Yo,

So, I've been working on an enormous recode of most of Fimfiction for the last few months, and part of that has been rewriting all of our Javascript to be...well....not complete and utter garbage. This means userscripts will likely horribly break when I put it out. This isn't going to be super soon because I have a lot of work and testing remaining but I wanted to give you guys a heads up. The most important change is that there will be no more jQuery. Yay! So if you're using jQuery, you'll either need to include it yourself or, VERY PREFERABLY rewrite your scripts to not be reliant on jQuery.

If you have any specific questions about bits of code you want to know if they'll break, just ask here and I'll try to give you the most informed information I can.

5339286
Pardon me, but I would like to know what you meant by "userscripts"; what exactly will malfunction when the site is updated?

5339302 You're in this group and asking what a userscript is? You probably don't need to worry....

5339319
*Checks group name and front page*
Oh, yeah!

5339302 A user script is programming that modifies the appearance or behavior of an application. A user script can customize the way you see the content on a site.

As an example, some users here use a user script that hides the feature box on the front page (because they don't believe it promotes quality).

5339286

5339319 Literally the only one I'm concerned about is a Stylish script that recolors the user toolbar. I'm sure I can paste it here if need be. (Sorry, olive green just isn't my color)

5339286
*welps*

JQuery is so fab tho.

Thanks for the heads up! Now I can go find a "brace yourselves" to warn my followers.

5339439
Stylish has nothing to do with javascript. As long as knighty doesn't pull anything and mess with other stuff, you should be fine.

5339530
Unless you're targetting really old browsers, there's very little you need something like jQuery for. I have written my own little library to fill the gaps but almost everything translates to native js in less code frequently. If you want to, you'll be welcome to code against my lib (fQuery, hurr durr) when it's done but I'd advise you just write little helpers of your own when you need them.

5339530 5339636
I'm gonna have to disable Fimfic ADvanced for this?

5339286
Don't mean to bug, but is there a way to query a fimfic API of sorts or will I hae to scrape HTML? I'm looking to make an IoT display for the big stats of the site.

5339286 RIP Sollace scripts.

This sort of thing is one of several reasons why I use userstyles rather than userscripts whenever possible and, so far, I've managed to write only styles myself.

Will you be changing any CSS classes, element IDs, or DOM layouts or are my creations future-proof?

It'll be a day most sad. The amount of time out into these scripts to be undone is a little sour on my tongue, but that's the way with progression. No idea if I want to bother fixing the scripts, but that also depends on how much the update will bring in terms of features.

5340191
Yes, there are a lot of changes in various places, but nothing that shouldn't be fairly simple to rewrite.

5340208
User scripts will never /ever/ be something that'll dictate site development, nor would they any other website. I'm giving a heads up so people can prepare and ask about specific things so they can rewrite them mostly beforehand, or at least be primed to do so.

...um, why is there no more jQuery? It generally seems like a sane thing to have. (Stack Exchange uses it, if that's worth anything.)

Ninja edit: Also, if classes and IDs are changing, could there be a standardisation on hyphens-as-separators XOR underscores_as_separators?

5340991

In that case, would you mind poking me when you're done? A lot of the styles I wrote, I don't use myself... so testing the fixes is a bit of a time commitment I'd rather not have to do repeatedly.

5339704
Most likely every script will have to be updated in some way, so yes.

5340991 Wasn't talking in terms of size development, it just sucks that many scripts will break. But it's still nice to have you come here and at least discuss this openly, rather than pushing out a giant update with no words.

5341121
Because it adds a lot of size and extra parsing time at the start, and all of its functionality is inordinately slower (like literally 10x sometimes) that native counterparts. There's nothing "wrong" with jQuery, it does a great job of standardising browser behaviour back to incredibly old versions, but I'm not interested in supporting those browers so it makes sense to drop jQuery and gain colossal performance boosts.

Here's an example. The page loads massively more quickly now, especially on older devices. It's exciting to me :V

5341585 Why are you using Imgur? They banned you from there, remember?

Personally, I use:
https://sli.mg/
It's super easy.

Let me help you with the pics from your post:

5341604
I keep forgetting :P It works for me locally of course, plus with this update whenever it hits, the problem is fixed ;)

5341639 Did you find a way to circumvent the ban?

5341785
Yes. We'll be making use of a proxy server to relay all images. Also fixes ssl mixed content warnings.

5341801 Crafty.

Fimfiction can't be banned for long!

5341639 Any general idea for when this update will come out?

5341585

As someone who has a terrible connection, I really appreciate your work to improve performance.

5341896
Rendering performance, not network performance. The scripts file is a lot smaller which will help initial site visits but mainly I'm talking about rendering time, which is somewhere around 2-4x as fast, depending on the page.

5341896

The change I just deployed to use https: for most of the resources we load should help users on slower connections as long as your browser supports http/2, however. Mostly helps if your connection is relatively fast compared to the latency on it, but it should still help in other situations by placing less load on your network when there are a lot of images on the same page to load. Cellular and satellite connections will see the most improvement.

Please also note that slow rendering often looks like slow networking, especially on modern broadband internet connections. The browser will still show "loading" and doesn't really distinguish when the loading is blocked by local operations as opposed to network ones.

5339286

Just out of curiosity: will this recode help with Fimfiction on mobile? It tends to be... Let's just say "quirky" at times.

User page is still being opened in full version, side panels with related stories can be clicked accidentally and hard to close, tags in search also don't work the best... Maybe it's just my phone, but there are quite a few things like that.

The perfect solution would be, of course, a dedicated mobile app, but I realize how much of work it takes to create one. Though I recall hearing about some plans of making one... Any update on that topic, or is it completely on the backburner?

5391312 I have improved the mobile site a ton, yeah. User page is a problem because there is no sane way to scale it down to mobile since it's customisable 2 columns. Most likely at some point I will get around to just making a completely different user page for mobile

5392206
Okay, thanks for the response. I'm browsing Fimfiction pretty much exclusively on mobile (in bed, riding a bus, during a boring lecture, etc.) so the site being mobile-friendly is a rather big thing to me.

As far as user page goes, can't everything be just put into a single, scalable column? Or maybe letting the page owner create a separate layout for mobile? Or just straight cutting out most of the content, and just leaving stories written by the owner, blog posts, page comments and owner's library? Just throwing some ideas.

5339286 14 weeks has already passed, and has the update finished yet?

5557305 Most likely not. It took them 9 months to fix the group permanent glitch.

5557305 I'm guessing they had to sacrifice a newborn baby to the Devil.

5557324 Okay?

5557327 That was a joke.

5557352 lol

The website for me was down this morning. Maybe the update was rolled out during the fewinutes that it was down???