I needed to forcibly place some origami fold marks in absolute locations on the page. This seemed like a useful pkg for at least some of the objects:

\usepackage[absolute]{textpos}

The problem is that it clobbers/ignores the ocg environment. E.g.

\textblockorigin{-18pt}{0mm}
\setlength{\TPHorizModule}{1mm}\setlength{\TPVertModule}{1mm}
\begin{ocg}{region boundaries}{rb}{on}
\begin{textblock*}{0pt}(0mm,0.5\paperheight) {\color{green}\rule[0.5ex]{\hmgn}{1pt}} \end{textblock*}
\begin{textblock*}{0pt}(\paperwidth-\hmgn,0.5\paperheight) {\color{green}\rule[0.5ex]{0.5\paperwidth-0.25\paperheight}{1pt}} \end{textblock*}
\begin{textblock*}{0pt}(\paperwidth-\hmgn,0.5\paperheight) {\color{green}\rule{1pt}{0.5\paperheight-\hmgn}} \end{textblock*}
\begin{textblock*}{0pt}(\hmgn,\hmgn) {\color{green}\rule{1pt}{0.5\paperheight-\hmgn}} \end{textblock*}
\end{ocg}

It would probably work if a \begin{ocg}… were nested inside of every single \begin{textblock*}, but fuck that.

The textpos docs mention that care is taken to put the objects into the background and that the overlay option can be used to put the stuff on top. I thought that might be a hack to get it to respect the ocg environment, but no. It does not work.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/61287283

I posted this thread, without issues. A year later, I finally got a really insightful reply that wholly answered my question well:

https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/39819472/25666072

Now it is “Removed by mod”. But I am the mod.. the only mod (wtf?). No, I do not have multiple personality disorder as the modlog shows.

So somewhere, someone booted that user. That had a ripple effect of destroying all that user’s content. So then I found a “restore content” button, used it, and had to give a reason. I thought I would just be sending myself a useless alert, but it actually restored the content.

So it’s fixed to some extent. But I would like to understand more about what happened. I cannot tell from that user’s modlog who banned them, or even which instance did the banishment. It may be true that it was an anti-spam control, and perhaps rightful, but it’s a bit fucked up how it killed all that user’s content when obviously some of it was useful.

I have seen this before in communities I moderate where a comment is gone because a user is banned. I never looked further. But now it’S clear this is not optimum. It was only in the case at hand that a user’s comment was useful enough that I remembered it, and it happened to be recent.

Clearly this is a bug: I am given the option to “restore comment” but I cannot review the comment before clicking that. So how can I first give a reason for restoring the comment if I am restoring it just to see if it should be restored?

To be clear, there are many bugs:

1. Banishment should give the banisher 3 options: ① remove all content ② remove no content ③ remove posts selectively.
2. The modlog should not hide who did the ban.
3. Mods should /always/ have a view of deleted content for which they have power to undelete.
4. Mods should (if they want) receive a notice when a bulk removal affects comments under their purview. There should be a view by which they can easily see on a timeline all bulk removed content that may be worth undeleting.
5. (edit) The msg “Removed by mod” is false. Since I am the mod where that happened, it could have only been an admin banning a user from the whole system.

The main problem is likely open-meteo who changed something with their server. Now given that open-meteo broke something, Breezy Weather did not behave well. BW reports that it fetched the weather without error, when in fact no data was fetched.

This thread was going:

https://slrpnk.net/post/44026568

comments back and forth until the mod cancelled the post. Probably a rightful mod action as the post was a bit unrelated to the community. I received a notification that someone replied to my comment in that thread before the whole thread was removed.

The notification still rightfully reached me, but it neglected to inform me that the thread was killed. There is still a reply option! WTF? Don’t offer a reply function if replies are impossible. I naturally clicked it and got a blank reply form. I took the time to write a relatively high-effort reply. Then I clicked REPLY. The button even animated to indicate registering my click. But the piece of shit did nothing. The form just sits there, unsubmitted and unsubmittable.

At first it just appears like a slow or unreliable network, because a long pause after a submission is how Lemmy apps behave when the network is stalled. So then I click again, but with concern that I might be posting a duplicate (because indeed that is another Lemmy bug to create dupes like this). Still nothing.

2nd bug: The app decides “fuck it, no need to inform the user”. It was not until I tried to visit the thread that I noticed it was mysteriously gone. And not until I read the modlog that I became informed. So now I have a comment sitting a form that’s falsely presented as submitable. Time wasted, and other user does not see my reply unless I dm them. But if I do that then they may possibly be unable to reach the thread for context.

