Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

Regarding Paolo's question, I e-mailed updates to old-style pages years ago that have still not been posted.

I haven't fixed it yet. I'll let you know when I have.

Paolo, I have just responded.

(We seem to occasionally go through long periods with no emails, during
which I tend to get out of the habit of checking the account.  Sorry for
the delay.  And Charles, there was a period before I joined that the emails
were more or less completely unread.  If there's something specific I
should go back and find, let me know.)

I changed the scripts from mysql to PDO, and I changed the FORM action to a
full URL, and it still didn't fix the problem. So I then turned to testing
the data sent for "125 Percent Shogi and 125 Percent Xiang Qi." I deleted
each field in turn until I stopped getting a 403 error. It was something in
the Setup field that was the problem. I then deleted parts of Setup until I
isolated what was causing the problem. It came down to the expression
"../../". This appeared twice, and when I changed both to "/", all it
complained about is that I didn't enter the right password. I don't know
why it hiccups over this, but if you will just change your links to use
full URLs, that should eliminate any instance of "../../" and allow your
updates to get through.

In order to debug this, I have temporarily made myself the author of Hexgi
listed in the database.

I debugged the script, edited Hexgi to use three-color boards, and returned
the authorship to you. Note that the ending period, which you didn't
include in your quotation of what you need to add, is a very important part
of the checker pattern. It is not a mere divider. The period after each
sequence of colors (identified by digits) tells it to repeat that pattern
for the rest of the rank.

Sorry for chipping in again.

I submitted, but the Step 3 just appeared as a blank page; however now the
game categories appear in the "Your Unreviewed Submissions" page, so it's
fine. Right?

Paolo,

I'm not aware of any problems right now. If you are, please give me a
step-by-step of what you are doing, including the URL of each page.

I am not sure what happened, but now it is definitely fine :)
It's added in index/msdisplay.php?itemid=MSthroughthelook

I don't know what happened, but it seems my article on interactive diagrams
has been completely corrupted, all less-than signs in it being interpreted
as HTML tags, rather than being printed. I am pretty sure this wasn't the
case when I last touched it. So it seems there is something changed in the
rendering scripts that corrupts the display...

Your page and msdisplay.php were both last updated a month ago, but
display_user_submission.php was last updated on March 4th. I just modified
this by commenting out each line that applied reverse_htmlentities() to one
of the page content strings, and it fixed your page. I'm not sure why the
code uses this function or how this could affect other pages. I do recall
seeing code for converting page content strings to htmlentities before
writing them to the database, and maybe this was for keeping the SQL string
from being corrupt. But now that I switched the code for writing user
submissions to the database over to PDO with prepared statements, that's no
longer an issue, and I removed the code for converting strings to
htmlentities before writing the SQL string.

What is the URL for the script that gives you this error message?

http://www.chessvariants.com/index/membersubmission2.php

I just finished rewriting membersubmission.php and membersubmission2.php to
use PDO methods instead of mysql functions. Please let me know how it
works.

I also modified the database and membersubmission2.php to allow itemids as
long as 64 characters. Since itemids are being used in URLs, the 16
character limit is making less intelligible URLs when games have long
names. I may update existing itemids to use longer portions of the summary
field, but that will take a script that does it systematically.

One more change is that spaces in a name are now converted to hyphens, and
not underscores, when generating an itemid.

Fergus Duniho wrote on 2016-03-12

... I just modified this by commenting out each line that applied reverse_htmlentities() to one of the page content strings, and it fixed your page.

The side bar for advertizements still has a rather adverse effect on the page, however. It runs over the entire height of the page, even though only the top 20% or so is filled with adds. So it just adds a lot of blank space, distorting the actual content by compressing it in the space that is left.

Is it really needed to make these side bars run along the entire article if there is no content to fill them anyway? I cannot imagine that I am the only one annoyed by part of my screen being wasted for blank space. E.g. the side bars could be put only beside the Introduction and Setup sections, so that the later sections can use the full width of the screen?

After the Design Wizard has run and displays its result, the article even starts to overlap the ads in the side bar. This might be a consequence of that the width actually changes by running the Design Wizard. Would it be possible to hide these side bars from the JavaScript of the Design Wizard when it needs more space (basically when the user activates it). E.g. by giving them an id so that their display attribute can be set to 'none'?

Never mind, I managed to close the ad colums by accessing them by class
(leftcol/rightcol) to hide them, and reset the float, marginLeft and
maxWidth of the 'main' element. So the Design Wizard can now use full
screen width again.

The main purpose of the sidebars is to make the content narrower, because
this makes a page easier to read. It also helps contributors who are
designing pages on desktops with wide-screen monitors to design them in a
way that will work on mobile devices, for which extra width is not even an
option. So, yes, they have to go all the way down, and they should not be
hidden unless it is for a page that requires the extra width and is not
intended to work on mobile devices. Using the space for advertising is a
side benefit of having the extra screen space available.

You do not have to edit the CSS of user-submitted pages to remove stuff you don't like; you can do what I did instead. I don't like the narrower content or sidebar ads either, although I used
Stylish to remove them from all pages (and force the content to use the
full width of the window), and to remove script warnings, as well as to
remove the "fineprint" area (used for editing the page) from printouts (this also means I now have to maintain my own stylesheets, although I can deal with this; furthermore my stylesheets won't affect anyone else since they are local to my computer). However, I cannot figure out how to make the printout to use the full width of the page, nor to convert pictures to monochrome on the printout (if you know how to do these things, please tell me). However, note that at least Firefox does have "responsive design mode" which allows to test it at various screen sizes, as well as rotation and touch events (I myself do not use it, although it can be useful to you if you do mobile and that stuff).

You can print pictures in monochrome by telling your printer to print the
whole page in monochrome. Just adjust your printer settings before
printing.

> I cannot figure out how to make the printout to use the full width of the
page

One of the best ways of dealing with bugs is to report them. I took a look
at the print preview for some pages and found the content displayed in a
narrow column. I have now fixed that.