We switched our main University Webmail service (30k users) to Roundcube on Monday:
https://webmail.hermes.cam.ac.uk/
On the whole the deployment has gone well (if we discount a foul up on my part which isn't relevant to this list).
Two issues have arisen:
First a number of people (in particular elderly, important, Professors) have complained about the fonts and colour scheme used by the Larry theme. In particular the fact that there is no way to increase the size of the font.
I don't suppose that plugins exist that would allow people to change the font size?
Failing that do people find that the Classic theme is considered an acceptable alternative? At the moment I have disabled that simply because the Larry theme is a better fit to our new University house style.
Secondly, a number of people report that Firefox (all the reports to date mention Firefox 22 on MacOS, but that may be a red herring) ships with a popup blocker enabled which blocks the "Send" button after a message has been composed:
http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/pop-blocker-settings-exceptions-troubles...
Firefox on my Linux workstation doesn't have any problems, even with the popup blocker enabled.
Slightly more alarmingly we have had one report (and only one report to date) where the Send button only works intermittently, which is harder to blame on a popup blocker. I don't suppose that anyone else on this list has had similar experiences?
For what it is worth: the memcache session storage seems to work just fine on a system of this scale so long as the patch that I submitted a few weeks back is applied (which Thomas Bruederli accepted and has applied as is to the GIT repository).
[To: and Cc: fixed manually to reverse RCU list's rude Reply-To: munging]
On 09.08.2013 11:55, David Carter wrote:
First a number of people (in particular elderly, important, Professors) have complained about the fonts and colour scheme used by the Larry theme. In particular the fact that there is no way to increase the size of the font.
???
Immediately upon reading the above (in my RoundCube window, in Firefox), I held down the Ctrl key and played with the mouse wheel. The font size changed up and down throughout the UI.
On Fri, 9 Aug 2013, Kaz Kylheku wrote:
On 09.08.2013 11:55, David Carter wrote:
First a number of people (in particular elderly, important, Professors) have complained about the fonts and colour scheme used by the Larry theme. In particular the fact that there is no way to increase the size of the font.
???
Immediately upon reading the above (in my RoundCube window, in Firefox), I held down the Ctrl key and played with the mouse wheel. The font size changed up and down throughout the UI.
Yes, sorry: I meant changing the default inside Roundcube. Ctrl-+ is already being used as a workaround (although this is a little more awkward in our case as people are directed to one of three HTTP servers on login).
However if an eldery Professor with poor eye sight has to do this on each new computer that they walk up to then they will conclude that it is a problem with Roundcube, rather than a problem with their eye sight.
I guess that I could knock together a larry-large skin, which is identical to larry but with larger fonts.
On Fri, 9 Aug 2013, David Carter wrote:
Slightly more alarmingly we have had one report (and only one report to date) where the Send button only works intermittently,
A bit of experimentation last night demonstrates that if someone clicks "Send" after a login session has expired then roundcube just sits there with a spinning "sending" icon at the bottom left.
The user doesn't get to see a popup alert to explain what has happened (although on the positive side it doesn't just throw away the message).
I imagine that is what is being reported here. While the KeepAlive stuff seems to be working, I imagine that it is quite common for people to close up their laptop and move to another room before continuing a message.
We are currently using the default:
// Session lifetime in minutes $rcmail_config['session_lifetime'] = 10;
which seemed sensible for permanently on connections.
I guess that I could increase that to an hour, or maybe two hours.
I am curious what other people use for session_lifetime, as this must be a fairly widespread problem for Roundcube deployments.
On 2013-08-09 23:20, David Carter wrote:
On Fri, 9 Aug 2013, David Carter wrote:
We are currently using the default:
// Session lifetime in minutes $rcmail_config['session_lifetime'] = 10;
which seemed sensible for permanently on connections.
I guess that I could increase that to an hour, or maybe two hours.
I am curious what other people use for session_lifetime, as this must be a fairly widespread problem for Roundcube deployments.
We have been using Roundcube as our default for several years, and have never heard any problem with this. I personally have closed my laptop on RC and moved to a different room without problem many times. Our session_lifetime is still set at the default '10'.
