Release Notes - December 1, 2015

[+Geocaching HQ 317]

Read previous Release Notes

 

Release Notes - December 1, 2015

 

We've made some backend updates to the Geocaching Profile to increase security on Geocaching.com. These changes will be invisible to most players; however, those who have added customization may want to update their profiles. Some older browsers may not benefit from these changes. If you are visiting from one of these browsers, you will be notified by a banner on the website.

[+thomfre 198]

Hyperlinks are not working in profile descriptions anymore. Would be nice if you could fix that

[cezanne 11]

These changes will be invisible to most players; however, those who have added customization may want to update their profiles.

 

I think everyone who ever looks at a profile page will notice the changes as also the font size (some profile texts are now too long e.g.), the size of the rectangle and some other things have been changed.

None of these changes can be security related.

 

Also hyperlinks do not work properly not even to pages on gc.com. External pages are blocked and internal ones open up in the sandbox frame when one does not manually open them in a new tab.

One cannot even link to cache pages in the expected way.

[+thomfre 198]

Please add 'allow-top-navigation' to the sandbox frame, that would fix the issue

[+Viajero Perdido 838]

Let us know, please, when you're done fixing the bugs introduced by this (see this thread and others) and have moved on to other things.

 

Then we can fix up our profiles for the new 2015 formatting rules etc. No point doing it twice.

 

Mine is a mess right now. Why do I even try? This is why we can't have nice profiles.

Edited December 1, 2015 by Viajero Perdido

[+HHL 639]

Hyperlinks are not working in profile descriptions anymore. Would be nice if you could fix that

 

No probs here with links and images here:

 

HHL's Profile

 

Hans

[+Viajero Perdido 838]

No probs here with links and images here:

 

HHL's Profile

Try a direct click, rather than open-in-new-tab.

 

Quite embarrassing.

Edited December 1, 2015 by Viajero Perdido

[+palmetto 145]

What's up with the ugly oversized default font?

[+Viajero Perdido 838]

What's up with the ugly oversized default font?

I think they borked the ability to inherit CSS from the surrounding page. Y'know, so your profile text would look the same as the Groundspeak-provided text, for page harmony and all that.

 

Please fix that.

[+HHL 639]

[...]

Try a direct click, rather than open-in-new-tab.

 

Quite embarrassing.

 

Yes, that's pretty bad.

 

Hans

[+dprovan 1497]

Try a direct click, rather than open-in-new-tab.

It wasn't until I actually saw it for myself that I understood what you're saying. The difference between "open" and "open in a new tab" should be local to the browser. I didn't know the web server could control that, let alone make the first fail while the second succeeds. (Well, "fail" is being too kind: left clicking on the link just doesn't do anything, as if the click never happened.)

 

Another interesting bug: the last line of my profile isn't being displayed. I'm guessing that's because I didn't include a blank line at the end.

[+Auld Pharrrt 1]

Try a direct click, rather than open-in-new-tab.

It wasn't until I actually saw it for myself that I understood what you're saying. The difference between "open" and "open in a new tab" should be local to the browser. I didn't know the web server could control that, let alone make the first fail while the second succeeds. (Well, "fail" is being too kind: left clicking on the link just doesn't do anything, as if the click never happened.)

 

Another interesting bug: the last line of my profile isn't being displayed. I'm guessing that's because I didn't include a blank line at the end.

 

type this at the end of your profile to show the last lines <br><br> That will solve it.

I haven't found a workaround for the broken link problem other than to right click and select "open in new tab"

Edited December 1, 2015 by Auld Pharrrt

[+The A-Team 1857]

I'm not seeing all of the problems listed by others, but I'm seeing some of my own.

 

Problems reported by others:

• The links on my profile do work for me, but they open the destination page within the frame, which is useless.
  
• At least for my profile, the fonts are the same as they used to be. I'm not familiar enough with anyone else's profile to know what has and hasn't changed as far as fonts go.
  

Problem I'm seeing:

• The frame resizes to fit what's being displayed inside it, but misses it by a bit. This means you get vertical and horizontal scroll bars for about a line's-width in both directions. Other users who don't use FindStatGen stats seem to just have the vertical scroll bar, so the horizontal bar may be caused by 750 pixels of width used by the FindStatGen stats (which was fine before) being too wide. Since I haven't made any changes to my profile content since Sunday, it seems like the frame has been narrowed to less than 750 pixels (a change which doesn't seem to have any identifiable security benefit).
  

To my somewhat untrained eye, all of the problems reported so far could have been discovered with 30 seconds of browsing a few random profile pages during testing. This makes me wonder whether any testing was done at all. It might be a good idea to roll back until these changes have been tested thoroughly and the problems resolved.

[+Auld Pharrrt 1]

I'm not seeing all of the problems listed by others, but I'm seeing some of my own.

