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[meta] Recent changes to UnityAnswers
UnityAnswers recently went down for a few hours for 'maintenance'. When it came back online, I found that I could no longer make comments on people's posts! The ability to contribute in conversations on this site is absolutely core, and I can't interact with the community without it.
In addition, I seem to have lost the ability to edit (or delete) any posts, including my own- something that can be very frustrating if I've made mistakes or want to make a retraction.
It also seems that instead of displaying my username next to my posts, it takes the text from my 'real name' field on my profile. While this isn't really that much of an issue, it's really extremely unusual behaviour for a site of this kind.
What I'd like to know is, how many of these changes are intentional? Prior to that maintenance cycle, there was a different bug where edits would either fail to apply, or take several hours to appear properly (which was annoying, but not critical)- now, I can't edit things at all!
As well as that, when I went to the 'contact' page to lodge a report, upon submission I was taken to a friendly 'internal server error' page- leading me to air my voice publicly, here.
Now, while I'm at it, I may as well say my piece on the moderation queue.
While it's a good idea to have some kind of filtering system for posts from users who may be spambots or other undesirables, don't you think it should be 'innocent until proven guilty' instead of how it is now? Right now it seems that the site instantly assumes that any user who signs on has bad intentions, which is inconvenient and confusing for new users (often leading to double-posting) as well as time-consuming for the users who have to run through that list several times a day. Why not change it so that instead of the threshold being 15 karma, it only blocks users who are on negative karma? That way, any user who proves that they can't (or won't) make decent posts has their contributions filtered, and any normal newbie can speak freely.
As it stands, the moderation queue provides very little benefit to the site. All it does is inconvenience genuine users, and as soon as the spambots notice that comments aren't filtered at all, doesn't stop them at all.
I also wanted to mention that as far as I know, comments also go through moderation. DZone doesn't control the policies regarding moderation, but at the time it was turned on it was deemed to be the best option available to combat an overwhel$$anonymous$$g spam problem.
I saw that comments seemed to be gone when I was here earlier today briefly, but they're back now. And editing works again.
Well, the problem seems to have disappeared. Not sure quite when it got fixed, since I've been away for a few days, but I'm closing this question since it's no longer relevant.
Answer by dzone_adm · Mar 16, 2012 at 04:15 AM
Hi there. We've tested things and edits appear to be working fine. Can you tell me what browser you're using? We had to apply a very large number of updates and so it took some time and then had to fine tune it.
Are you still having the issue with not being able to comment or edit? Both of those appear to be working for a large number of people on the site for the last few hours (there were some issues immediately after the update earlier today). As always, we strive for quality and this update was not done as smoothly as we had hoped. If you have any further problems, please contact support@qato.com and we'll get it resolved ASAP.
Well, I would tell you, except that I can neither comment nor edit. So, as much as it pains me to do so, I'm going to make this page look disgusting by posting a comment as an answer.
I'm using Firefox 10.0.2- it's possible that there's an update that I haven't applied, I'm checking now. No, I still can't comment or edit.
Well, I just switched to Chromium, and now comments and edits work. Seems to be a Firefox-specific bug.
I'm also on FF 10.0.2 and things seem fine. Just getting an occasional 404 error.
Answer by Bunny83 · Mar 16, 2012 at 04:33 AM
I have to verify that. The add comment button is missing and there are actually no button at all below posts except the "more" button which just shows the character / word count of the post.
Maybe only the high karma people are affected?
The moderation queue is not that bad, but new users should get informed that their posts have to be verified before they are visible to the public. "innocent until proven guilty" doesn't work since the spammers can create accounts 20 times faster than you can suspend them. They cross post on several questions before they got detected.
btw. The question title was a link to the question itself, now it's just plain text. It was quite useful when you followed a link from an e-mail it only showed that single comment / answer and the title-link was the easiest way to visit the actual question page.
I've just logged out, deleted all cookies, refreshed the page logged in but it still doesn't work. The page looks exactly like i'm not logged in.
Here i still use FireFox 4.0
With FireBug i found out that the "add new comment" button is there, but has a "display: none" style. However the "post-controls" div only contains the "more" button.
When i "cheated" the add new comment button visible it doesn't work.
I've also made the comment edit field visible manually.
[...]
I've also made the comment edit field visible manually, but when i press the "comment" button i get a download of "add.json" which contains a json string of the comment i've posted. The comment however has been posted, but it's not nice that i have to edit the page to add comments. x)
Just tried IE7 but same result. I get two errors in my FireFox error console:
commands.lockPost is undefined
Line 330 on this page
and
pageContext.url.questionEdit is undefined
Line 515 in http://answers.unity3d.com/themes/unity/pack/combined.js.h-730254411.pack
Works fine here (Safari). But it didn't work earlier, as I mentioned, so I don't think it could be a browser problem. I didn't do any cookie deleting or anything, I just came back to the site later in the day and then it was working again. Also no issues with Firefox (old version, 3.6) or Opera.
Everything is back to normal (except the title-link which is intentional i guess) after i've done another page-reload (CTRL+R) today.
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