Site Updates

[Osian]

This thread will be used to note any changes/additions introduced in any future site updates.

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The mine database, edit request system, photo gallery, document library, and Pit & Putt will be temporarily unavailable from 18:00 tomorrow, Friday 28th. This is expected to last no longer than half an hour, after which all systems will become available again.

This is to perform various system upgrades, including performance optimisations and ui improvements.

Cheers,
Osian

 

[Osian]

Everything's back online. I'll soon have a follow up post outlining the new improvements.

As always, do let us know if you spot any issues.

 

[Osian]

The majority of this update was focused on internal system/infrastructure upgrades, to:

• improve the robustness of our ever-growing codebase, so that new features are easier to develop and bugs are quicker to fix
• lay some crucial foundations for some exciting upcoming features.

However, we did also use this opportunity to put the new technology to good use in existing portions of the site.

Here's a list of some of the changes introduced in the update:

General:

• Optimised browser scripts to both load and run faster

Photo viewing:

• In almost all places where images can be found on the database portion of the site, e.g MineDetails, Gallery, Pit & Putt, etc., images will reserve the necessary space before they've loaded in. This avoids unexpected size/layout shifts during/after loading, and is especially noticeable on slower networks, and looks particularly satisfying on the Gallery page.
• The full-screen lightbox that appears whenever you click on images in the database now supports smooth panning and zooming. This pan/zoom section can be fullscreened independently of the lightbox to let you make the most of your screen if you want to.
• The lightbox now interacts more consistently with the back/forward buttons in the browser. This is especially useful on mobile devices, where you can now use your device's native back function to exit the lightbox to just the page itself.
• The lightbox no longer shows the image at the wrong size for a splitsecond when going backwards/forwards
• The Featured Images carousel found on some mine entries now has smooth scrolling animation when you click the buttons on either side
• The left-right buttons on the carousel are now disabled if there aren't enough images to allow scrolling
• The searchbar in the top-left of the images in the Gallery page now automatically performs the searches as you type

Flickr Submission Page:

• This page has had a minor redesign to improve ease-of-use, especially when it comes to assigning your photos to mines in our database. The general usage of the page is similar to how it originally was, so shouldn't be particularly unfamiliar to those of you who have already used it in the past. Overall, there's too much to list, but I'll list some highlights
• The photo preview when you're assigning titles, descriptions, mines etc to images now supports panning/zooming, just like in the lightbox on other pages
• Some additional warning messages have been added to prevent unintentional loss of progress

Mine Addition/Edit Request Pages:

• Both of these pages have also been revised for ease-of-use, with a more useful selection of fields for you to input mine information
• After making an addition/edit request, you will once again be updated via forum notifications when an Area Moderator resolves the request, or otherwise contacts you for further information.

Pit & Putt:

• The image shown uses the same pan/zoom technology as the lightbox, so that it's now way easier for you to spot small clues in the distance
• The individual sections can be resized by clicking and dragging on the dividers
• The mobile layout of the page is now easier to navigate, by:
  • Adding extra padding on the sides of the page to let you scroll the page easier instead of accidentally panning the map, image, or the mine entry that appears after you win
  • Making the sections taller overall
• The various ways to recentre the map (e.g the home button, or clicking the rows in the guess-tracking table) will now do so much smooth than before

Miscellaneous:

• The mine dropdown selector used in a couple of places has had an overhaul
  • It now supports infinite scrolling, instead of just showing the first hundred results (without affecting performance!)
  • It is now much easier to deselect a mine
  • It now loads the aliases of mines in the list (e.g Parc Mine is also known as Gwydyr Parc Consols)
  • It now shows a thumbnail for the mine on the right
• A pop-up that can appear in the top-right of the page in certain circumstances (e.g winning a game of Pit & Putt) now has a progress indicator counting down to when it will disappear
• In various situations where text has to be loaded from the server, a placeholder will now be displayed

 

[BertyBasset]

The above is essentially a consolidation release. That means we can now get on with new features.

In the pipeline:

• User photo upload (as well as Flickr linking)
• User document upload
• Rationalisation of mine entries using 'Features' for geographically distinct features belonging to a specific mine

Feel free to suggest any useful addition you would like to the site or any enhancements to existing features - and if you come across any bugs or issues, please report them using https://buddlepit.co.uk/community/index.php?threads/mine-database-mine-docs-photo-issues.517/

 

[TomFerry]

I cannot seem to link all photos across from a album , only
Single photo url is working any ideas ?

 

[TomFerry]

Have emailed you the images Robin , have posted here as it’s been since a update , I usually click copy url


Then paste that in there and that next box turns blue .

 

[Osian]

I cannot seem to link all photos across from a album , only
Single photo url is working any ideas ?

At what point is it failing? At the very start, or at the end?

 

[TomFerry]

The blue button for next is not turning blue when I insert the URL for all photos out a album

 

[Osian]

If you send me the link in a PM, I can have a look at the issue

 

[Osian]

That bug's now been fixed.

As a reminder, the Flickr submission utility currently supports the following link formats (Where the dashes are either letters or numbers):

• links to an individual photo (starting with flickr.com/photos/------@N--/--------)
• links to an album (starting with flickr.com/photos/---------@N--/albums/---------)
• links to a gallery (starting with flickr.com/photos/---------@N--/galleries/----------)
• shortened links to individual photos (flic.kr/p/--------)
• album share links (flickr.com/gp/--------@N--/-----------)

Do let us know if we've missed any other types of Flickr URLs that aren't in this list

 

[Osian]

We've pushed a new update to the to the Mine Database today. This one is largely focused on improving our server-side infrastructure in preparation for some new features in future. It does also include quite a few bugfixes and other improvements, which I have listed below.

