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Daily Thread 5-29-2021: Weekend Discussion

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I have been working 12-hour days from 8 to 8 all week, so all week long I have been hopping on here about 10 p.m. or so and glance at the day’s TexansChat conversations. I was unaware of the new HyvorTalk Version 2 roll-out today, but I became aware of it late Friday night.

UPDATE: I have used a strikethrough on some spots in this article, and made notes to accompany the reason why some text is marked out now.

Here’s what I know:

First of all, you might need to clear your browser’s memory cache. I’m not going to explain how to do that. Google it. You need to clear your internet browser’s cache, to scrub it’s memory of stuff so that the new changes that evolved on Friday will work better for you. You don’t have to clear your browser’s memory when it comes to auto-fill such as remembering your various login user names and passwords, by the way. You can omit that from your cache clearing task.

Secondly, I went into the admin console and toggled “Send emails to users” to the “off” position because I think it got toggled back to “on” during this roll-out of Part 1 on Friday. If you are still getting emails to your email account then you need to go into your area of HyvorTalk and toggle it to “off.”

This new HyvorTalk roll-out that happened is called Version 2, and the Friday May 28 roll-out was Part 1 of 3 of Version 2–Hang with me, OK?, because it’s not as bad as you’e thinking right now…I promise. They are planning on rolling out Part 2 of 3 next week, but that’s their plan and they might not follow through by getting it done next week…or they might end up doing it next week sometime. Their plan is to roll out Part 2 sometime next week.

I have seen “release notes” on what will happen with Part 2 and then Part 3. I can tell you that the new stuff coming in both Part 2 and Part 3 is not bad or weird. In fact, it’s all stuff for people like me who are admins–It’s stuff behind the curtain in my admin console that has nothing to do with your experience as a user when making and viewing comments in our threads. Having said that, they might make tweaks here and there to address some of the things people are experiencing. So keep it in mind: We might see adjustments here and there. But in terms of stuff that is planned for Part 2 and Part 3, unless they are intentionally leaving some info “secret” from us admins, none of it changes your experience. Well, sort of. I suppose the plan they have is to allow admins to toggle “off” the feature showing who upvoted a comment…so technically speaking, yes, there is one thing that affects your experience. Update: This is now fixed!

I chatted with Hyvor tech support late Friday night–they are abroad and so at midnight for us in America it’s like daytime over there to them, and when it’s afternoon here in America it’s basically midnight or early morning hours to them–and so I gave them the link to our Friday daily thread so they can see the day’s long-running commentary by y’all about the new changes. Keep in mind that as the day went on, a lot of your issues began clearing up. I know that there are some cosmetic changes that you may or may not “like,” and I know some of you feel it’s worse on mobile than it was before Friday’s roll-out of Version 2 happened. Anytime changes happen, some people will like it and some won’t. Personally, I got onto my mobile phone (I use a OnePlus 9 Pro 5g and it uses Oxygen OS) and saw that it was easier to construct a new comment because of the layout of the editing buttons (the Bold, Italics, Underline, Quote, and the GIF, Emoji, Image, and Preview icons).

  • I mentioned to the tech support person that we are concerned about the way the “Z” key functions, so us TexansChat folks need to be testing that out this weekend. I hopped on too late in the night so of course I can’t use the Z key since all the comments were already ALL NEW to me since late Friday night was my first chance to hop into Friday’s comments section. Update: They are aware and will be working on the Z key issues next week. It works, meaning it jumps you from new comment to new comment, but there are some other bugs going on and they will sort it out.
  • I mentioned to the tech support person that we very much want to see the feature of how you can see who upvoted to be a choice and not forced on us. In other words: I’d like, as our admin for our site, to be able to toggle that to “off” so that people can upvote anonymously. Why? Please read the huge-ass paragraph below for my stance on this. Part 2 of the roll-out seems to indicate that they will indeed make this an optional feature that I can toggle on/off for us. Update: Like i said up top, it’s fixed!

