Feature Announcements

[Kison]

• SITE CHAT:
  • There's a new option in the Settings tab to disable/enable smilies.
    
  • If smilies are enabled, their text equivalent will be converted to a graphic in the chat windows. They should follow the same format & use the same graphics as the forums.

Please thank

FROZEN ANGEL

for making these changes!

I'll also take the opportunity to let people know that we're planning to switch the forum over to HTTPS. You may have noticed that the main site & the wiki already are switched over. To do the same with the forum, however, is requiring us to host a bunch of insecure images (mostly using the img BBCode) ourselves, and modifying the affected posts & private messages to link to the new, secure image. Once the switch happens, if you try to link to a site that does not support HTTPS, your image will not appear. Sites like imgur which allow both http & https should be fine.

[Frozen Angel]

Just some little details :

- all the available smiles in forum are now available in site chat with the same codes but without the annoying space problem.

- The smiles are now in both compact view and the normal view, to disable them use the option in settings (if you change this setting your page will be refreshed automatically to parse the massages again)

- The smiley which wasn't available yesterday is now working You can cop paste similes from chat like normal text (yesterday you couldn't do it)

and that's all

[Frozen Angel]

smilies*
copy*

sorry - auto correct and stupid keyboard

[ConnorJC]

Can't you edit posts here?

Anyways, two quick things I don't think anyone's mentioned yet:

- MafiaScum is now available over HTTPS. This breaks a lot of images (which is why it isn't forced yet). We're fixing those right now. Once that's done the forums will only be available over HTTPS.
- There's now a dev chat server, and will soon be one for the forums. Most people probably don't care, but I can post the link if anyone is interested in testing new features.

[McMenno]

sitechat doesn't seem to work in https

[mastina]

sitechat doesn't seem to work in https

Yeah, can confirm at least on my proxy. Whenever I use an https proxy, site chat is entirely absent; in order to use it, I have to be on an http proxy. This has been a thing for a very long time. (Honestly most of the servers my proxy uses switched over to https already so I have to go out of my way to not use https and would love it if https's glitches were fixed so that I wouldn't have that issue.)

[ConnorJC]

Site chat is still hosted on HTTP right now. It should start working once it's put behind an HTTPS reverse proxy.
Passing this on to Kison so he can fix it.

[chilledtea]

https was an awesome addition. Thanks, to all the people responsible for it.

[Kublai Khan]

Ugh. I have to type an extra letter? Way to "boost" efficiency by slowing us down guys.

(srs though, great job!)

[ConnorJC]

Ugh. I have to type an extra letter? Way to "boost" efficiency by slowing us down guys.

(srs though, great job!)

How fast do you type a letter?
https://www.httpvshttps.com/

[Not_Mafia]

HTTP 215% slower

[ThinkBig]

HTTPS is soooo slooooooow

[zoraster]

HTTPS is soooo slooooooow

what?

[ThinkBig]

HTTPS is soooo slooooooow

what?

I am having a difficult time loading the site on https. Should I refresh my cookies and history?

[Kison]

Some more changes!

• SITE CHAT:
  • The user list should now be removing users who have been disconnected for a period of time.
    
  • The ;) and :oops: smilies should now work.
    
  • There is now a status icon to on the left side of user conversation windows. Green: online & active, yellow: online & idle, grey: offline or invisible.

Please thank

FROZEN ANGEL

for making these changes!

sitechat doesn't seem to work in https

I haven't set it up yet. Hoping to get to it in the next few days.

[Cabd]

Kison; any idea why my company firewall would be letting MS traffic through but blocking sitechat? Is it hosted elsewhere from MS proper?

[Kison]

It's on a different port(4241). You're not the first to have that problem though so we will probably move it to 443(the port for HTTPS) when we switch the board over.

[Dunnstral]

Maybe it's just me but https MS pages feel like they load slower

[Zachrulez]

HTTPS is soooo slooooooow

what?

There actually is a performance penalty so it likely is loading slower for people.

Edit: It seems that a header needs to be set with HTTPS to allow caching. I'm not sure if this was done when the change happened, but if it's not set to allow caching, that would actually explain significantly slower load times. (Since you would need to download all the content you are opening every time.) Fortunately if this is a problem, it seems to be an easily fixable one.

Edit 2: In windows you can open up PC settings, type in internet options and then from there go into the advanced tab. (In previous versions of windows it should be in the control panel.) Scroll down to security and check to see if the "Do not save encrypted pages to disk" is checked. If it is, uncheck it. MS

should cache

regardless of HTTPS if it's unchecked.

[ConnorJC]

Actually, if MS enables HTTP/2 there will be a performance

benefit

while using HTTPS (As no modern server/browser supports unencrypted HTTP/2, and HTTP/2 is faster than HTTP/1.1).
I'll try to get Kison to do so

The current page load speed difference is about 1/20th of a second, so any perceived slowness is likely a caching problem.
HTTP @ 599ms https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/epTqrG/htt ... iascum.net
HTTPS @ 656ms https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/bTfVjU/htt ... iascum.net

[Zachrulez]

Incidentally MS tests very low on caching.

I'm not sure what the site's situation is, but HTTP2 is still pretty new and can actually be detrimental and/or difficult to implement. Eventually there will be a benefit though I'm sure.

[ConnorJC]

HTTP/2 is easy to implement on nginx, but unfortunately MS uses apache rather than nginx, and apache http/2 support is 'experimental'
I'm trying to find a solution though

Edit: How can HTTP/2 be detrimental to implement?

[Zachrulez]

I'm guessing it has to do with support and the lack of taking advantage of the features that would make it faster.

It'll be faster in the long run of things, but it's possible that it could be slower

now.

[ConnorJC]

It's faster right now, go see for yourself

https://www.httpvshttps.com/

[Zachrulez]

It's actually more complicated than testing it's ability to load (lots of) images.

https://blog.fortrabbit.com/http2-reality-check

Example: It actually takes longer for an HTTP2 page to respond to a request to load, so if a page is small enough it will actually load slower in HTTP2.