LTT Menu Icons aren't showing up

[AlTech]

hi all,

 

I've been trying a feature in Firefox which allows me to force all font to be a specific font I like.

 

The LTT forums seems to have some issue with this.

 

You'll notice how i see the text instead of the icons when i click on the dropdown for my profile.

 

 

This is a bug with the forum. Please fix it.

 

@colonel_mortis IDK if your icons are part of a font. But please find an alternative and fix this issue. I'm keeping my customized font and i wanna be able to see the icons instead of these weird bits of text.

 

 

Thanks.

[RileyTheFox]

13 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

hi all,

 

I've been trying a feature in Firefox which allows me to force all font to be a specific font I like.

 

The LTT forums seems to have some issue with this.

 

You'll notice how i see the text instead of the icons when i click on the dropdown for my profile.

 

 

This is a bug with the forum. Please fix it.

 

@colonel_mortis IDK if your icons are part of a font. But please find an alternative and fix this issue. I'm keeping my customized font and i wanna be able to see the icons instead of these weird bits of text.

 

 

Thanks.

 

Using inspect element reveals that the icons are text and not images. LTT should really make them images instead.

[LogicalDrm]

3 hours ago, EvilCat70 said:

Using inspect element reveals that the icons are text and not images. LTT should really make them images instead.

Don't know much about web development, but which ones load faster, text or images?

[IAmAndre]

57 minutes ago, LoGiCalDrm said:

Don't know much about web development, but which ones load faster, text or images?

 

4 hours ago, AluminiumTech said:

hi all,

 

I've been trying a feature in Firefox which allows me to force all font to be a specific font I like.

 

The LTT forums seems to have some issue with this.

 

You'll notice how i see the text instead of the icons when i click on the dropdown for my profile.

 

 

This is a bug with the forum. Please fix it.

 

@colonel_mortis IDK if your icons are part of a font. But please find an alternative and fix this issue. I'm keeping my customized font and i wanna be able to see the icons instead of these weird bits of text.

 

 

Thanks.

These are fonts, Font-Awesome more particularly. They load a lot faster than images because they are basically the same weight as any other font and allow to have icons. The font is loaded just once, while images would require multiple loads, and multiple files.

Now the problem you're having is that your browser is changing the fonts, so the icons are no longer using a Font Awesome. That's definitely not a bug.

[LogicalDrm]

^

So if thats taken in consideration, would the addon @AluminiumTech uses be able to ignore some fonts. Which would clear this non-issue without having to do pretty much anything.

[IAmAndre]

1 minute ago, LoGiCalDrm said:

^

So if thats taken in consideration, would the addon @AluminiumTech uses be able to ignore some fonts. Which would clear this non-issue without having to do pretty much anything.

I've never used this plugin, but if there's no option to specify which font to avoid, the creator should skip FA because it's very common font today.

[colonel_mortis]

This is not a bug with the forum, this is an issue with your decision to force all fonts to not be what they were defined as on the page. Using a font for the icons rather than images has a number of benefits, including that it is faster to download and that it is easier to develop with. The icons fall back to plain text for accessibility reasons.

 

This is not something that will be changed.

[Junel]

I've had a similar issue, but on my iPhone, wasn't sure if it was just my iPhone playing up, a refresh fixes it however, so I never bothered to action it. 

[AlTech]

5 hours ago, colonel_mortis said:

This is not a bug with the forum, this is an issue with your decision to force all fonts to not be what they were defined as on the page. Using a font for the icons rather than images has a number of benefits, including that it is faster to download and that it is easier to develop with. The icons fall back to plain text for accessibility reasons.

 

This is not something that will be changed.

Ok. Fine. be that way.

 

5 hours ago, LoGiCalDrm said:

^

So if thats taken in consideration, would the addon @AluminiumTech uses be able to ignore some fonts. Which would clear this non-issue without having to do pretty much anything.

I know images load slower but it would be worth it.

 

5 hours ago, IAmAndre said:

 

These are fonts, Font-Awesome more particularly. They load a lot faster than images because they are basically the same weight as any other font and allow to have icons. The font is loaded just once, while images would require multiple loads, and multiple files.

Now the problem you're having is that your browser is changing the fonts, so the icons are no longer using a Font Awesome. That's definitely not a bug.

The fact that I can't see the "icons" is an issue.  I should be able to use whatever font i want and still be able to see something denoted as an icon.

 

An icon is an icon and a font is a font.

 

They can use SVG files for the icons.

[PlayStation 2]

56 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

Ok. Fine. be that way.

 

I know images load slower but it would be worth it.

 

The fact that I can't see the "icons" is an issue.  I should be able to use whatever font i want and still be able to see something denoted as an icon.

