, so it represents a lot of work. Many of the changes are subtle behind-the-scenes stuff, but some things are more obvious and dramatic.

A comprehensive list of changes is at the end of this journal for those who are interested. Some of the most interesting changes are:

* What's with all this orange? The system now highlights the usernames of people you watch, in places where that distinction might be useful. The color we use and the places it does this are currently under live testing and will be improved as we get feedback.

* Thumbnails for submission uploads can now be any size (up to max full image size) as you upload them, and they'll get resized to 200x200. Previously they had to be 200x200 on upload or the system would reject them.

* When you change your email address in your Account Settings, or if we receive too many bounced emails when the system tries to email you, you will get a notification telling you to re-verify your email. If the re-verification process doesn't work or if it's too confusing, please let us know.

* The keyword and username autosuggest function has been improved in many ways. The updates should make it faster and it should get out of the way more effectively when you don't need it. You can also now see user icons next to usernames as they are suggested.

* You can now send Private Messages instantly to any recipient from your Private Messages page. Just click the "New Private Message" link at the top and you can type a recipient name (which also autosuggests usernames as you type).

* Clicking thumbnails in a Pool preview (the ones that are a box that has three thumbnails over the pool title) such as on the userpages now takes you to that submission, not to the pool gallery view. To get to the pool gallery, you now need to click the pool name.

There's a zillion other changes and fixes too, so be sure to read the full list at the bottom of this journal.


Inkbunny T-shirt Competition

There's just 1 WEEK LEFT on the competition! Be sure to get your entry finished and submitted by 11pm Friday 3rd of May 2013 CEST (Amsterdam) which is 2pm Friday 3rd of May 2013 PST (Los Angeles).

Full details about the competition and technical specs (such as the essential pixel size and file type you MUST use) can be found here: https://inkbunny.net/journalview.php?id=77698

Don't forget to tag your entries with the keyword "comp2013"!

Check out the awesome T-shirt design entries we have received so far!


Updates for Inkbunny release 57

This is the comprehensive list of changes included in the latest live version of the site.

* Added: You can now start a new Private Message to any recipient via a link on the Private Messages list page. On clicking this link, a blank PM appears with the ability to enter the recipient by name in to a text field, which auto-fills with name suggestions as you type.

* Added: Usernames throughout the system now highlight orange if you are watching that user. This does't happen everywhere but you will see it in places like gallery views, linked names in comment text, etc.

* Fixed: A bug in search meant that it could take a very long time, or never complete, when a search consisted of at least one “short” word (known as stop words in full text indexing). We have changed the indexing system to optimise it for these short words. Searches like “my little pony friendship is magic” was one of the most common ones that would run in to trouble. It should work fast now.

* Added: We now allow thumbnails to be uploaded that are any size (up to the max size allowed for full size image uploads). Thumbnails will be automatically resized to 200 x 200 after upload. Previously you could only upload files that were exactly 200 x 200 pixels or smaller.

* Changed: Clicking the thumbnail of a submission in a pool preview will take you to the submission you clicked, not just the pool contents gallery view. To get to the gallery view you now need to click the pool name below the preview thumbnails.

* Fixed: A design fault meant that Private Message Threads could only reach a maximum of 500 messages per thread. That is now fixed. So all you people RPing in HUGE threads may now continue. :P

* Changed: The layout of the Search page has been changed to make it a bit more friendly to use, such as moving the artist name and “search favorites by” name fields up towards the top.

* Added: When commenting on a submission, it now remembers which page you were viewing and takes you back to that page number of the submission. Previously it would always reset your view back to page 1 after you commented.

* Changed/Added: Support Tickets now shows all read/unread tickets and gives you the option to sort by Unread first. Previously you could select between showing all unread or read+unread, which wasn't very efficient or easy to use.

* Added: Email accounts must now be verified each time you change the email account under your account settings. Verification is an email set to the new account with a verification link.

* Added: We now mark email accounts as invalid after we receive too many bounces form an address. The account owner will then be notified that their email address needs to be re-verified and we will stop sending mail to the invalid address.

* Added: A warning message now appears on the “forgot password” page if the user is trying to reset their password but their email address has already been marked invalid due too many bounces.

* Fixed: Various bugs in the Search system have been fixed. These were mainly to do with punctuation and special characters causing zero search results to be returned or an error message to show.

* Changed: Members page username search now returns results with exact name match first, then search matches start of name, then search matches search term anywhere in name.

* Changed: Hotlinking of Inkbunny assets has been blocked (hotlinking means embedding them directly so they can be viewed on pages on other sites by using the direct source hosted by Inkbunny) .