As always, please let us know if you spot any issues, however small, by replying to our Bug Reports thread.

Cheers,
Osian

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Full Changelog:

General:

• Reworked server-side code to be more resilient and maintainable (most of the development effort for this particular update went into this)
• Server-side and client-side code optimisations to improve page load times
• Improved some of the pop-up dialogs to always fit on the screen on small/mobile devices, and to be easier to dismiss by clicking outside of them
• Minor visual tweaks/improvements for the light theme
• The random button in the mine search widgets in the sidebar of the forum and the navigation bar of non-forum now respects the entered text, which is consistent with the behaviour of the dedicated mine search page
• Fixed a bug where default forum avatars would be vertically miss-aligned on Firefox in specific places
• Fixed a bug in image lightboxes where if you fullscreened the lightbox, then fullscreened the pannable image viewer, then exited fullscreen once so that only the lightbox is fullscreened, then the image viewer's fullscreen button would be in an invalid state, thinking that the image viewer was still fullscreened when it's not, causing it to misbehave so that clicking it again would instead cause the lightbox to exit fullscreen

Mine Entry Pages:

• Tweaked visuals to be cleaner and more consistent with other areas of the site
• Updated the map to use our more modernised mapping infrastructure. As a result, these specific maps now have:
  • Smooth zooming
  • Faster/more reliable loading for OS maps
  • Buttons that are stylistically more consistent with the rest of the site
  • Placeholders for when the image in the tooltip is loading
  • Drop shadows on map markers to make them clearer
• Added a placeholder image while the primary image of mine is loading, which eliminates any layout shifts during/after loading
• The "has survey" compass indicator in the publications section is now more accurate
• Fixed a bug where the "Show all X (Y More)" button that appears when the Publications section has a lot of publications would display the wrong number of documents, would preview an inconsistent number of items above it

Mine Search:

• Optimised search to return results around twice as quickly
• Added placeholder images while the thumbnail images of results are loading
• Tweaked 'order by location' to order by location before area
• Fixed a bug with the page selector that would make the last page button not actually go to the last page in specific circumstances

Mine Edit Request:

• Fixed a bug where, if you chose 'The location is incorrect/inaccurate' as the request reason, then the location selector's map would be missing

Photo Gallery:

• Added widescreen support
• Added better loading feedback when changing pages or adding search filters
• Made the 'collections' button easier to find and understand
• Fixed a bug where opening the lightbox to view an image after adding a search filter or changing page would sometimes cause the image to not actually display in the lightbox

My Photos:

• Added widescreen support
• Fixed a bug where reloading the page after applying certain specific search filters would cause the photos to be listed in reverse order

Flickr Photo Linking:

• Improved the wording of certain instructions to be clearer
• Fixed a bug that would cause the images to load in a random order. They should now load in the list in the same order as they do on Flickr

Document Library:

• Added widescreen support
• Added a draggable divider between the document list and viewer, letting you resize both
• Changed the placeholder image when no document is selected to a photo I took in a bookshop in Hay-on-Wye
• Fixed a bug where the document type names would incorrectly overflow in the advanced filtering menu on certain display widths

Pit & Putt:

• Fixed a bug that would cause the title screen to overflow on small/mobile screens

 

[Osian]

We're aware of a minor issue that's causing some icons to fail to appear; we are looking into it. All other site functionality should be unaffected.

 

[Osian]

The icons issue has now been fixed.

 

[Osian]

We've pushed a new minor update to the site, which includes some things that were postponed from the previous update. These are:

• a complete revamp of the Gridref Converter utility into a more general Coordinate Converter
• the addition of a new utility to query the elevations of points in England, Wales, and Scotland

It also includes a couple of minor fixes elsewhere:

• Fixed a bug that caused Pit & Putt's map's home button to not recentre the map when you're in the middle of a game
• Removed the broken Welsh lidar layer from the Armchair Explorer

As always, do report any issues that you find in our Issue Tracking thread.

Cheers,
Osian

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Some details on the new utilities:

Coordinate Converter:

This is a full redesign, reimplementation, and expansion of the previous Gridref Converter tool. Here's a comparison of the two versions:

Before	After

The new version supports even more coordinate formats, these being:

• Decimal Latitude and Longitude
• Degrees, Minutes, and Seconds
• OS Grid Reference
• OS Easting and Northing
• Irish Grid Reference
• UTM

These are selectable via the dropdowns. The source format dropdown will by default will have Auto-detect selected, which will use the first valid format it finds from your input.

Points that you enter through the text field will appear as markers on the map, where you can then drag them to move them, or click them to remove them. You can also add points directly by clicking on the map. Furthermore, if you hover over a marker on the map, a popup will appear showing that location in all of the supported coordinate formats:


The button in the top-right lets you export the conversions as a TSV table, which is directly pastable into spreadsheet software such as Excel.

Elevation Lookup:



This page lets you quickly query the elevation of any point in England, Wales, or Scotland (the precise valid area is shown on the map on the page). You can lookup up to 10,000 points at once (though beware that beyond 2,000 points your browser may slow down).

Similarly to the coordinate converter, you can use the map to add/move/delete points directly.

The colours of the map markers correspond to the elevations of the points. The colour scale itself, as indicated by the bar in the bottom-right of the map, depends on both the lowest and highest points you've added to the map.

The buttons in the top right are the same as for the coordinate converter, letting you copy the values as a TSV table, or download as a GPX file containing the elevation data for those points.

As an additional note, the tool uses a 50m heightmap to perform the lookups, using bilinear interpolation to smooth things out. As such, it can be less accurate on top of sharp mountain peaks, for example, but is quite accurate elsewhere.