Activity Stream..bugs?

[Lilaena De'Ville]

Spoiler tags and smileys don't work in the activity stream. see? :)

[Solomon Latona]

Devil's Advocate: do they need to?

The activity stream only shows the first ten words of any post: unless it's a teeny tiny message, you have to click on 'see more' anyway.

[Droo]

OMG I CAN'T BELIEVE DARTH VADER IS LUKE SKYWALKER'S FATHER!


Devil's Advocate: do they need to?


I'd say yes, but I'm hyper sensitive about spoilers.

Edit: Also, I checked, and 27 words from your last post showed up on the activity stream.

[Solomon Latona]

Well okay, Mr Needlessly Nitpicky, it only shows X words. :rolleyes

I'm not sure that in practice it is an issue. How many times do people actually include spoilers right at the very beginning of their posts? Usually, there's some amount of preamble first, a lead-in sentence or what have you. Having not gone back through the entire boards counting words and checking them in activity streams I honestly don't know if it's an issue or not: but before we go expecting the admins to invest the time trawling through code to try and fix a problem, it's probably worth ascertaining whether it is a problem, or if it's just a "feature" that we need to learn to work/live around.

[Lilaena De'Ville]

I don't know if it needs to or not, it's just something I'd noticed, and yes, it's because I read something in the Activity Stream that was a spoiler and you can't tell via the AS. I'd been meaning to mention it, so I'm mentioning it.

[Captain Untouchable]

Not suggesting that it's not worth mentioning: just playing devil's advocate, as I stated. :)

Droo pointed out that when people have back-and-forth discussions in threads (he used the Doctor Who one as an example specifically), the spoiler tags tend to show up pretty early if people are replying with spoilers to specific quotes, etc. Just felt it was important to make sure we had a good "why" before dumping more things onto the pile of stuff the admins already have to worry about. ;)

Is this something we can work around in the meantime? Start putting (spoiler) in front of spoiler tags as a warning to people looking in the Activity Stream, maybe?

[Lilaena De'Ville]

I'm fairly certain there isn't a huge pile of things the admins are sitting around worrying about. They'll be ecstatic for this to work on! :p

[Dasquian Belargic]

One solution that I can see right away is that... we can reduce the number of characters that will appear, per post, in the activity stream. This would mean less of a post preview.

[Abarai Loki]

I don't think that will solve the problem, to be honest. If you look through the Doctor Who threads, for example, there are plenty of instances in which people might post just a couple of words, coupled with a question mark, or an exclamation, or a smiley, and that alone, coupled with the fact its in the Doctor Who thread, would be enough to spoil it for someone else.

And how much could the character limit on post previews be reduced before the activity stream is made redundant?

Admittedly, I don't know a whole lot about how it works, but I wonder if there's a way to make the activity stream react to spoiler tags in the same way it does quotation tags, in which case anything in spoiler tags simply wouldn't appear in the post preview.

[Dasquian Belargic]

Looking through the admin options, I don't see anything at first glance that looks like a way to do that.. but I will keep on investigating.

[Lilaena De'Ville]

I would imagine it's a code issue which means one of the Chris' would have to look into it.

[Dasquian Belargic]

I can't see where in the settings for the activity stream it disables quotes, so that's where I'm struggling to find the solution.

[Glen Hawkins]

For experimentation purposes, bold, italics, underlined, strike.

In the Activity Stream at the moment, there's a post that Droo made using the [youtube] tags. The tags do not show, but the text that was between them does, as with the [spoiler] tag.

Edit:

It looks like BBCode (anything in square brackets) does not work in the activity stream, including bold/italics/etc. This means that unless there is an "enable BBCode" option that is not selected, it might not be possible to make spoiler tags work... it may be something that the Activity Stream is just not programmed to do.

[TheHolo.Net]

I have investigated BBCODE and HTML in the Activity stream with no success. I will revisit researching it again in a few months. It certainly is not an existing 'option' at this time. Its that way by design as far as I have been able to determine.

[Droo]

Suggestion: if you are going to put a spoiler near the start of your post, then perhaps you can use the & nbsp; HTML code for a blank space. All you have to do is remove the space between the & and the n for it to work. For example, in the activity stream, look at my recent post in the random thoughts thread. It contains a spoiler which would've appeared unspoilered in the post preview, however, you can see the HTML code spam I included in my post to prevent the spoiler itself being revealed. Would people be willing to do this if they're going to put spoilers near the beginning of their posts?

[Dasquian Belargic]

That seems like one way of avoiding unintentional spoils due to the activity stream. It's a shame there's not a way to get that code into peoples posts without manually typing/copying + pasting.

[Lilaena De'Ville]

[i wonder...]

googled and found a solution! Ha!

http://www.gaijingamers.com/showthread.php?t=6629&page=4

simply place brackets inside your spoiler tags, it completely hides it in the activity stream.

[Droo]

Nice one, Holly!

[Dasquian Belargic]

Good, easy solution!