Daystrom Institute Technical Library

We asked "Did you like Identity, Part I, the eighth episode of The Orville season 2?" and you voted for "Loved it!" with a winning score of 12 out of 19 votes (63.2%). For our new poll we are asking "Did you like Identity, Part II, the ninth episode of The Orville season 2?"

We have resolved a problem that caused the system to not recognise your password as correct, even when it was. This fix extends to the following places:

• Voting in the Caption Competition
• Adding a game review
• Adding a book review
• Adding an episode/film review

Congratulations to "ilandra" winner of last months caption competition.

Fixed a but were Additional People, Additional Species and Station / Ship internals pages would forget your selected critera when you clicked on additional pages. This is now fixed.

For example if you searched for all additional people with a name starting with "A" the first page respects that selection. However, clicking on page 2 would cause it to forget your selection and show all additional people.

We've started updating the pictures on Deep Space Nine with larger slightly better quality ones. So far we've completed the run through of Season 1. More to come.

We've made the header on mobile and other small devices sticky so it stays at the top of the page when scrolled. Making navigation a little easier. As always you likely need to clear your cache or force a reload to see the change.

Fixed a small issue on picture pages where the pop-up reference info and clickable links (for example on review images pages) would not work. They now will.

You may have to force a reload or clear the cache to get it to work.

YouTube and other videos are now responsive to your screen size. So they will shrink to fit the screen width of your device. This works in places like articles (such as the STD Article and postings on the forum. We have also taken the opportunity to make the default size 1280 x 720, assuming your screen is large enough. This change affects all existing postings so there is no need to alter your existing posts to take advantage of the change.

We're updating our image pages today. The layout remains the same, however, the following changes are implemented:

• The fade out / fade in transition is replace by a slide effect
• You can navigate in the following ways:
  
  • Clicking the First, Previous, Play, Next or Last button.
  • Pressing the left arrow will move you to the previous image.
  • Pressing the right arrow will move you to the next image.
  • Pressing the shift-left arrow or up arrow will move you to the first image.
  • Pressing the shift-right arrow or down arrow will move you to the last image.
  • Pressing space bar will play / pause play mode
  • Clicking on a thumbnail in the navigation panel
  • Swiping the main image left or right, either using the mouse or your finger on a touch screen, such as an mobile or tablet
  • If you attempt to swipe off the end of the image set in either direction it will bounce back as you would expect
  • The play button now automatically navigates from the current image to the end of the image set in turn and then stops, rather than looping around to the beginning forever
• If you are at the start of the image set the Previous and First buttons are disabled
• If you are at the end of the image set the Play, Next and Last buttons are disabled
• The navigation between images is no longer recorded in the browsers history. So hitting the back button will take you to the page that brought you to the images page, however, you are still able to bookmark any image directly.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying, yay you can now swipe between images on phones and tablets!

As always if it doesn't look right force a reload or clear the cache and it should come good.

Note: We also fixed an issue where Command-left arrow would not action the back operation on Mac. Equally Control-left arrow would now work on windows.

Mobile mode will automatically activate for phones and other smaller devices, without the need to press the Mobile site button.

Virtually all content has been tailored to fit the width of the smaller screen, without compromising the desktop version. For example where the desktop version might use multiple columns the mobile version will revert to a single column to fit the screen.

The home page is now available on mobile devices for the first time. As you will see it rearranges itself to suit the smaller screen. This is also true of the what’s new pages.

All pages now contain a “Hamburger menu” (the blue three line symbol in the top left of the screen). This provides access to all the menu items from the desktop version. The main top strip buttons are now provided as a dramatic new icon panel, rather than the old scrolling menu.

As part of the upgrade comes a new update to the forum software. This has required a new style for the system. Rather than building one from scratch, which took me 2-3 weeks the first time around, I have decided to use a freely available one. It fits reasonably well with our styling and has the added advantage of being responsive to screen size. So it re-works the forum to automatically fit on phone screens and other smaller devices. We’ve updated the forum post that explains what the button graphics are here:

What are the button graphics?

The new software gives some increased functionality; for instance when you load the forum it will notify you if anybody has replied to one of your posts, or to a topic or subforum you’ve subscribed to. It can also send users notifications via email about new posts in subscribed topics or when a PM is received.

Quoting has been extended in the new forum to include links to the user's profile and post itself. The date and time of a post is also shown to make the distinction between posts extra clear.

Showing even more advanced emotions than smilies is possible with the use of Emoji! With Emoji, it's easy to add extra emotion to your post from your tablet or mobile devices.

Spoiler text now shows a little button that you can click to see the hidden text.It can also be used to hide more content than the previous system, including pictures and videos.

There's also a modification to the video posting method. Previously when posting youtube videos, one had to post the entire link and then edit it to turn it into an embedded video. Now there is a special "youtube" button which will give you tags in the message; you simply post the video 'code' from youtube in those tags. So if youtube gives you a link like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bZKEhgieoc you simply post everything after the = sign into the youtube tags.

The old video button is still there, so you can post non-youtube videos as well.

Desktop browsers now use scroll bars that better fit in with the site colour scheme.

Gallery pages now have a better grid layout but still adjust to fit the device width. Notably the table is centred and no longer has large gaps between the rows. The thumbnail size has also been increased.

We’ve changed our checkbox and radio button styles. The new ones don’t require javascript to work and are keyboard accessible. They also don’t require images to make them work. You can also now click on the label next to the button and not just the button itself. Radio buttons now have a more traditional round style.

The Image quiz and Sudden death pages now have full size images, rather than thumbnails.

The within page selection buttons have been improved. Now, instead of hiding buttons when they are not applicable to a certain page we now show the button as disabled instead. For example if a ship has no images then the Images button will show as disabled, rather than not being shown at all.

This also applies to the “Additional People”, “Additional Species“, “Size comparison”, Ship and Station “Internals” pages, where the “Display” button will only be active if there are items that match your selection criteria.

The "Site map" and "Site Index” pages have been reworked with better headings on the index and a better layout for both.

The pages on the styling menu have been reworked to make better use of the space.

The Writers and Director Statistics pages are now sortable, click on the column headings choose your order.

Added a new Actor Statistics page to match the Writer and Director pages.

What’s new pages now have Next and Previous buttons.

If things don't look right you need to force a reload or clear your cache.

The temporal image pages had the wrong coloured buttons for alternate timeline entries. This is now fixed.

The Rules Of Acquisition List page was missing the References section. This is now fixed.

We had an issue on the Service History page where the scale blocks could show a split, especially on mobile. Should now be fixed.

Fixed an issue where the links on the Writer statistics page would not work

We asked "Did you like Deflectors, the seventh episode of The Orville season 2?" and you voted for "Loved it!" with a winning score of 4 out of 11 votes (36.4%). For our new poll we are asking "Did you like Identity, Part I, the eighth episode of The Orville season 2?"

Congratulations to "The Geek" winner of last months caption competition.