As many of you know, right now if you hover your mouse over an upvoted comment (We call it a Rec, not an upvote, by the way, but I will call it an upvote here for the sake of it all) it shows you who exactly has upvoted/Rec’d a comment. Supposedly, the Part 2 roll-out will give admins like me the ability to toggle that feature to “off” so that nobody can get into tizzies about who is Rec’ing who on here. Anonymity is good, IMO. I mean, most times we can sort of know who is Rec’ing a comment because folks who tend to agree with one another also tend to Rec one another’s comments on here. Where this gets wonky for us as a “family,” however, is when an upvote is happening on a hot button topic that might be a bit sensitive or when upvoting is boosting one person’s opinion vs. someone else’s opposing opinion when two people get into a back and forth over a topic. I think people like to be able to Rec certain things without necessarily giving away their identity. Some of you might say people ought to “wear it” regarding if you Rec something then put your name on it. To me, anonymity is ultimately a good thing. I don’t want to see feelings get hurt over exactly who it is that’s upvoting certain things; it’s just a petty argument waiting to happen.

As a reminder again: Part 2 and Part 3 of their Version 2 roll-out will be, so far as I know, nothing but stuff that we admins use behind the scenes. OK, so there were 11 things released Friday May 28th that was in “Part 1” of their 3-part roll-out of Version 2. Of the 11 things, only 2 had anything to do with us in terms of using the commenting system in our daily lives as commenters here on TexansChat:

Thing #1 that you are experiencing right now and knew/know about:

  • One of those things is of course how you can see who upvoted/Rec’d something…but again, Part 2 is supposedly planned to include me being able to toggle that to “off.”

Thing #2 you don’t know about, but you need to play around with (And, there are two ways to do it):

  • Spoiler text is now available. So here’s an example of how to do it, pretend what I’m typing below is me typing into the text editor box a new comment/reply:

In the end of the movie, here’s what happened:

>!The bad guy doesn’t die and instead he kills the good guy. So it’s a bit of a bummer, tbh. I guess not every movie has to end where the good guy wins and the bad guy loses. But in this movie I just thought that it was a bit weird.

I’m not sure if they do a sequel, but I think it has potential if they want to do a 2nd movie.

— end of example —

So by typing a >! right in front of the first letter of the word “The”, NO SPACE!, then when you preview the comment before publishing it, you can see that the whole block of text is a clickable “button” that when you click it…it reveals the spoilers text. The trick, though, is that you can’t have blank lines of text. In my example above, I typed a continuous string of words. As soon as I hit the “Enter” key to make a new line, it’s over. Done.

You can also play around by doing this:

!!The bad doesn’t die and instead he kills the good guy. So it’s a bit of a bummer, tbh. I guess not every movie has to end where the good guy wins and the bad guy loses. But in this movie I just thought that it was a bit weird.!!

To me, this way of doing spoiler text looks a lot better than the first way I mentioned up above, and it sort of mimics what we were accustomed to over at BRB. The only trick is, again, that it doesn’t like making new paragraphs. If you have a continuous string of words and/or sentences then it works well. Soon as you make a blank line of text, things get wonky. BUT…you can now use spoiler text!

The glitches lots of you were experiencing Friday, several other HyvorTalk clients out there had been reporting similar problems to the tech support team. We need to keep a watch on it, but I think it was just buggy for awhile and most of it has cleared up by now. Please be patient. I’m most concerned about the Z key and also the upvote thing. But I think those two things are going to be alright.

I know that a lot of y’all were likely having some BRB Coral PTSD going on Friday, and I am sorry I wasn’t here. This past week has been a nightmare for me, and I felt bad when I hopped on here late Friday night. I’m not going AWOL on you guys and gals. I promise. And, I’m making sure I cover as many bases as I can with y’all and also with the HyvorTalk team, as well.

This weekend I plan on creating an article that’s just for this kind of stuff, so it doesn’t clutter up the other conversations in daily threads. That way we have a space we can go to, to talk about Version 2 and whatnot. Give me some time and I’ll have it up for us sometime this weekend….hopefully by around mid-afternoon on Saturday.