* Updated: We are now using the latest version of Piwik stats tracker.

* Updated: We are now using the latest version of JWPlayer embedded media player.

* Added: The user signup process now makes it clear what email address a user entered as they signed up. So on the “enter activation code” page after signup they can potentially spot any spelling mistakes in the email address they gave.

* Changed: The keywords and username autosuggester has been improved in many ways, including showing user icons with usernames, and showing active users first (active in last month) in the list of suggested names. It also filters out accounts that have signed up but that have never been activated, which means a lot less garbage or unused accounts will be suggested as possible matches to your search term.

* Fixed: A bug allowed the keyword/username autosuggester to try to make multiple requests to the server at once, meaning that as the requests came back they'd keep popping up unexpectedly and getting in the way. Now the autosuggester can only make one search/request at a time.

* Fixed: A bug with the autosuggester meant that clicking out of a textbox or text area would not cancel the server query. If the request to the server was slow, this could mean that after a few seconds you might see the suggestions box pop up for a text box you don't have the cursor focused in any more.

* Added: The keyword and username autosuggester now caches results on the client browser for up to 24 hrs. This means suggestions are displayed faster when entering the same text again.

* Changed: The keyword autosuggester will now list the search term you just typed as an option. Previously it would remove the word you just typed, as it didn't seem useful to have the exact word you just typed as one of the selections you could choose from. But this leads to confusion that the word typed may not be in the common list of words used on the system. Now if you type “male”, then “male” will still show up as a suggested option, letting you know it is a common word.

* Added: Banned Users page (which shows users you have banned from your account) now uses the username autosuggester as you type names in to the “add” field.

* Added: Block Submissions By Artist Name page (which shows users whose content you block) now uses the username autosuggester as you type names in to the “add” field.

* Added: The keyword and username autosuggester now shows a spinning icon in a text field if it is querying the server for suggestions as you type.

* API - Fixed: A misconfigured suhosin.get.max_value_length value in the Suhosin PHP security module was blocking API requests with long property values. So trying to retrieve more than about 50 submissions via api_submissions.php would fail due to the very long query string. It should work up to the max 100 submissions per request now.

* Added: Added more instructions to the deployment documentation such as setup of memory limits for the database (the deployment doc is something that will be useful for the IB v2 OpenSource project down the track!).

* Fixed: Added extra entries to Apache webserver config to ensure all javascript files are compressed as they are sent via HTTP. Some of the many varied mimetype names that all refer to javascript files weren't included. Only a problem in very rare situations.

* Added: Deleted assets (files marked deleted, or files of submissions marked deleted)  are now automatically purged from disk after a set time period.

* Optimised: More caching of common data in memory, particularly to do with commonly accessed user account data.

* Optimised:  CPU and Disk I/O priority for uploaded image processing have been changed to ensure they can't overload the system.

* Changed: The maximum number of items that can be viewed in the favorties gallery is now 50,000 (was 10,000). Some people were hitting the old limit which meant they couldn't see their older favorites past 10,000. Those favs were never lost but you just couldn't view them. If anyone hits 50,000 let us know. :P

* Changed: Strict-Transport-Security header TTL has been set to 4 weeks.

* Change: Updated various things to make IB compatible with the latest PHP version.

* Fixed: Payment “special instructions” was showing a blank entry to users as they click the Donate button and there were no special instructions for their chosen payment type.

* Added: Default error page message now includes a suggestion that cookies may be disabled in your browser if it detects you aren't logged in.

* Changed: Links to API and Hacks are now separate in the page footer (they used to be one combined link).

* Removed: The “fees” link in the page footer has been removed. Inkbunny does not charge fees, so having a “Fees” link that then told you this seemed a bit confusing.

* Fixed: A bug was allowing users to reply to deleted comments, if they still had a browser window open viewing a page from before the comment they are replying to was deleted.

* Added: Made the “location” settings page more Mac-friendly by including the Mac “command+f” search shortcut as a suggestion (we previously just had the Windows ctrl+f suggested).

* Added: You can now Sort by Sender name (for inbox) and Recipient name (for Sent box) in Private Messages view.

* Changed: Search Messages link at the top of Private messages list page is now bigger. Did you know you can search your private messages? :P

* Fixed: A bug was preventing moderators from purging their own Private Messages.

* Fixed: A bug on the Search page meant that the order_by property in the URL appeared twice.

* Added: When clicking the link to request Bulk Upload permission, the new ticket it opens will now be pre-filled with a message. This will help avoid confusion that was leading some people to think that page was for entering a submission description.

* Fixed: A bug was allowing the Submission Title to appear in the website page title if you were viewing a friends-only submission that you should have no access to. It would show the error screen telling you have no access, but the title of the image would still be revealed by accident this way.