You mentioned that you have 3 servers running, I wonder if the loss of session is because when moving from place to place your users are changing servers? No idea if that's a possibility, as I have no experience with clustering of this type.
On Sat, 10 Aug 2013, Arne Berglund wrote:
You mentioned that you have 3 servers running, I wonder if the loss of session is because when moving from place to place your users are changing servers? No idea if that's a possibility, as I have no experience with clustering of this type.
No, logins sessions are attached to a single server (so the squirrelmail caching IMAP proxy can work to its best effect). The only particularly unusual thing about our setup is that we are using memcached for session storage, which Thomas indicated was new when I asked a few weeks back.
This means that sessions are expire immediately at the end of the session lifetime (plus a 60 second fudge factor that I have added) rather than being garbage collected asynchronously some time later.
However at the moment this is all just a best guess on my part to explain two reports of the Send button failing to respond, and my own observation that I see exactly the same effect if the session cache entry is left to expire. I could be barking up the wrong tree altogether.
On Fri, Aug 9, 2013 at 8:55 PM, David Carter dpc22@cam.ac.uk wrote:
We switched our main University Webmail service (30k users) to Roundcube on Monday:
https://webmail.hermes.cam.ac.uk/
On the whole the deployment has gone well (if we discount a foul up on my part which isn't relevant to this list).
Two issues have arisen:
First a number of people (in particular elderly, important, Professors) have complained about the fonts and colour scheme used by the Larry theme. In particular the fact that there is no way to increase the size of the font.
I don't suppose that plugins exist that would allow people to change the font size?
Failing that do people find that the Classic theme is considered an acceptable alternative? At the moment I have disabled that simply because the Larry theme is a better fit to our new University house style.
Increasing font size is a standard feature that every browser supports. Thus none of our default skins has such a functionality built in. But with the "extensible" skins it relatively easy to create a custom skin that supports this and still makes use of the templates and styles from the default skin.
~Thomas
On Sat, Aug 10, 2013 at 8:20 AM, David Carter dpc22@cam.ac.uk wrote:
On Fri, 9 Aug 2013, David Carter wrote:
Slightly more alarmingly we have had one report (and only one report to date) where the Send button only works intermittently,
A bit of experimentation last night demonstrates that if someone clicks "Send" after a login session has expired then roundcube just sits there with a spinning "sending" icon at the bottom left.
Hmm, sessions should not expire while somebody has an active window and is still typing a message. This is the real issue that needs to be investigated and resolved. But you already mentioned that the memcache fix is applied in your deployment, right?
The user doesn't get to see a popup alert to explain what has happened (although on the positive side it doesn't just throw away the message).
Wow, I didn't know that the a popup blocker also blocks inline HTML dialogs... The webmail should probably be white-listed in your Firefox installations.
I imagine that is what is being reported here. While the KeepAlive stuff seems to be working, I imagine that it is quite common for people to close up their laptop and move to another room before continuing a message.
Aha!
Saving the message as a draft will likely help these people even when the session expires. But we also have another "helper" planned for this: http://trac.roundcube.net/ticket/1488925
~Thomas
On 11/08/2013 17:02, Thomas Bruederli wrote:
Increasing font size is a standard feature that every browser supports. Thus none of our default skins has such a functionality built in. But with the "extensible" skins it relatively easy to create a custom skin that supports this and still makes use of the templates and styles from the default skin.
The Larry theme doesn't support browser text zoom very well. I tested in Firefox, with zoom set to only increase text size, and the theme does not grow gracefully.
The same with zooming everything (not just text), it works yes, but it creates the need for horizontal scrolling which makes it a pain to use (even at 1920 wide).
So really it needs work to say it supports the browser zoom features in a usable way.
Nigel
On 09.08.2013 23:06, David Carter wrote:
On Fri, 9 Aug 2013, Kaz Kylheku wrote:
On 09.08.2013 11:55, David Carter wrote:
First a number of people (in particular elderly, important, Professors) have complained about the fonts and colour scheme used by the Larry theme. In particular the fact that there is no way to increase the size of the font.
???
