Forum Helper browser extension

Version 1.01.0373 with the fix of the occasionally not working shortcuts for Reply Templates was now submitted to Chrome's webstore, and will be available in a few hours after the approval by Chrome. Yesterday's enhancements (i.e. user name editing) are already available in the webstore (version 1.01.0354).

trux said:

Yesterday's enhancements (i.e. user name editing) are already available in the webstore (version 1.01.0354).

Already using this feature.  Nice.

I'd like to encourage anyone suspecting spam, abuse, or any other violation of the terms of use, to please "report as abusive."  Click "More, Report as abusive" under the post.

That way the mods and admins are aware and will remove the post from public view.

New version 1.01.0376 was published in Chrome's webstore, though there are mostly only some minor fixes and improvements in it, nothing crucial.

Otherwise, if any of you have a wish for a feature not listed yet on the ToDo page, just let me know.

seilogramp said:

I'd like to encourage anyone suspecting spam, abuse, or any other violation of the terms of use, to please "report as abusive."  Click "More, Report as abusive" under the post.

This probably isn't under Garmin's control, but the Report as Abusive button really needs confirmation.

The problem is that the More menu (like other things in the forum) is a little unreliable and sometimes fails to load (or loads very slowly). What can happen is that the user clicks More, but the More menu doesn't open after a few seconds, so the user tries to click More again. Unfortunately, in the meantime, the More menu might finally load, and the user can accidentally click "Report as Abusive" instead.

Another issue is that the More menu isn't optimized for touchscreen use on mobile, so it's possible for a user to try to tap More > Edit, but fat finger it and accidentally tap More > Report as Abusive. (The forum experience on mobile is bad in general.)

I realize neither of these are common problems, but I've definitely accidentally reported one of my own comments as abusive in the past.

Even disregarding the usability issues described above, I think that, in general, any action as drastic as reporting a post should have confirmation.

FlowState said:

the user can accidentally click "Report as Abusive" instead.

This has been noted in the moderators forum. In the moderator's queue I check if the poster and the reporter are the same person, then I "ignore" the report and the post remains in public view. The assumption is that the user reported themselves in error. If the abuse report is in one of the developer forums, that is managed by specific Garmin Staff, so external mods, not employed by Garmin, cannot do anything about that other than bring it to their attention in the moderators forum.

FlowState said:

any action as drastic as reporting a post should have confirmation.

You should at least see in the more menu that "report" changed to "reported." But there is no "are you sure" option just to confirm this wasn't a mistake. Also, no option for the user to reverse that action.

But yes, I agree there is a lot of room for improvements. Most of which have been discussed amongst the admins and mods since the last major update over 4 years ago. We can only hope there are some changes for the better in the next major forum update.

For some history, in April 2019 Garmin forums were completely reworked. The platform was changed from vBulletin to Telligent. Then in January 2020, new version of forum software from Telligent.

FlowState said:

This probably isn't under Garmin's control, but the Report as Abusive button really needs confirmation.

Indeed not really under Garmin's control, but I managed to inject the necessary code into the forum scripts, and modified the behavior with GFH. There is now a new option in the GFH settings (enabled by default), which allows you to turn on the confirmation dialog for the Abuse reports.

So now, when you click the "More" under any post, the button "Report as abusive" will appear in red instead of blue (in order to help you see instantly whether the button has the dialog attached or not). If it is red and you click it, a dialogue pops up, and the post will be reported only if you click the OK button. See below how it now looks:

There is also another new feature, which should make the usage of the shortcuts for Reply Templates and Bookmarks more user friendly. When you hit the trigger hotkey combination twice instead of just once, or when you click the blue hotkey indicator, a table with the list of available shortcuts pops up. If you type a key, the list is automatically filtered on-the-fly, so there will be accordingly less available options with each character. And instead of typing the entire 3 keys sequence, you can simply just click the desired shortcut at any moment.

The new version is not available in the webstore yet. It waits for the approval from Google's staff. Not sure whether they'll approve it during the weekend. I'll let you know when it becomes available.

seilogramp said:

For some history, in April 2019 Garmin forums were completely reworked. The platform was changed from vBulletin to Telligent. Then in January 2020, new version of forum software from Telligent.

(I realize this is directed at everyone, not just me)

Yeah, I was around then, and to be fair, the vb forums were a lot worse than these ones.

At the time, when it became clear that Garmin would switch platforms, I begged Garmin to switch to nodebb or discourse. Both of them are much more modern (2010s tech vs 2000s tech), and have a few advantages:

- much better usability on mobile (I rarely browse garmin forums on mobile due to poor usability and almost never bother to post on mobile.)

- *fast* infinite scroll combined with the benefits of pagination (there's a custom scrollbar widget which allows you to instantly jump to any point in the discussion - no matter how long it is - either by scrubbing/dragging, or by entering a post #.)

- hybrid threaded/linear mode where posts are linear, but you can still see the ancestor posts for any given reply (they're collapsed by default)

- proper support for emojis

If anyone wants to see what this would've looked like in action:

Suunto forums: https://forum.suunto.com/

Forum thread with 1.2k posts: https://forum.suunto.com/topic/8823/suunto-vertical-is-here/421

I can't imagine browsing a 1000+ post thread in these creaky forums, but it's possible on a more modern platform.

But we're stuck with this platform which:

- is extremely slow and finicky

- still has issues where post text overlaps the related links

- has a stupid "+ New" button on every thread which creates a new thread as opposed to a new reply (can't tell you how many times people in the CIQ showcase forum have pressed the button and accidentally created a new thread when they actually wanted to reply to an existing thread.) Garmin clearly agrees this is an issue bc they tried to fix it when it was first reported, but unfortunately only one edge case was fixed (when you click on the link to go to the first post in the thread - unfortunately, it's easy to click on links the forum list to go to the *latest* post in the thread)

- rejects posts with quoted emojis

- only supports its own limited subset of emojis as opposed to all the standard emojis

- rejects posts with certain types of programming code (which is an issue for the CIQ forums). This was a huge issue with the old forums, but it's funny how it still exists (although it's very rare now)

- kicks you out of "edit post" mode when you create a reply to a post (without submitting it) and someone edits the post you were replying to. At best this is an annoyance, and at worst you could lose what you were editing

Also, lots of content was lost in the changeover:
- attached files

- images

- Link URLs (only the link text was preserved.) Combined with the fact that the old forum abbreviated link text for bare urls (e.g. "www.google.com/..."), this means that many links were lost

Chrome's staff took their time for approving the new version, but now it is finally available in the webstore, so you can update. This version brings the confirmation dialog before reporting posts as abusive, and the selectable list of available shortcuts upon double-press of the Hotkey trigger combination (Ctrl+Shift+K by default).

FlowState said:

- still has issues where post text overlaps the related links

BTW, this is one of the annoyances that the extension fixes.

FlowState said:

- kicks you out of "edit post" mode when you create a reply to a post (without submitting it) and someone edits the post you were replying to. At best this is an annoyance, and at worst you could lose what you were editing

Yes, happens to me all the time, but fortunately it is now at least possible to retrieve the lost text relatively easily - it is enough to reload the page, and click the reply button again - the lost text will be there. I have it on my internal list of tasks, and will try to fix it in a future version of the extension too.