It’s not merely bad timing. Refreshing notifications long after a thread is removed, even a day, still yields comments with false reply buttons.

!foss_requests@libretechni.ca was attacked by a spammer(usrahonehub@libretechni.ca). As the mod, I was able to ban the user from that specific community only.

When dealing with a manifestly malicious actor, the only tool at my disposal was “ban from community”. That community-specific feature is useful in cases of users who break the rules of the community. It’s a bit weak for addressing malicious attack. A threat agent banned from one community can retaliate by attacking other communities moderated by the same mod.

The only other action I can take is to “block user”. But I think that’s a user-level action that would actually be irresponsible for a mod to use because it would hide that user’s future attacks from the mod in other communities they moderate. Correct? (question: or is lemmy designed well enough to limit the 'block user' action to communities that blocking account does not moderate?)

Features needed

① Mods should be able to pre-emptively ban a malcious account from all communities that they moderate, not just the community that was attacked.

② When visiting that user’s profile, there also is no quick option to report the user to the admin. Perhaps DMing is sufficient, but it requires an extra level of ambition of the mods. OTOH, a quick button could be abused by mods. So I guess it’s not so clear cut.

In !askelectonics@discuss.tchncs.de, I posted the thread “What did I buy? Need help identifying mystery board.” The mod censored it instantly. It was removed so fast I thought it never posted in the first place. I thought a broken network connection caused a dropped message and data loss. Luckily I could use the browsers back button to reach it.

Then it became clear: the Alexandrite client is not working for the user. It’s working for the mods by disappearing the user’s own work when the mods nix it from the timeline. It’s obviously a disservice to the user to be subjected to data loss. The data loss is chaotic and arbitrary. These are the original posts:

• https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/69059793 ← gone
• https://a.lemmy.dbzer0.com/lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/76800419 ← still there

Notice the discuss.tchncs.de copy is completely destroyed, not merely removed from the timeline. Incidentally, I got lucky by posting on a host other than that of my account. So there is still a cached copy on dbzer0.com. But despite the persisting copy, Alexandrite neglects to give the link to its own user. Had I closed the browser before noticing the removal, it would effectively be data loss because there would be no way to notice and no way to obtain the link.

There is a recent trend where it has become acceptable for apps to not work in the interest of the user who executes the app. This misplacement of duty by inverting who is being served is mostly an erosion manifesting from web apps, not user-installed apps (though Firefox is an exception whereby Mozilla often takes decisions in the interest of webmasters). Regardless of whether a removal from a timeline is justified, it’s not okay to subject users to data loss and deny them transparency.

The interesting take-away for users is to avoid posting on the same host as your account. If a community is local, use an external account to post there to avoid data loss.

Crossposted from https://fedia.io/m/fedia/t/4433120

The mag is reachable and I am subscribed. But if I try to crosspost this:

https://fedia.io/m/humanrights@crazypeople.online/t/4433054/How-paper-cheques-are-critically-important-to-our-human-right

to !belgium@europe.pub, it’s impossible. I was able to cross-post to a few other places, so it’s uniquely a problem with europe.pub.

(edit)
It looks like the problem is that the pull-down list has a fixed limit on the number of choices, and belgium@europe.pub does not make the cut even when it is fully specified. It’s quite aggrivating that the first half of the list space is wasted on irrelevant junk (random, pets, etc).

A spambot created several communities. When you report the posts therein, the moderator is obviously a recipient. And the mods themselves are in fact the abuser in this case. Does the admin see the report?

The “create report” option should list the mods and admins with pre-checked tickboxes.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/43321455

I posted this:

https://thelemmy.club/post/56740107

It should be on my profile page, but it is not. Yet on that page directly, outside slrpnk, the post is there. Visiting https://slrpnk.net/c/AskReddit@thelemmy.club is possible but shows no posts.

update

Past related defect → https://slrpnk.net/post/27305276/18013879

partially fixed

A node block I had forgotten about hid my own post from myself. Unblocking the node fixed that problem. But there are still several msgs unrelated to the previously blocked node that I cannot see /in the parent slrpnk thread/. I suspect there is a language settings defect.

confirmed - there are 2 different defects

Details about the language setting defect in the parent thread.

SDF is defederated from thelemmy.club. When an SDF user searches specifically for !mildlyinfuriating@thelemmy.club or !Android@thelemmy.club, the search tool gives “no results”.