* Changed: Terms of Service used to say “over the age of 18” as our age limit. But this is syntactically incorrect as it has been corrected and now reads “at least 18 years old”.

* Changed: We now use a much nicer Twitter widget on the user pages.

* Changed: The “Top 100” list on the Members page now shows the Top 100 “active” members. Active members are users that have posted new submissions in the past 3 months. This means the Top 100 now gives a better idea of the current top contributors to the site.

* Fixed: The “enter text here” helper messages in various text boxes on the site will now correctly disappear if you right-click on the text box. Previously in some places it would only clear on left click. Right click is likely if the user is pasting text.

* Fixed: There were some bugs in the way username shortcuts like @ somename (without the space) were interpreted, so that email addresses or things like @.@ got interpreted as username shortcuts.

* Added: Old entries in the system's global IP Ban table are now autoremoved. Previously old entries would expire but would hang around in the banned IPs table forever, doing nothing but taking up space.

* Changed: The Site Statistics page now shows a more accurate count of the number of active users per day, as the count is now based on logged IP activity per 24 hour period. Previously it was relying on counting unique users that had viewed any news submissions or journals in a 24 hour period.

* Added: Better error checking on file uploads to ensure that the files actually got saved to disk correctly at the temporary-file-processing stage, and return a useful error to the user if they didn't. This will only be of use if there is some totally unforeseen problem with opening and writing the file, such as a full “/tmp” disk.

* Added: Better sanitisation of data coming back from file mimetype checks. Now mimetype data has to be in exactly the form “word/word”. Previously the sanitisation could have allowed more complex unexpected data formats to be returned.

* Fixed: Some bugs were allowing blocked submissions to show in some places where they shouldn't. These were submissions blocked by the users blocked keywords or ratings settings.

*Fixed: The position in code where certain DB transactions were set to begin would allow overlapping operations to complete, which should have blocked one another. This included things such as commenting on a journal just as it is deleted. Only affected a few minor things like this.

* Changed: Suggest Submissions will now omit any submissions you have recently viewed, or that you have faved. It already omits submissions by artists you already watch.

* Added: There is now better search timeout handling on the “Suggested Submissions” and “Favs by Users you Watch” gallery views. If these pages take more than a minute to load now they'll throw an error rather than leave you stuck in limbo for ages.

* API - Added: api_submissions.php (Full submission details) now returns the total number of times a submission has been viewed.

* API – Added: api_watchlist.php is a new interface that returns all the watched artists for a given user_id.

* API – Added: api_search.php can now use last_file_update_datetime to order results. This is useful for downloader scripts that need to update existing lists of submissions/files.

* API – Changed: Due to the new hotlink blocking system; When requesting assets (jpegs, gifs, swf, etc) a blank HTTP referrer (empty string or null, or no referrer sent at all) or "https://inkbunny.net/"; must be sent as the referrer with the request.

* API – Changed: When searching using a text string for keywords in the api_search.php interface, the characters "_" and "," are converted to spaces automatically for the purposes of searching within the database. Characters which have special meanings for Full Text searches in Postgresql (such as |, &, :, ! and ~) are ignored.

* API – Changed: For the username and keywords autosuggesters, the HTML response header will contain a directive for your client to cache the result data for 1 day, if it supports caching.

* API – Changed: The username autosuggester's results are now returned ordered by active accounts first (sorted alphabetically) then inactive accounts (sorted alphabetically). Active accounts are defined as any with activity in the last 30 days, with a preference for those with user icons. This is to ensure the most likely useful names appear at the top of the list (old accounts or those without icons are less likely to be of interest).

* API – Changed: The username autosuggester; A maximum limit is set on the number of results returned. At the time of writing this note, the limit was 300 results per request.

* API – Changed: The username autosuggester; All results are returned with HTML entities encoded. Eg: & will appear as &, > will appear as >, etc.

* API – Changed: The username autosuggester; A new parameter “searchtype” has been added whch allows you to choose between searching "start" of username for search string (default) or searching "any" part of username for string. Assuming the search type is set to "any" then searching for “fre” will return an array of suggestions like “alfred, manfred, killfree, freda, fred, frederick, freeman” etc. Eg: https://inkbunny.net/api_username_autosuggest.php?usern...

* API – Changed:  The username autosuggester will now return the path and file name for the user icon of the usernames suggested if the users have a user icon. Note that this is a relative path like "27/27014_fred.jpg". You need to prepend the full location to the start of this string get the icon size you want. Eg: "/usericons/tiny/27/27014_fred.jpg" for tiny icon 20x20px, "/usericons/small/27/27014_fred.jpg" for small icon 50x50px, "/usericons/large/27/27014_fred.jpg" for large icon 100x100px.

