Handling of blue prints in the forum needs a rework

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Tairon96
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Handling of blue prints in the forum needs a rework

Post by Tairon96 »

Some blue prints are rather large. Loading a thread with such large blue prints slows down the forum and causes much traffic. Since I read the forum sometimes during being on the move my traffic volume is quickly consumed.

Quoting a post with large blue prints is terrible. The complete blue print is loaded into the edit box.

It would be better, to store the blue prints separately like attachments. If you want to copy a blue print, you can access the blue print. If you are not interested in the blue print right now or you have already taken a look at it, you would be able to skip the loading of the blue print.

By the way : The blue print format itself is a bit awkward. A human readable head and footer would be great. In the head the given title and a time stamp or simple ID to identify the blue print would be helpful. In the footer a indicator to show the end of the blue print is reached could prevent accidentally cut short blue prints.
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Optera
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Re: Handling of blue prints in the forum needs a rework

Post by Optera »

Blueprints are just objects serialized to string. While they could also be exported as xml structure that would make the whole string much larger, which is one of your critique about them.

No idea what kind of traffic volume you have to notice a couple of additional characters. Pictures and banners take up magnitudes more traffic volume than strings.

While it might be an improvement in comfort to not include bp tags in quotes, you can always select a portion of text before pressing quote to only quote the selected text.

Tairon96
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Re: Handling of blue prints in the forum needs a rework

Post by Tairon96 »

A blue print can be several MiB in size. If someone quoted already the post with the BP it is duplicated and therefore loaded several times by just reading the thread.

If you want to post a reply, the BP is loaded again to show the thread while you edit your post. If you need a couple of times to polish your own post... the BP is loaded again and again.

In the case of pictures, these can be identified by your browser to block them and to be loaded only on manual request.

And my mobile traffic volume is 2 GiB per month.
___

I don't want to have the complete BP readable. The data can stay as it is now. I have only asked for a header and a footer to capsule the data. This is only a few additional bytes. I don't know, if there is some kind of escape sequence already implemented in the BP data.

Before / now :
0eNrtm19vozgQwL9KxHNYgf+AqbQrrf......bppHuo9h5PVUQSN7VEIDLo
A possible change
<Factorio blue print="0.16.51"><title="Some example blue print"/><date="2018-12-05 18:45"/><data>0eNrtm19vozgQwL9KxHNYgf+AqbQrrf......bppHuo9h5PVUQSN7VEIDLo</data></Factorio blue print>
The data is not changed. There is only very small additional information : Header, game version, title, time stamp ... and a help to identify the end of the data. ;)
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Loewchen
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Re: Handling of blue prints in the forum needs a rework

Post by Loewchen »

The maximum comment size is 60'000 characters, so transfer volume is a complete non issue.

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Re: Handling of blue prints in the forum needs a rework

Post by Tairon96 »

Sorry, my fault. At the post I have in mind I have read 500.000 characters instead of 50.000 characters. ( Still with several times being quoted it sums up. But 10 times less than I have thought )

Nonetheless quoting a post and writing a couple of own words is a hard job. With "The complete blue print is loaded into the edit box." it is difficult to shorten the quoted post to the relevant text part.
Optera wrote:
Thu Dec 06, 2018 7:26 am
[...]
While it might be an improvement in comfort to not include bp tags in quotes, you can always select a portion of text before pressing quote to only quote the selected text.
This does not work for me. Maybe it's because I am using Chrome on my smartphone ?

I have to search for the text I want to quote within the clutter of blueprints. It's sometimes like looking for a needle in a haystack.
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Optera
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Re: Handling of blue prints in the forum needs a rework

Post by Optera »

Tairon96 wrote:
Mon Dec 10, 2018 3:10 am
Maybe it's because I am using Chrome on my smartphone ?
Well, there's your problem. ;)

Mythbusters reference aside.
Using Quote to create a reply always copies the whole post.
Instead use reply and mark the text in the topic list below and paste it at the cursor as quote with ". This works on Chrome and FF on PC, but again the forum is not designed for touch use let alone tiny phone displays.

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