Some Feedback and one or two bugs

cBB Follower is after cBB Reactions my second CaniDev extension and overall I like it. I think I like the mentions system the most. Before that, I used Simple Mentions which is a fine extension, but I think that your mentions system is simply an overall improvement. I like that it automatically creates a link to the user profile, that the new profile page has its own tab where it shows you where you were mentioned, and the dropdown menu where you choose the user you want to mention is prettier and just better in terms of readability. I really like it.

I also like that the new profile does not only show you the posts of a user but also the topics they created. That is a nice touch.

There are, however, a few things I would like to change about the extension. I think similar to cBB Reactions the extension would benefit greatly from some more customization options. The most important one for me would be the possibility to deactivate the like system. I use another extension to like posts and I don't want a second like system on top of that. I could see many people thinking that who use for example the Thanks for Posts extension. In my case, I was able to solve the problem because I also use cBB Reactions and you had offered another user here a way to remove the like button when they use both extensions at the same time. This gets rid of the like button in the normal forum but not when posts are shown as part of a hashtag. Then it is still possible to like them. I don't know whether this is intentional.

So ideally what I would like too see in a future version is this: The like system can be turned off entirely or it can be turned off only for the forum posts but not for the comments on the wall. And the permission settings for sharing and liking I would like to see disentangled too.

Then I don't like that I can't forbid users to upload images to their wall. I turned off attachments in my forum entirely and I would like to do the same for image uploads to the wall. I will likely try to remove the upload button to fix that, but I really think that the extension should not allow users to upload images without having a permission setting to turn that off.


Now let me tell you about two bugs I've encountered. When I create a comment on a user's wall that includes a hashtag, that hashtag might stop to function all together. I get the error message when clicking on it:

Parameter "user_id" for route "canidev_follower_profile" must match "\d+" ("" given) to generate a corresponding URL.

This doesn't always happen, but it seems that once a hashtag is broken, it doesn't work anymore no matter from where it is accessed. I only know that whenever this happened it arose from a hashtag that was created on a user's wall and that this hasn't occurred so far when a hashtag was created in a forum post.

And finally, there is another "bug" that is less important. I have created a test-user that I have removed from the registered users user group and moved them into the guest group so that I can copy their permissions as an admin. When I do that I unfollow all users I had followed before. I think the reason is that I as an admin who copies a guest's permissions am momentarily not allowed to follow other users and then the extension unfollows me from everybody because of that.


Overall cool extension. As with the Reactions extension, it suffers from a lack of customization options to turn individual features of the extension on and off. I think that would make it much more attractive for many users. I really want to turn off the like system and I wish I could turn off the hashtag feature to avoid that bug.

[IvanPF]

Thanks for the suggestions and reports.
I will definitely take them into account for the next version.

So I looked some more into that hashtag bug I mentioned in my first post and I think I can tell you some more about it.

The bug occurs if user A posts a hashtag on user B's wall that user B themself hasn't used before. Then the entire hashtag doesn't work anymore no matter from where it is accessed. The bug is fixed as soon as user B uses the hashtag once.

Additionally to the error message I showed in my first comment already:

Parameter "user_id" for route "canidev_follower_profile" must match "\d+" ("" given) to generate a corresponding URL.

phpBB Debug produces the following warnings:

[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/ext/canidev/follower/libraries/tools.php on line 229: Undefined array key 65
[phpBB Debug] PHP Warning: in file [ROOT]/ext/canidev/follower/libraries/follower.php on line 91: Trying to access array offset on value of type null

The 65 refers to the user ID of user B.


A friend of mine was trying to fix the bug, thinking that the extension tries to access something from the cache that doesn't exist there yet because user B hasn't used the hashtag yet. She tried the following:

Code: Select all

to fix crash due to hashtag on other's wall after line 209 in tools.php add:
                    if(!array_key_exists($row['target_id'], $user_cache))
                    {
                        $user_cache[$row['target_id']] = $row;
                    }

That partially fixed the bug for us. Clicking on the hashtag produces no more crash nor any warnings. But on the hashtag page that shows all posts and comments associated with the corresponding hashtag, it displays the comment as

User A > User A

instead of as

User A > User B

as it should.

This is then where we gave up trying to fix it ourselves.