 

An icon is an icon and a font is a font.

 

They can use SVG files for the icons.

The point here is that a font is a single file. If the devs went for SVG icons, they'd probably have to go for multiple files.

This isn't an issue on their side, but rather an issue with whatever you're using to force a specific font.

[Clanscorpia]

1 hour ago, AluminiumTech said:

The fact that I can't see the "icons" is an issue.  I should be able to use whatever font i want and still be able to see something denoted as an icon.

Most website use custom fonts and elements are designed around those fonts, this isnt their fault, theyve done an amazing job optimizing the forum and you dont have to be rude about it 

[LogicalDrm]

1 hour ago, AluminiumTech said:

I know images load slower but it would be worth it.

So when ever someone complaints about forums being slow, we could blame it on you? I think most here want faster forums over extra customizing options.

[AlTech]

4 hours ago, Clanscorpia said:

Most website use custom fonts and elements are designed around those fonts, this isnt their fault, theyve done an amazing job optimizing the forum and you dont have to be rude about it 

Mortis' response was inappropriate imho. He could have offered a nicer answer instead of the response he gave.

 

4 hours ago, LoGiCalDrm said:

So when ever someone complaints about forums being slow, we could blame it on you? I think most here want faster forums over extra customizing options.

The forum's currently being slow have nothing to do with me.

 

5 hours ago, Dan Castellaneta said:

The point here is that a font is a single file. If the devs went for SVG icons, they'd probably have to go for multiple files.

They wouldn't be that large...

5 hours ago, Dan Castellaneta said:

This isn't an issue on their side, but rather an issue with whatever you're using to force a specific font.

Yes this is. They designed their website badly and I'm showing them how to fix it.

 

 

[AlTech]

11 hours ago, colonel_mortis said:

This is not a bug with the forum, this is an issue with your decision to force all fonts to not be what they were defined as on the page. Using a font for the icons rather than images has a number of benefits, including that it is faster to download and that it is easier to develop with. The icons fall back to plain text for accessibility reasons.

 

This is not something that will be changed.

What do I need to do to get you to change this?

 

Your attitude is completely inappropriate and now you've just pissed of me in a way that I want to boycott this and the LTT forums.

[vanished]

16 hours ago, AluminiumTech said:

I've been trying a feature in Firefox which allows me to force all font to be a specific font I like.

Why on earth would you want to do that?

 

Regardless... how do you seriously see this as a bug with the forum, or believe that not wanting to change this is in any way "completely inappropriate"?

[Jiaweeeee]

1 hour ago, AluminiumTech said:

Mortis' response was inappropriate imho. He could have offered a nicer answer instead of the response he gave.

Lmao I'm going to be really straight forward , far worst than Mortis .

Who dafug do you think you are that LMG should optimize their forum to be able to accommodate just you because you don't like how things are ? Since you're a "Programmer" , why not optimize your damn script so that it works with the forum rather than having the entire forum change just because of you . 

[LogicalDrm]

1 hour ago, AluminiumTech said:

The forum's currently being slow have nothing to do with me.

Who said anything about current state? If we would make forums have to load more stuff because you don't like the font (or can't add exception to addon) and forums got slower in turn, it would be because you did reguest it. Also, have you ever heard little thing called designers choice? Its a thing where designer chooses to use something because it fits better, works better or otherwise is more to their liking. If you don't like it and want to change it, any problem related is your problem, not designers. Things would be different if there was some universal issue with fonts. But so far I've seen only issues with older Safari mobile browsers and other old/less used browsers.

[AlTech]

45 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

Why on earth would you want to do that?

 

Regardless... how do you seriously see this as a bug with the forum, or believe that not wanting to change this is in any way "completely inappropriate"?

A *GOOD* programmer who spends their time working on websites should not make a website look and feel fundamentally different because someone decides to use a feature of their browser that a company added.

 

The fact that these are allowed to be icons is ridiculously stupid. They are not icons if they do not consist of an image.

 

This way of making the forum is ass backwards and is bad planning. I proposed a solution when I ran into an issue where I could not see these icons through the badly designed system. Normally developers will take on feedback from customers and make changes. 

 

25 minutes ago, Jiaweeeee said:

Lmao I'm going to be really straight forward , far worst than Mortis .

 

You really don't understand programming.

 

The fact that these icons are not actual icons but false images is embarrassing enough as it is. The fact that nobody wants to change it is and people deny that it's a problem is a problem in and of itself.

 

Also, you're breaking the Forum community Standards and you're being a dick to me.