 

Problems reported by others:

• The links on my profile do work for me, but they open the destination page within the frame, which is useless.
  
• At least for my profile, the fonts are the same as they used to be. I'm not familiar enough with anyone else's profile to know what has and hasn't changed as far as fonts go.
  

Problem I'm seeing:

• The frame resizes to fit what's being displayed inside it, but misses it by a bit. This means you get vertical and horizontal scroll bars for about a line's-width in both directions. Other users who don't use FindStatGen stats seem to just have the vertical scroll bar, so the horizontal bar may be caused by 750 pixels of width used by the FindStatGen stats (which was fine before) being too wide. Since I haven't made any changes to my profile content since Sunday, it seems like the frame has been narrowed to less than 750 pixels (a change which doesn't seem to have any identifiable security benefit).
  

To my somewhat untrained eye, all of the problems reported so far could have been discovered with 30 seconds of browsing a few random profile pages during testing. This makes me wonder whether any testing was done at all. It might be a good idea to roll back until these changes have been tested thoroughly and the problems resolved.

 

Even more mysterious ... when I mouseover your horizontal slide bar, I get the whole page as it is supposed to be ... sugests maybe browser dependant and/or cache needing refreshed?

[+Mausebiber 476]

Link in my profile to Geocache, Souvenirs Gallery not working any more.

[+Viajero Perdido 838]

To my somewhat untrained eye, all of the problems reported so far could have been discovered with 30 seconds of browsing a few random profile pages during testing.

To my trained eye, I agree.

[+Mausebiber 476]

Links in profile working again....

[cezanne 11]

Links in profile working again....

 

Yes, but now the profile tabs don't work.

[+Mausebiber 476]

Yes, but now the profile tabs don't work.

 

Just give the SA a couple of minutes, i bet he is already sweating like hell

[+The A-Team 1857]

Yes, but now the profile tabs don't work.

 

Just give the SA a couple of minutes, i bet he is already sweating like hell

Smoke testing and/or UAT would limit or even eliminate the need for the sysadmins to sweat while fixes are made on-the-fly on the live production site.

 

It does seem like various changes are being made as we speak. The borders in the tables in my stats have now disappeared, and links are now going somewhere (albeit forcing the opening of a new tab, drawing the ire of the popup blocker; while better, this still isn't what should be happening). I'd like to reiterate my earlier recommendation that the site be rolled back and these fixes be made and tested behind the scenes before rolling it out again. Trial and error on the live production site just isn't a good idea.

[+thomfre 198]

Hyperlinks are not working in profile descriptions anymore. Would be nice if you could fix that

 

No probs here with links and images here:

 

HHL's Profile

 

Hans

Yes, because they added my suggestion Thanks Groundspeak!

[+barnold 3]

not so much problems in chrome or explorer, but tabs in profile do not work in firefox, what could be reason for that?

[+MBFace 2]

not so much problems in chrome or explorer, but tabs in profile do not work in firefox, what could be reason for that?

Using Firefox I'm finding that the tabs in my own profile won't work (just bring up a blank page) but everything is fine if I look at a friend's profile.

[+EngPhil 0]

Using Firefox I'm finding that the tabs in my own profile won't work (just bring up a blank page) but everything is fine if I look at a friend's profile.

Similar here.

 

Chrome seems OK-ish (it still opens new tabs where it should be opening content in the same tab).

Safari also seems OK-ish (it still opens new tabs where it should be opening content in the same tab).

Firefox viewing my own profile opens blank tabs instead of content.

Firefox viewing someone else's profile tries to display content but stalls out trying to load some element(s), resulting in a blank brown page (it's been spinning for several minutes now....)

[+y2kcompliant 0]

Please roll back the changes. The scroll bars around my Profile information is covering up information and not calculating the space properly. The font change and kerning is displaying less information on one screen. Wrapping in text boxes now causes charts to look horrible.

[+tomturtle 8]

I am using Chrome, and all I see is a small fraction of my profile info. When it first comes up, it has scroll bars, but then they disappear and all I can see is the small portion that fits on the screen below the rest of the profile. I cannot scroll down at all either in the small window or the overall page. Please roll this back until this problem can be fixed.

[+koyamas family 0]

Similar here.

 

Chrome seems OK-ish (it still opens new tabs where it should be opening content in the same tab).

Safari also seems OK-ish (it still opens new tabs where it should be opening content in the same tab).

Firefox viewing my own profile opens blank tabs instead of content.

Firefox viewing someone else's profile tries to display content but stalls out trying to load some element(s), resulting in a blank brown page (it's been spinning for several minutes now....)

 

I confirm all the points.

[+van der Decken 65]

Please roll back the changes until you've got them working.

[+waterskippers 1]

Using Firefox I'm finding that the tabs in my own profile won't work (just bring up a blank page) but everything is fine if I look at a friend's profile.

