Website Maintenance 30 July 2020

[euler]

Essential back-end maintenance has been completed to the website today. The changes mainly related to updating security procedures and optimising general performance. Although there should not be many noticeable changes, there have been significant changes to most of the scripts. Whereas a lot of hard work and testing has been done on a local machine before uploading there is no accounting for these changes on a busy live website. If you notice any bugs, then could you this is the place to report them.

[hidesugar]

when I see friends progress, the color of characters of numbers of problem solved by the friend is the same whether I solve the problem or not.
Is this a bug?

pic.png

[fakesson]

The style sheets appear to have changed. Besides what hidesugar mentioned, I saw a lot of other differences. Here are two additional examples:
The progress bar under Problem Difficulty Ratings is no longer changes color from red to green.

Screen Shot 2020-07-30 at 9.36.17 AM.png

Bold font is used in many places where it wasn't before.

Screen Shot 2020-07-30 at 9.40.49 AM.png

I did a hard refresh in Chrome to reload the style sheets, but it didn't make any difference.

[euler]

Those changes regarding progress bars and font differences are intentional. Although it wasn't the main focus of the work I was doing I have streamlined style in a number of places. There is no longer any inline style and dynamic information, like the progress bars which depend on immediate style values as the page renders, needs now to be handled differently.

I'm still a little unclear about the colouring on the progress page. What were you expecting to see and what has changed?

[hidesugar]

fig.png

[fakesson]

Makes sense, thanks for the explanation.

[euler]

Thank you for that. Very clear.

You might need to refresh your browser's cache (Ctrl + F5), but can you check to see if I've fixed it? I've even emboldened the green font when you have solved it to help it stand out.

[hidesugar]

Now It is fixed. Embolding is nice. Thank you.

[euler]

You're welcome, and thanks for the helpful feedback.

[philiplu]

I'm fine with losing the gradients on progress bars, but is there any way to get the bar on the difficulty of a problem in the Archives pages to be grey instead of orange, as before? That was useful for quickly noting the hard problems that made it out of the Recent group into the archives without hitting 100 solvers. If not, not a big deal - there are usually at most one or two such problems at any time.

[euler]

Good spot. I'd missed that. It should be showing differently now. You may need to do a hard refresh (Ctrl + F5) to update your browser's cache of the style sheet.

[forarslys]

Fraction bars in problem 330 (and possibly some other problems) have disappeared, and also numbers in denominator are left-aligned.

The font between <var> </var> tags now seems to be identical with normal statements just with italic style, which I feel is a bit visually unfriendly.

---
On a related note (but a bit off-topic since these seem to have been around for a while) :
the fraction bars in problem 245 are black regardless of the theme setting (Default / Dark), which is hard to see with Dark theme.

In problem 436, The 'x' letter in the "For example" is also <var></var> tagged.

[euler]

Thanks for pointing out those issues. I have no idea how you spotted the "x" wrapped in a <var> tag! I've removed it.

Including #330 I've identified five problems with the same issue: 221, 308, 330, 378, and 449. Problems like that will require a re-write with the mathematics being replaced with MathJax. As for #245, that was created before we had a dark theme; it looks like 110, 241, 287, 363, and 450 have similar issues.

I've added all of them to my to-do list. I'll get around to updating each of them when I get time.

If you spot any other types of problems, then please let me know. I can do a search on the DB to find clusters of problems with the same problems and add them to my list.

[euler]

All edits are done! Time for bed, me thinks.

[philiplu]

Did something change with the persistent logins? I usually have two going, one on my desktop PC, one on the iPad. But I've been asked to log into both of those multiple times today with the CAPTCHA check. I've been sure to check Remember Me each time.

My account page shows 3 active logins, all of which have expiration times on 29 Aug 2020. One is at 11:27, about 5 hours earlier than the current time, one has a day time about an hour earlier than now, and the 3rd time is a few minutes ago.
Makes me suspect the logins on my two devices are somehow not recognized later - that 11:27 time is probably my earlier PC or iPad login which somehow got disassociated from the proper device, so I had to relogin.

[forarslys]

It's before the update that I noticed the 'x', when <var> looked more different. I sensed slight inharmoniousness thanks to that.

Thank you for such a quick fix, but the problem 330 seems to have gone wrong.
a(2) used to be

Code: Select all

\dfrac{7}{2}e - 6

a(n) be

Code: Select all

\dfrac{A(n)e+B(n)}{n!}

and a(10) be

Code: Select all

\dfrac{328161643e-652694486}{10!}

If I may point out other things,
the space between icons at the top right corner of the problem statement is not equidistant; the space between a pin and paper [Show HTML problem content] is narrower.
Also, hovering the pin icon no longer informs one how many pins are remaining. And, if one opens a problem page after having used up all the available pins, the pin icon disappears. This change might confuse new users on as to why it does not show up.
I don't mean to be picky, but I'm sorry if I sounded.

Anyway, thank you very much for all the hard work done for maintaining the great web-site.

[euler]

You certainly don't sound picky. I very much appreciate attention to detail. The number 1 priority would be problem statements, so thank you very much for taking the time to check and let me know about those errors. They've now been fixed.

There will be some changes that were deliberate and others are oversights. Apart from the unnatural gap between the icons, missing the hover information for the pins was accidental. I've also modified the code so it should all be good now.

[forarslys]

Thank you for the fixes again!
You are welcome, but I can say I was just lucky, for those problems were coincidentally ones I was trying to solve recently.

And, here is, I am afraid, another problem with a layout issue; problem 720
The example permutations for N=4 are all listed in one line, unnaturally followed by \vdots. Originally each permutation occupied one line.
I guess this would be the last find from me for now.

[fakesson]

I observe the same behavior for persistent logins as philiplu using Chrome on a Mac.

[euler]

Thanks for reporting the issue with the persistent sign in; it's affecting me too. I am looking into it, but at the moment I am unable to consistently identify why it is happening.