 

25 minutes ago, Jiaweeeee said:

Who dafug do you think you are that LMG should optimize their forum to be able to accommodate just you because you don't like how things are ? Since you're a "Programmer" , why not optimize your damn script so that it works with the forum rather than having the entire forum change just because of you . 

It's not my script. This is a part of Stock Firefox. This feature is on FireFox which is installed on millions of PCs in the world.

 

Forgive me for using a standard feature of a browser which allows me to make most websites look better than they otherwise would.

 

12 minutes ago, LoGiCalDrm said:

Who said anything about current state? If we would make forums have to load more stuff because you don't like the font (or can't add exception to addon) and forums got slower in turn, it would be because you did reguest it.

I haven't really complained about forum speed based on the assumption that they used images more than they currently do.

 

If they don't use images where icons should be and the website loads slowly nonetheless, that is bad programming.

12 minutes ago, LoGiCalDrm said:

Also, have you ever heard little thing called designers choice?

I don't use products which I believe to be badly design, stupid or useless.

 

I'm not gonna make exceptions for the LTT forums.

12 minutes ago, LoGiCalDrm said:

Its a thing where designer chooses to use something because it fits better, works better or otherwise is more to their liking

 

12 minutes ago, LoGiCalDrm said:

. If you don't like it and want to change it, any problem related is your problem, not designers.

This is fucking Web Technology mate. Web technology is supposed to be compatible. There is no excuse for me not being able to see actual icons instead of fake icons using a ridiculous font.

 

It is not my fault that this website was designed badly. I should not have to re-design this website because some "geniuses" designed it in a specific way.

12 minutes ago, LoGiCalDrm said:

Things would be different if there was some universal issue with fonts.

There is an issue here. This is using fonts. This is not using real icons or SVGs. If it was then I would be having this conversation.

 

You and Mortis' insistence that I must be wrong is completely absurd. I am using the forum the way I want to use the forum. The forum should not be so badly designed that I can't use it the way I want.

 

If I want to make all the font on the forum "Comic Sans" then I should be entitled to see every piece of font as Comic Sans AND be able to see the icons on the forum.

 

I don't like Comic Sans FYI but the rest still applies.

 

[LogicalDrm]

8 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

-snip-

Fine. I don't argue over thing one likes better than others as its pointless. I'll ask another, related, question. Which is better in terms of accessibility. Icon with Alt-text  or font which reads as text but displays as icon?

[colonel_mortis]

Icon fonts are the norm at this point - you will struggle to find modern sites that don't use them. Some of those sites won't be breaking because they use other ways of selecting the icon from the font, but that sacrifices accessibility because it doesn't fall back to text, and screen readers can't read it as text. 

Using the icon font that we are means that if an icon fails to load, it gets some text instead, so it's still usable (even though it's a bit ugly). If we used images, you would get a square with a broken image picture in. 

There is no perfect solution, but this has worked without complaints for a year, and only has issues when you use your specific setting. 

 

If you disabled images because they slow things down, you wouldn't complain that the icons don't work. Yes, you didn't expect them to break, but they do because you are using a browser feature that, while built in (just like disabling images is in some browsers), is not something that we support. 

[AlTech]

20 minutes ago, colonel_mortis said:

Icon fonts are the norm at this point - you will struggle to find modern sites that don't use them.

I worked in a corporate environment as part of work experience. One of their most important websites i had a look at and played around with (which was maintained by the company) used SVGs. There were no icon fonts in site.

 

20 minutes ago, colonel_mortis said:

Using the icon font that we are means that if an icon fails to load, it gets some text instead, so it's still usable (even though it's a bit ugly).

the text looks ugly. It defeats the whole point of paying a fortune for a proprietary and ridiculously terrible software package which is supposed to look damn nice.

 

20 minutes ago, colonel_mortis said:

There is no perfect solution, but this has worked without complaints for a year, and only has issues when you use your specific setting. 

I'm sorry that I'm not like 100% of people.

 

Your solution may work for 99% of people. But in life I am not the 99% nor have i ever been in anything. I am that 1%.

20 minutes ago, colonel_mortis said:

If you disabled images because they slow things down, you wouldn't complain that the icons don't work.

Instead of saying X will slow the forum down, why don't you actually fix the forum so that it isn't slow.

20 minutes ago, colonel_mortis said:

Yes, you didn't expect them to break, but they do because you are using a browser feature that, while built in (just like disabling images is in some browsers), is not something that we support. 

 

Could you at least attempt to create a 3rd theme option in the themes selection which uses real icons in place of font icons?

1 hour ago, LoGiCalDrm said:

Fine. I don't argue over thing one likes better than others as its pointless. I'll ask another, related, question. Which is better in terms of accessibility. Icon with Alt-text  or font which reads as text but displays as icon?