Similar here.

 

Chrome seems OK-ish (it still opens new tabs where it should be opening content in the same tab).

Safari also seems OK-ish (it still opens new tabs where it should be opening content in the same tab).

Firefox viewing my own profile opens blank tabs instead of content.

Firefox viewing someone else's profile tries to display content but stalls out trying to load some element(s), resulting in a blank brown page (it's been spinning for several minutes now....)

 

By clearing caches, I was able to Firefox to display my profile page and get most of it to work. However, I do not care for the fact that there is now no separation between the bars in my bar graphs and the tables do not have grid lines anymore. Makes it much tougher to view and read data.

[+tomturtle 8]

It looks like some fixes have been put in. My pic that I have in my bio now re-sizes itself. I had to reload my profile, but it now no longer cuts off the bottom. The only problem I am having with it now is that the page is too narrow for the findstat statistics. If we could just make that a little bit wider, it would be a good thing.

[+niraD 3158]

Before, opening offsite links in a new tab worked, but opening offsite links in the same tab garbled the page.

 

Now, neither works in my normal browsing configuration. Either way I get "Firefox prevented this site from opening a pop-up window."

 

Yeah, I can whitelist www.geocaching.com so the pop-up windows work, but I'd rather the links not open new windows in the first place.

[+IceColdUK 976]

Not sure whether this is related to the recent changes or not, but just noticed...

 

My other half's Bio includes BBCode tags, but these are no longer being interpreted on the Profile page (http://www.geocaching.com/profile/?guid=2096123a-3dcd-4890-9feb-658abc36074c). Initially, there was only a tag and I wondered whether the external link was the issue, but I've added a couple of others and these aren't working either.

 

These tags do still work on Log posts. Obviously, they can be changed in the Bio to HTML tags, but is this just a temporary glitch?

 

Thanks,

Richard

[+lpaulriddle 0]

Using Firefox I'm finding that the tabs in my own profile won't work (just bring up a blank page) but everything is fine if I look at a friend's profile.

Similar here.

 

Chrome seems OK-ish (it still opens new tabs where it should be opening content in the same tab).

Safari also seems OK-ish (it still opens new tabs where it should be opening content in the same tab).

Firefox viewing my own profile opens blank tabs instead of content.

Firefox viewing someone else's profile tries to display content but stalls out trying to load some element(s), resulting in a blank brown page (it's been spinning for several minutes now....)

 

By clearing caches, I was able to Firefox to display my profile page and get most of it to work. However, I do not care for the fact that there is now no separation between the bars in my bar graphs and the tables do not have grid lines anymore. Makes it much tougher to view and read data.

For folks having the issue with the FindStatGen tables missing grid lines.. I figured out what is causing this. The new profile page is loading a stylesheet called normalize.css, which has a default rule that collapses spaces between table cells. I was able to get my grid lines back by adding the following to the top of my profile:

 

<style type="text/css">
table { border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 1px; }
</style>

 

You can experiment with the border-spacing value to see what gives the best result.

 

Everything now seems to work fine with Chrome, but with Firefox, the iframe is not resizing for me, and I can't click on any tabs or inline content within the FindStatGen section. Not sure what the issue is there. [update -- I tried with a completely fresh install of Firefox, and it worked fine. So apparently, something in either my settings or extensions is messing it up. Will continue to experiment with it.]

 

Paul

Edited December 3, 2015 by lpaulriddle

[+Gill & Tony 326]

Thanks, Paul

 

That has solved the grid lines problem for me. It now looks perfect.

 

Now all we need is to get rid of the stupid scroll bar at the bottom of the profile and reinstate the DNF counts which were obviously a real security risk!

[+Spatial Distortion 0]

Obviously everyone that cares about their profile and make custom profiles is experiencing issues.

 

Please FIX IT

[Moun10Bike 411]

The profile is not broken. Rather, you had several places in your code where you were explicitly forcing widths to greater than the limit of 750 pixels. I've adjusted those for you, but you might want to further tweak things.

[+wesi 0]

Did you perchance today change the format of the notification emails, without posting release notes? I have an elaborate procmail rule that removes all the frog turd from your mails, and today, it got bent all out of shape. All the found logs that I got on my caches were messed up. Nevermind, I will adjust the filter. But it would be nice if code changes that affect paying members could be accompanied by release notes. Thanks!

[Tassie_Boy 4]

Did you perchance today change the format of the notification emails, without posting release notes? I have an elaborate procmail rule that removes all the frog turd from your mails, and today, it got bent all out of shape. All the found logs that I got on my caches were messed up. Nevermind, I will adjust the filter. But it would be nice if code changes that affect paying members could be accompanied by release notes. Thanks!

 

Go for a wander through the forums and you'll find several threads about this on the go already.