* Fixed: Search results reordering by popularity (views) or create date now re runs the whole search. Previously it just reordered the current results set, which is the wrong thing to do as we need to go back to the whole archive of submissions to decide the top submissions by views or date, not just the current result set.

* Fixed: The currently viewed page number on Support Tickets is reset back to page 1 when you change the sort order. Previously it didn't do this, which could be very confusing.

* Fixed: Users banned system wide from commenting or sending private messages could not access their Private Messages in view only mode. This meant they couldn't read the moderator PM telling them why their commenting and PM rights were revoked.

* Fixed: Friends-only submission thumbnails were showing in the “next/previous” links in the pool bar under the submission view, even when you weren't a friend of the submission owner.

* Fixed: BBCode shortcut to embed thumbnails in comments wouldn't render a default icon for the submission type if there was no thumbnail for that submission.

* Optimised: Changed our backup snapshot process to use a much faster method, which cuts database snapshots down to just a few minutes, not most of an hour.

* Fixed: Changing time period on Search results page would sometimes break the page and show you zero results, until you clicked another time period and the results would magically reappear.

* Fixed: A bunch of small security issues were zapped.

* Added/Changed: Lots of other things that are too numerous and minor to mention, but that make everything just a little bit better!

Thanks!

IB
Viewed: 344 times
Added: 10 years, 11 months ago
Site News Item: yes
Commenting Locked
 
softcream
10 years, 11 months ago
awww yeaaaa
idlevalley
10 years, 11 months ago
I feel that I should mention that I really appreciate these updates. I also feel that I should be paying to use a site that acts so professionally.

Thank you.
TTFox
10 years, 11 months ago
Gotdamn y'all on a role lately. Keep up the good work guys! =D

You guys can change the icon to 200x200 plus make it like FA icons for couples and shit.
Sefeiren
10 years, 11 months ago
Thanks for all the hard work you guys. All of these updates are awesome!
Shokuji
10 years, 11 months ago
Thanks so much for all the effort put into making IB an even better place to be. =3
sedkitty
10 years, 11 months ago
This is what I like about IB over other similar furry-art sites that shall go unnamed -- you actually know what you're doing.  Keep up the good work. :3
FerretWilliams
10 years, 11 months ago
"Clicking the thumbnail of a submission in a pool preview will take you to the submission you clicked, not just the pool contents gallery view."
Yay! I kept forgetting that it takes me to the pool, or not noticing that I was looking at a pool. I just saw an image I wanted to go to and I clicked it. Happy to see it acting like I expect.

"Added: When commenting on a submission, it now remembers which page you were viewing and takes you back to that page number of the submission."
Ah, that'll be handy, especially a many-page submission.

"* Fixed: Friends-only submission thumbnails were showing in the “next/previous” links in the pool bar under the submission view, even when you weren't a fiend of the submission owner."
Missing a letter gives that one an entirely different meaning, lol

So many updates, didn't read them all.
Toksyuryel
10 years, 11 months ago
Suggestion for future changelogs: sort the changes so that things that are added are grouped and at the top of the list, changes are grouped and next, followed by grouped removals and then finally all of the fixes grouped together. Keep the highlights section at the very top of course. This would make them a lot more readable and make it easier for more important things to be found quickly.
EvilCapitalist
10 years, 11 months ago
Future suggestion:

Add an AJAX call every 5 mins or so to update PMs, have it add a '(1)' if you have unread PMs. This will cause the tab to highlight in modern browsers. Should be really easy to do and would make the site *much* better to use.
OreoClarity
10 years, 11 months ago
What da ya know, a furry art site that delivers actual updates, instead of promising them and never following through lol

Great work guys, I'll definitely continue to donate to your awesome site! Love all the updates!
Jacinth
10 years, 11 months ago
Anyway we could see the implementation of a [tab] or [indent] BBCode in the next rollout? IB authors need some format love. :(
arkthebear
10 years, 11 months ago
An overhaul of the writing stuff would be pretty helpful and may help pull in some people from SoFurry. Matching their functionality would essentially remove one of the biggest roadblocks to migration.
Jacinth
10 years, 11 months ago
Definitely. I don't know that we even need to match the SoFurry functionality (frankly, some of it I just don't like) but the ability to handsomely format our documents and possibly even the epub functionality would be a huge boon. I have to resolutely ignore my uploads after I put them up because I can't bring myself *not* to indent, but there is no way to make indents even!
New Comment:
Move reply box to top
Log in or create an account to comment.