I'm not that bothered about accessibility. If they need an alt text then they can use the first method of having an icon by default with optional text.

[colonel_mortis]

37 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

I'm sorry that I'm not like 100% of people.

 

Your solution may work for 99% of people. But in life I am not the 99% nor have i ever been in anything. I am that 1%.

 

37 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

I'm not that bothered about accessibility. If they need an alt text then they can use the first method of having an icon by default with optional text.

No, but more people need the accessibility options than have complained about this.

38 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

the text looks ugly. It defeats the whole point of paying a fortune for a proprietary and ridiculously terrible software package which is supposed to look damn nice.

Having no icon is worse, because then you can't use the site at all.

39 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

Instead of saying X will slow the forum down, why don't you actually fix the forum so that it isn't slow.

Merging all the icons into one font does make it go faster - if it had to load every single icon individually, page load times, particularly for refreshes, would be noticeably longer. Sprite sheets could be used to improve that (though not necessarily eliminate it) would take a prohibitively long time to implement (in fact, replacing all the icons on the site would also be prohibitively time consuming).

55 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

Could you at least attempt to create a 3rd theme option in the themes selection which uses real icons in place of font icons?

Would you prefer that I spend all of the small amount of time that I have to work on the forum making a change that nobody but you will benefit from, or that I spend it adding some of the other features that you have requested?

 

You are welcome to write a script that will use https://raw.githubusercontent.com/google/material-design-icons/master/iconfont/codepoints to replace the text in the icons with their codepoints (get the contents of the .material-icon elements, and replace it with &#(the codepoint at the end of the row);). That will still use a font, but it should bypass your font override (because it changes it to use characters outside the normal range). I can't change that globally because it would still take a long time to change everything, wouldn't be compatible with some settings, and would remove the accessibility benefit, but it should be sufficient for you to be able to use the site.

 

I'm not ruling out ever changing anything, but there are a lot of other things that I would also like to do, and this comes very low on the list.

[AlTech]

 

1 hour ago, colonel_mortis said:

Would you prefer that I spend all of the small amount of time that I have to work on the forum making a change that nobody but you will benefit from, or that I spend it adding some of the other features that you have requested?

This is completely off topic but could you make a topic in the features and suggestions subforum which contains a list of all the features you are planning on adding and what's the status of them.

 

1 hour ago, colonel_mortis said:

You are welcome to write a script that will use https://raw.githubusercontent.com/google/material-design-icons/master/iconfont/codepoints to replace the text in the icons with their codepoints (get the contents of the .material-icon elements, and replace it with &#(the codepoint at the end of the row);). That will still use a font, but it should bypass your font override (because it changes it to use characters outside the normal range). I can't change that globally because it would still take a long time to change everything, wouldn't be compatible with some settings, and would remove the accessibility benefit, but it should be sufficient for you to be able to use the site.

 I can try and write a script *Grumble*.

 

[Bouzoo]

This thread is gold. 

On 2/6/2017 at 11:31 AM, AluminiumTech said:

Instead of saying X will slow the forum down, why don't you actually fix the forum so that it isn't slow.

That what you're asking for is contradictory to your initial request. Also that's being very rude. It's also against CS on which you called out Jiaweeeee while we're at it. 

⇣

On 2/6/2017 at 9:56 AM, AluminiumTech said:

Also, you're breaking the Forum community Standards and you're being a dick to me.

 

On 2/6/2017 at 11:31 AM, AluminiumTech said:

The text looks ugly. 

While I agree that the font is not what you would call pretty long live comic sans, having ugly text is better than this?

 

 

 

Good luck with navigating the forum with a billion of those, in case you don't remember where something is located.

 

On 2/6/2017 at 9:56 AM, AluminiumTech said:

Normally developers will take on feedback from customers and make changes. 

Yes, if it's worth it and if there is a point to a feedback/request that someone provided. Devs don't have to change anything if they feel like it's wasting their time and if there are more drawbacks than gains (it is the brutal truth), and let's be clear, you are the only one that requested that afaik. Only one person out of 400,000 users. Tell me, how far up your to do list would you put it?

 

On 2/6/2017 at 9:56 AM, AluminiumTech said:

There is no excuse for me not being able to see actual icons instead of fake icons using a ridiculous font.

Erm... lower loading times? Colonel_Mortis God knows how many more important things increase loading times that should have higher priorities over this, so let's not jump to conclusions here since neither one of us knows exactly how this forum was built and what's happening behind the scenes.

 

[Oliy]

Why is this thread even open? It's clearly a client side problem in the first place and forcing fonts is just a bad idea to begin with and using images for icons instead of the icons included in the font is like using a match to cook noodles, it's inconvenient and slow