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What is broken on this site

asked 14 years ago

this post is marked as community wiki

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Please list here anything that is broken at http://ask.sagemath.org.

UPDATE: Please post bug reports at the main askbot development site: askbot.org.

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hi guys, would you consider posting these issues at http://askbot.org instead? It might actually serve two good purposes - (1) new users of this forum will be more likely to post b/c "what's broken on this site" will not be the first thing they see; (2) - you will increase activity at askbot.org

Evgeny gravatar imageEvgeny ( 14 years ago )

that said I don't mind at all to follow this thread as I receive updates by email, just thinking that some folks may be put off from using your forum by seeing this on top of the list :). btw, I've already fixed many of the issues mentioned here.

Evgeny gravatar imageEvgeny ( 14 years ago )

Can the default sort order be changed to "newest"? That might help.

ccanonc gravatar imageccanonc ( 14 years ago )

actually you probably want "active" - that way people will see that something is going on at the site, otherwise they are less likely to post.

Evgeny gravatar imageEvgeny ( 14 years ago )

Presuming the backend is SQL, a "group by" clause could also help (a 2nd level of sorting). I know pure python lets you do multiple levels of sorting as well.

ccanonc gravatar imageccanonc ( 14 years ago )

29 Answers

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3

answered 13 years ago

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I never received any mail from this site, although I wish it in my profile (subscriptions tag). But yesterday the situation changed drastically, more than 30 emails from asksage ! I didn't change subscriptions (and had no activity on asksage for last month). Here are my subscriptions:

Asked by me: instantly Answered by me: instantly Individually selected: weekly Entire forum (tag filtered): weekly Comments and posts mentioning me: weekly Choose email tag filter: off

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indeed, the same happened to me too. If anyone does look into this, I wish they would fix the email subjects too, which currently have "[ASK.SAGEMATH] [ASK.SAGEMATH]" prepended. I think one [ASK.SAGEMATH] would suffice.

niles gravatar imageniles ( 13 years ago )

Same thing here. I tried every possible configuration, including "no email at all", but still keep receiving emails for avery update.

pang gravatar imagepang ( 13 years ago )

@pang the email tag filter is also broken, so if you set it to anything but "off", you will stop receiving any email at all.

niles gravatar imageniles ( 13 years ago )
3

answered 14 years ago

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The color scheme.

Maybe a secondary consideration, but I think uniformity of look & feel between http://sagemath.org/ and asksage could be an important way to indicate to new users that asksage is a real part of the sage community, and encourage them to use it. The color scheme and overall look of the google groups page is vaguely similar to that of sagemath, but this is quite different.

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Along these lines, the documentation for sage does not look at all like sagemath.org.

niles gravatar imageniles ( 14 years ago )
3

answered 14 years ago

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Trying to edit a previous comment, I still get another error page (different from the ones mentioning e-mail problems), main error being with list index out of range, and Traceback mentions switch to copy-and-paste view.

[note: I have no trouble editing this answer]

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Niles, do you mean edit comment underneath a question or answer? Comments are actually not yet editable, only questions and answer are. Could you post a url where you get the error?

Evgeny gravatar imageEvgeny ( 14 years ago )

no, sorry for the abuse of terminology, I mean to edit an "answer" that I have provided (like the one we're commenting on now).

niles gravatar imageniles ( 14 years ago )

Strangely, I get the error when I try to edit some answers, but not others. The following gives an error: http://ask.sagemath.org/answers/65/edit/ it's a link to the "edit" button for my comment at http://ask.sagemath.org/question/20/the-tachyon-object-used-for-rendering-plots

niles gravatar imageniles ( 14 years ago )

hopefully by the time William returns I'll write a script that fills in the missing post revisions. Apparently exception fired after the question got saved but before the revision record would be created.

Evgeny gravatar imageEvgeny ( 14 years ago )

thanks for checking into this; if this problem only affects questions from the first half day or so of asksage, then maybe it's not worth spending too much time on. But if the fix is easy, that would be great :)

niles gravatar imageniles ( 14 years ago )
2

answered 14 years ago

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The privacy policy linked on the footer as "privacy policy" goes to a template page that is currently empty. IOW there is no privacy policy.