This is a user-hostile act. Refusing the inform the user is an assault on the user’s dignity. We know the community exists. What happens when the Lemmy server is proactively defederated with is that it will not connect to the defederated node even to check if a community exists. That’s all fair enough. But the user should be informed. Not just that the node is defederated but also the rationale. That’s necessary for respecting the user’s dignity. It’s disrespectful to the user to regard them as unworthy of information.

What should happen

The search tool should respond with:

“Unable to verify the existence of !mildlyinfuriating on thelemmy.club because thelemmy.club is defederated. The reason it is defederated is: ‘the host is mismanaged by pro-Trumper bootlicking nutters’” (for example -- whatever the admin wants to enter).

Bonus points for overachievers

It would be extra useful if the Lemmy backend could periodically grab a dataset from a directory service like Lemmyverse. It could then use that information to perform better and give better information. The search tool could then say “the community exists according to our records, but …”

PDF layers can be created such that they display on the screen but are withheld when printing. This code should disable the OCG layers from printing:

\usepackage[printocg=never]{ocgx2}

When compiling a doc with the above and printing this way:

lp $mypdf

The layers still print. It’s unclear if latexpdf is failing to generate the PDF correctly (i.e. a bug in the ocgx2 pkg), or if the lp command is failing to treat the PDF correctly. It’s worth noting that the ocgx2 documentation is non-existent/minimal. It seems to be a fork of ocgx which extends ocg-p. The ocgx docs state generally that ocg-p options are supported.

cross-posted from: https://libretechni.ca/post/2238534

This is the thread:

https://libretechni.ca/post/2232241

The comment count is 3, but when I enter the thread I only find 2.

From a logged out browser, I can see 3 comments, thus the comment from @rako@tarte.nuage-libre.fr. Really bizarre because I have not configured my profile to block anything yet.

UPDATE: as someone pointed out, a profile setting for language was the culprit.

I wouldn’t exactly flip to “not a bug”, however, because the client should inform the user. The suppressed post should just be folded with a “(comment suppressed due to language preference)”.

And as a 2nd bug, the language parameter in the settings should make it clear what the setting does.

I tried to search for communites using the query string 'tea'. Got a flood of shit about steam.

Bug 1: It’s first of all a shame that it’s not smart enough to rank whole-word matches to the top. Communies simply named “tea” have a low rank and some do not even make it to the first page.

Bug 2: We have no word boundary expression. I should be able to search for '\<tea\>' to limit to whole words.

Maybe the devs worry that the modern day population can’t handle that.

Bug 3: Certainly we should at least be able to do 'tea -steam' to nix bad results. That query finds nothing, so apparently it is ANDing the two conditions and also treating the '-steam' literally.

Icons for PDF annotations need to pop out with high visibility so you can see them stand apart from the main content. So PDFs often specify colors like bright yellow, fuschia, or dark blue. This is sensible. But then in Okular clicking on the annotation icon results in a pop-up note that uses that same foreground color of the icon as the background of the note with black text on top of it. It’s horrible for reading the text.

I produced a PDF using LaTeX and the pdfcomment package. I specified no color, as I do not want to control or dictate to readers what color is used. So it’s left to the viewer to choose sensible colors. Okular chose dark blue for the icon (good). But then when expanding the icon we have black text on a dark blue background. This is a terrible default.

There is some mention somewhere that Okular colors can be changed in a Qt config tool of some kind, but the problem is that the color of the icon and the color of the note’s background is the same configuration setting.

Or am I missing something?

Update: If you click on a pop-up annotation, the color is unreadable. But if you hover over the icon, the popup has a reasonable light gray background. Hovering does not always work though.. it doesn’t seem to sense the mouse position, depending on what the last action was.

I discovered this accidentally. Lemmy has a vuln (for lack of a better term) whereby an end user who has no server-side visibility can see the vote of mods or admins.

If you post, then “delete” your post using the lemmy client (stock or alexandrite), it does not really delete your post. It just hides it and shows a hard-to-notice tiny red trashbin next to the title. So it’s hidden from normal users but apparently not mods and admins who then vote on it because the deleted indicator is hard to notice. Posts in this state should really have a red background or something to make the hidden state louder.

Strictly speaking, there is still a degree of secrecy/repudiation because you don’t generally know if a vote comes from the mod or admin.

Bug 2: Another defect is involved: I posted a dupe because there was no instant indication that pressing “Create” had effect. After waiting a bit, I clicked “Create” again. But really it was just slow to process. So a dupe post was created. I deleted the dupe immediately because I suspected there would be a dupe. But then half a day later, my deleted post had an up vote, which could only come from someone who can see deleted posts.