Immediately upon reading the above (in my RoundCube window, in Firefox), I held down the Ctrl key and played with the mouse wheel. The font size changed up and down throughout the UI.
Yes, sorry: I meant changing the default inside Roundcube. Ctrl-+ is already being used as a workaround (although this is a little more awkward in our case as people are directed to one of three HTTP servers on login).
However if an eldery Professor with poor eye sight has to do this on each new computer that they walk up to then they will conclude that it is a problem with Roundcube, rather than a problem with their eye sight.
Someone with poor eyesight will have trouble with every PC application that has a UI with text, and every web page.
The fonts in the default Roundcube theme aren't any smaller than anywhere else in the system.
Microsoft Windows allows you to increase the UI font size globally; does the Roundcube UI not respond to this?
There are also font size settings in Firefox (separate from the scale change via Ctrl-{+/-/wheel}.
On Sun, 11 Aug 2013, Thomas Bruederli wrote:
Hmm, sessions should not expire while somebody has an active window and is still typing a message. This is the real issue that needs to be investigated and resolved. But you already mentioned that the memcache fix is applied in your deployment, right?
Yes. Further experimentation yesterday does suggest a difference in behaviour between the memcache and normal database code.
If I click Send and the session has expired using memcache session storage the browser just hangs with a spinning "Sending" icons, which is what I reported yesterday. The same experiment using database session storage appears to send the message successfully (which I don't quite understand if the session has expired: is there special handling?) and then bounce the user to the login page with a "session has expired" error. I think that this is what you are expecting to happen here.
A related curiosity in the client side Javascript:
It looks like that if you click Send without any network connection at all (I disabled wireless on my laptop a lot while testing the the KeepAlive stuff yesterday) then you end up with a stuck Sending spinner. Which is fine: the browser can't do much else at this point. However none of the buttons in the Roundcube user interface respond if you restore the network connection and try again, which is a little concerning.
If I force a page reload and the session hasn't timed out then Roundcube carries on its merry way, but you have lost the current draft message.
I haven't tried a variety of clients. The problem might be specific to Chrome running on my Linux workstations. This might be where the helper app that you mentioned would step into the rescue.
I imagine that is what is being reported here. While the KeepAlive stuff seems to be working, I imagine that it is quite common for people to close up their laptop and move to another room before continuing a message.
Aha!
Looking at my logs, I'm pretty certain that this is what is going on, at least in the two cases reported to me so far: there is a longer gap between KeepAlives than I would expect.
This would have worked with our old Webmail application, so people haven't adapted their behaviour. My workaround was to increase session_lifetime to 4 hours, to match the old Webmail's behaviour.
On Sun, 11 Aug 2013, Thomas Bruederli wrote:
Increasing font size is a standard feature that every browser supports. Thus none of our default skins has such a functionality built in. But with the "extensible" skins it relatively easy to create a custom skin that supports this and still makes use of the templates and styles from the default skin.
I knocked together a small plugin which provides a drop down in the preferences offering three base font sizes:
Small : 11px (the standard setting from the Larry theme) Medium : 13px Large : 15px (the largest value which seems to be useful for me).
The plugin just pulls in an extra stylesheet of the form:
body { font-size: 13px; }
with extra fix ups to be added as required.
I still need to run some tests on different platforms to see what the knock on effects of messing with the font size are.
Half of hour of experimentation with the platforms available to me right now suggests that 13px works without ill effects, but that 15px really requires a large display to work. I do have to say that after comparing 11px, 13px and 15px, 11px does look very small.
My professors with poor eyesight also don't approve of the dark blue text on light blue background that Larry uses, but I can take much the same approach there. Presumably I will be able to move from local botch fixes using plugins to extensible skins at some point in the future?
Hello Mr. Carter,
Would it be possible for you to send me a copy of the plugin you developed for the font issue, or else direct me to its location within a repository?
Many thanks and Best Regards,
John
-- View this message in context: http://roundcube-webmail.10982.n7.nabble.com/New-Roundcube-Deployment-tp1111... Sent from the Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
-
Arne Berglund -
David Carter -
John -
Kaz Kylheku -
Nigel Peck -
Thomas Bruederli