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The About page is also empty.

ccanonc gravatar imageccanonc ( 14 years ago )

this is available to site admins through settings->flatpages

Evgeny gravatar imageEvgeny ( 14 years ago )

Its been more than a year that this is reported. The Privacy page and About page are still empty/useless.

VInay Wagh gravatar imageVInay Wagh ( 13 years ago )

Its been more than a year that this is reported. The Privacy page and About page are still empty/useless.

VInay Wagh gravatar imageVInay Wagh ( 13 years ago )
1

answered 14 years ago

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The title of each page ends with "ASKBOT: Open Source Q&A Forum". That's not really something broken, but maybe it makes sense to change it to something more specific.

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1

answered 13 years ago

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I have stopped getting email updates. I tried updating my subscriptions but I don't receive any emails. Is there any way this could be fixed?

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I can't get email to work now either.

niles gravatar imageniles ( 13 years ago )
1

answered 14 years ago

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Should deleted questions be listed under "Related questions"?

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don't know. should they? right now there is s no "delete forever" function, so potentially garbage posts may appear in those "related questions" what do you think?

Evgeny gravatar imageEvgeny ( 14 years ago )

On this page, I see links for "test question [deleted]" and "Does asking a question work? [deleted]". Maybe we should include only questions that a not-logged-in user can browse? I don't know if this is easy/efficient to do.

Mitesh Patel gravatar imageMitesh Patel ( 14 years ago )

oh, I get it now. Will hide them in the next version until there is a "hard delete" function in place. Thanks!

Evgeny gravatar imageEvgeny ( 14 years ago )
1

answered 14 years ago

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At least sometimes, the number of answers/votes on a given question on the front page are just wrong. It's hard to give an example that will be current when anyone reads this, as it seems unpredictable, but you can probably find your own.

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You may be confused with the fact that votes only apply to the question itself (not votes on answers).

ccanonc gravatar imageccanonc ( 14 years ago )

there is a 60s caching delay to update front page, so votes on question will appear a little later. cache invalidation could be better.

Evgeny gravatar imageEvgeny ( 14 years ago )

I see. Why would one vote up a question? Anyway, I also saw questions that supposedly had no answers, while having had them for a number of hours. Sorry I don't have any examples now.

kcrisman gravatar imagekcrisman ( 14 years ago )

kcrisman: Presumably so unanswered questions can be sorted by upvotes. It's just a "use-case" you may or may not have interest in personally.

ccanonc gravatar imageccanonc ( 14 years ago )

@kcrisman, those broken counts have been fixed, but the 60s cache delay is still there it will most likely go down or be removed in the future. as for why upvote a question - well maybe you have a point, but @ccanonc is right - the questions can be sorted by votes that's what "popular" tab is for.

Evgeny gravatar imageEvgeny ( 14 years ago )
1

answered 8 years ago

jupsal gravatar image

I recently joined the site to post an answer to something that I realized I could help with. However, I soon went on to discover that one needs at least 10 karma to answer. I can see how there is a need to eliminate spam, but I think the site could benefit from some other form of verification so as to not scare off new users.

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Apparently you do have 11 karma, though?

kcrisman gravatar imagekcrisman ( 8 years ago )

Yes. After someone replied to the post I linked above I was bumped to 11 karma and was able to submit the answer to the original question I wanted to answer. I realize this is not a problem for me now, but it is a hindrance to new users.

jupsal gravatar imagejupsal ( 8 years ago )
1

answered 14 years ago

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The search field does not find the following post with query "EOF" (no quotes):

http://ask.sagemath.org/question/90/v...

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This seems like something wrong more generally with askbot -- they might appreciate hearing about it at askbot.org

niles gravatar imageniles ( 14 years ago )

niles: I know :-), but Evgeny is still listening and it's great to keep him around!! ;) Thx Evgeny!

ccanonc gravatar imageccanonc ( 14 years ago )

I agree with Niles - I'd appreciate if bugs and issues were reported on askbot site. That would in fact help the forum project because people often decide to use software based on the activity on the site.

Evgeny gravatar imageEvgeny ( 14 years ago )

The problem here is that MySQL full text search automatically drops short words (I don't remember the actual number). This will be fixed when forum supports Postgres or standalone search engines like solr or sphinx.

Evgeny gravatar imageEvgeny ( 14 years ago )

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Asked: 14 years ago

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Last updated: Jul 19 '16