User Experience
Newly-registered users now see a message noting that they might not be able to post until an admin approves their account. This fixes a potential source of confusion and annoyance for new members.
I restored all the old post attachments (all six of them) from my backup, so you should be able to download them from posts. We never used file attachments much, so uploading new attachments is currently disabled. If anyone really wants uploading back, let me know.
Bug Zapping
For a while, JaxBoards had a bug with the forum icons on the index page. The first forum in a category always had an "Unread Topics in This Forum" icon, even if you'd read all the topics in that forum. Sean helped me fix this code, which should be working a lot better now. Peeking under the hood, we're now using JSON instead of BLOBs for storing the forum/topic read flags in sessions, which should be more efficient and a lot easier to debug.
The Quote Post button was showing up even for guests, which obviously doesn't make sense. This problem also caused confusion for searchbots - more on that later. Fortunately, this should be fixed now.
I removed the Full Edit button from the post-editing forms. I don't think most people use this button very often - if I'm mistaken, please let me know. If we bring this back, we'll need to make some code fixes, since there was a nasty bug with the Full Edit button that could blank your post.
I fixed a few more trailing spaces in various places, like post links, search results, and IM windows.
Skins
I squashed a few bugs with skins:
- Images for the Contact Details infobox logos were partially chopped off
- The Edit and Quote button icons in topics were also slightly scrunched
- The BT Classic logo was misaligned in Firefox
- The New Winter Blue snowman was missing
- The JaxBoards icon (used for PMs and IMs) was nearly invisible in the Vapor skin
Also, the Hello Kitty (a.k.a. Pink) skin is hidden for now. This skin had a lot of custom code and now-broken images, making it very difficult to maintain in 2025. Plus, no one was using it. If anyone likes it and wants to revitalize it, let me know.
Accessibility
I made a bunch of fixes designed to make JaxBoards more accessible. While Sean's original code did a good job of building an accessible forum, there were still a few things that needed updating.
I used an accessibility tool to scan every page on the forums and every skin to check for potential issues. This helped me spot a couple of places where inputs weren't properly matched up with their respective labels. I also added title and aria-label tags in a bunch of places.
I fixed a few missing alt tags for images.
While these accessibility tests are primarily designed to help people living with disabilities - especially those who use assistive technology like screen readers - they can be helpful to anyone. For example, I think the new tooltips for certain controls will make it clearer what they do, even if you never use assistive technology.
SEO
Google is now crawling the forums, and I've set up Google Webmaster Tools to check how searchbots are performing and to see what searches are bringing visitors to the forums. We've never had a tremendous amount of traffic from Google searches, but this is still a good way to spot potential bugs and issues.
I added a few more user agents for bots that can show up in the Users Online list. This helps me monitor which bots crawl the forums most often - and, more importantly, helps me evaluate whether a bot is crawling pages excessively and needs to be blocked.
I removed the "nofollow" rule from URL tags. Using nofollow is designed to reduce the incentive for spambots, but since I have admin approval of new accounts enabled, I think it's safe to eliminate this.
Other stuff
I ran the W3C Validator to make sure there are no significant issues with our HTML output. The index page should be free of W3S errors and warnings, which is nice. Any remaining issues are probably inconsistencies between the XHTML (which we used to use) doctype and HTML5 (which we're using now). You don't need to care about this... unless you find such things interesting, of course.
I made a few small updates to the BT "mainsite" - I added a favicon and included a link to the forums.
I plan to keep making updates and improvements to the JaxBoards software in the months to come, though future updates are likely to be a lot more incremental. As usual, if anything is broken or you have an idea for a cool new feature, be sure to speak up.
3/19 Edit - Fixed a typo in the W3C Validator name
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Edited by: Bibby, Mar 20th, 2025 @ 2:05 am
