Starship Asterisk*

Chris Peterson wrote:

WJShaheen wrote:I would dearly love to upload attachments (saving BYSTANDER the hassle of having to convert my links). But, there is no Upload Attachment option, as described in the instructions for posting images. In fact, the forum permissions explicitly state, "You cannot post attachments in this forum"

Is it temporarily disabled?

I think you have to have a minimum number of posts (ten perhaps?) before the system allows uploads. A necessary precaution against spammers. You can either reach that number, or a moderator can flip the bit once it's apparent your intent is fine.

Yes, thanks, Chris. Bystander took care of it (thank you). Good to see you here.

Bill

Is there any fix planned for the RSS feed? It still shows as invalid by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

This feed does not validate.
'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0x96 in position 710: invalid start byte (maybe a high-bit character?)

There are an additional 6 compatibility issues with the feed as well

http://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi? ... 2Fapod.rss

I was passed some email addresses of people who might be able to make updates for us, but eventually ended bounced to people who never responded.

One thing I DID do was write my own scraper that transformed it into something a little better. I doubt it fixed your specific issues, but it at least gave me high res images in my feed reader. Feel free to give it a try: http://gentle-dawn-3839.herokuapp.com/apod.rss

I will warn you that sometimes it's really weird, and doesn't format things exactly right. It's really hard to parse the APOD site on the fly consistently. Also, heroku is dropping their free plans soon, so that feed may go down - I hope to bring it back up on a better host though. Complain here if you miss it! I have it on GitHub and had bigger plans of just scraping the entire site and formatting it for 2015. Someday.

The Asterisk will be down tomorrow night starting at 5 PM for a long overdue major software version upgrade. I do not know when it will be back up but if all goes smoothly it should take less than an hour.

Note, edited post to correct date.

Minor, but an irritation all the same: clicking on the link in my email for a watched discussion no longer takes me to the post that generated the email (even though it it clearly part of the URL), but only to the top of the relevant page. It's like the internal anchor to topic and post isn't present in the HTML.

Chris, the email you received may have been from before the update. Please do let me know if the problem persists when you receive a new email. If you already got an updated one then it is indeed a problem and probably something I can fix easily.

There are some non-minor issues I'm also working with MTU tech support to get through. They involve the BBCode and a lot of posts are currently not parsing correctly. Hopefully the fix is relatively easy, however. It will be another half hour or so at least before we can see.

Several pictures I have posted in many of my posts have disappeared. Is there a reason for that?

And Geck, I apologize for sending you a PM, when I should have posted my question here.

Ann

Yes, it's most likely caused by the BBCode issue.

geckzilla wrote:Chris, the email you received may have been from before the update. Please do let me know if the problem persists when you receive a new email. If you already got an updated one then it is indeed a problem and probably something I can fix easily.

There are some non-minor issues I'm also working with MTU tech support to get through. They involve the BBCode and a lot of posts are currently not parsing correctly. Hopefully the fix is relatively easy, however. It will be another half hour or so at least before we can see.

No, it's still not working. I can see some of the issues. Old links contain forum, topic, and post parameters. Those do not work with the new system, they just go to the forum and topic. New links don't contain the post parameter at all (the "e" parameter is always "1", and there is no "p" parameter). So these also just go to the forum and topic, not the post. And looking at the posts themselves under any topic, they all seem to have the same post value (but only in some topics, not all).

Testing out Chris's problem.

Thanks, Geck, my pictures are back.

But in the recent APOD M81 thread, I posted two Hubble pictures, one of M51 and one of M81. In my original post these two pictures were side by side, at least on my own computer, which made for a striking contrast. Now the M81 picture is below the M51 one, and I can't edit my post any longer.

I realize that this is a tiny problem, but I would be grateful if it could be fixed. But if it can't, it can't.

Ann

Yeah, the new board CSS is nice, but requires some little tweaks. How about now?

Thanks! You fixed it!

Ann

The APOD rss feed is showing the yesterday image not the today image. How can it be fixed?
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod.rss

Just updated the board software. As usual, post here if you notice anything that seems off.

Thanks, geck!

"El certificado de seguridad del sitio no es de confianza"
Starship Asterisk is unsafe according my smartphone

Rothkko wrote:"El certificado de seguridad del sitio no es de confianza"
Starship Asterisk is unsafe according my smartphone

This error does not mean a site is unsafe. It means that your browser has a problem with its security certificate. It's only an issue when you connect securely (using https://). You can review the security certificate for asterisk.apod.com and you'll see it is issued by mtu.edu. This is essentially a self-signed certificate, which your browser doesn't recognize, but it's clearly from a reputable source- the university of an APOD editor.

So there's no risk. Add an exception and forget about it.

gracias, Chris. siempre ignoré la advertencia, pero me resultó llamativo (es el único sitio con este mensaje). sistema operativo Android 4.2.2

google translate
thanks, Chris. I always ignored the warning, but I find it striking (it is the only site with this message). Android 4.2.2 operating system

Rothkko wrote:gracias, Chris. siempre ignoré la advertencia, pero me resultó llamativo (es el único sitio con este mensaje). sistema operativo Android 4.2.2

google translate
thanks, Chris. I always ignored the warning, but I find it striking (it is the only site with this message). Android 4.2.2 operating system

Yes, the warning is meant to be scary. There are many times when you would not want to use a website with a warning like this, such as for your bank or some other private personal information being stored. Hopefully you aren't doing any banking at Asterisk.

geckzilla wrote: Hopefully you aren't doing any banking at Asterisk.

me ha pillado!!
I've caught! ?

It'd be nice if the RSS feed either had a unique <guid> per entry, or if the link to the latest page was a permanent link, such as http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap160918.html as opposed to always pointing to http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html.

The reason is my RSS reader checks both for a GUID, and if none is found, it uses the URL. Since the astropix.html URL is always there, it is considered to have already been read, and thus my APOD ends up being delayed by a day. Personally, I recommend both adding the GUID, and changing the URL.

I have noticed that in the web page footer, the "Index" link is missing on some pages. As far as I can tell, it's only missing on the days Thursday, Friday, and Saturday!

I have my Firefox browser set to open links in a new tab, always. Yet all links in Asterisk posts open in the Asterisk tab. There must be a setting in the phpBB software that is overriding my Firefox preferences. Any idea if there's something I can do to switch that off? I don't see any possibility in my Asterisk prefs.

Rob