Bug 3: It’s certainly a good feature that authors can still see their own deleted posts and I would not change that. But in the specific case of dupes, it would be useful to have a “destroy” feature which would actually remove the data after so many confirmation steps.

(Apologies for publicly posting a link into Cloudflare’s walled-garden, but archive.org comes up empty.)

The linked bug report shows that astonishing but deliberate regular expression treatment was reported 9 years ago. Still today I spent time trying to work out why my regular expression was not matching only to find that the dev hi-jacked the meaning of ^ and $ for another purpose. Man page still neglects to warn users.

SDF went down over a month ago because they ran out of disk space. I’m calling this a software security bug for needless loss of availability. It should have only been a partial loss of availability.

What should have happened

When the server detects disk space getting low, it should not just crap out. It should switch into a read-only mode. In read-only mode, users can still login and access existing content. New posts, comments, and edits are disabled in this state. The node should signal to other fedi nodes that connect that it is in read-only mode.

Perhaps most importantly, users could then be informed /in band/ that the server still lives. We often see fedi nodes simply vanish out of the pure blue and users are at a spontaneous loss of data and relationships. Logging into a read-only server would settle some nerves.. keep ppls blood pressure down.

Some admins disable downvotes for their whole server (e.g. beehaw). It’s useful indeed considering the software is otherwise incapable of thwarting silent downvotes. But it’s too blunt as just a server-wide option.

For some communities downvotes are appropriate and some are not. The infosec.pub admin may want downvotes to be broadly possible, but it makes little sense for a community like !isdown@infosec.pub. And particularly off or obnoxious for a so-called “safe space” like !humanrights@lemmy.sdf.org.

The only Android app I could find which advertises having offline capability is FOSS Weather, which is now archived and no longer on f-droid.org. When I launch it, there is just a blank screen and a menu. It’s wholly broken apart from the menu, but useless with just a config UI.

The instance who hosts me (slrpnk) defaults to Alexandrite, a 3rd party Lemmy web client. It’s a good move considering how unstable and buggy the stock Lemmy client is.

But it has a bizarre defect. Most of the time, all the icons for actions below comments on the notifications page are blank. On some rare occasions they will mysteriously render. But most of the time I have to guess on the position of an icon, hover, and wait for a text popup. Upvotes and downvotes are indistinguishable.

There are also times when the whole page is a disaster and I must do a hard-refresh. The refreshing causes the server to work harder, and also often triggers slrpnk’s anti-bot javascript test (which is incidental and unrelated to Alexandrite).

This problem is specific to the stock Lemmy client web app. When I visit !foss_requests@libretechni.ca, there is a NEXT button at the bottom. Clicking it simply refreshes the current page and does not advance to the next page. This problem manifests in both Firefox and Chromium based browsers.

Worth noting that other clients (e.g. alexandrite) work fine.

When I visit this page to see blocked instances:

https://slrpnk.net/instances

There is no column containing the rationale. WTF? Rationale is far more interesting than the software and version, and they took enough care to make fields for that.

I notice that if I copy text from either Dino (an XMPP app) or Nheko (matrix client) and paste it into either Ungoogled Chromium or Firefox, the whole browser and all tabs freezes.

WTF. Firefox and UC both claim to have containerized sessions. Every tab should be separate and immune from interference by the others. But if I paste something from either Dino or Nheko into one tab, it fucks whole fuckin’ kit and caboodle. Browser is dead frozen. Must be killed.

It’s likely some kind of Wayland fuck up. Probably some botched interplay between wayland and X11. I did not really dig into it.

The simple concept of linking to a PDF has been enshitified in so many ways of fuckery lately. The linked page has a download link that triggers the fetching of some JavaScript download manager garbage that demands agreeing to, idk, probably something that legally fucks you in a variety of ways.

But what the browser does is worth considering. Chromium and Firefox both show NOTHING when hovering over the hyperlink. Normally I expect to see an URL at the bottom of the window when hovering on something clickable. The browsers do nothing.

Is that a smart design? Shouldn’t the browser signal to the user “clicking this executes JavaScript?”

The stock lemmy web client has had this annoying shitty bug as long as I remember. Not sure how or why ppl have tolerated it for so long.

I started this thread:

https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/52956979

Then I wanted to cross-post to !IRC@lemmy.cafe. The first defect is that it’s impossible to enter the full address of the target forum. Lemmy forces us to enter only part of the name and choose from a pull-down list. Then from there it’s not even smart enough to prioritise the user’s subscribed forums to the top. So entering “IRC” gives a long list of circle jerking forums, while the more simple match !IRC@lemmy.cafe is pushed off the list.