ParanetOnline
The Site => Site Suggestions & Support => Topic started by: cstanley1976 on May 28, 2010, 11:43:23 PM
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first off i apologize if this is not the appropriate spot to post this. i didn't feel like private messaging Iago and bog him down with it was right.
the new chat feature is AWESOME! I've used a lot of different chat websites before and this one is one of the best i've ever used. easy to change rooms. has a nice interface. i love love love love it. will totally use it. and once more people start using it all the rooms will be in use too.
thank you thank you thank you. ;D ;) ::) :P
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It seems to be testing out pretty well. It doesn't handle server downtime well at all, but that's to be expected. :)
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It's good for what it is, but...yeah, it ain't my cup of tea. I like having threads I can come back to and see what folks were talking about, being able to coment on what a friend seven time zones away might've said at 2am my time, and just plain being able to multi-task on the internet without getting lost. A chat window like this one pretty much demands full attention, and most of the time that's just not something I can do.
I think there's much more value in having a board where people can just shoot the breeze and be dorks in a few threads rather than being restrictued to using a chat function. My $.02. :-\
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Pharaoh, the problem lies in the recent history of these boards. Persistence (i.e., posts that don't fade away over time) has led to MAJOR social problems from time to time in these forums; people have shown a terrible tendency to burrow down through the days and find something to piss themselves off over. *shrug* Much as I enjoy the general ability to have a continuing conversation that preserves itself over time, the mods have had to put out fire after fire because too many people just can't control themselves (all of us included, to be sure), and that's a real pain in the ass for an understaffed, volunteer group of mods.
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Consider it a blast shield to protect the forum from my growing urge to nuke it all from orbit (it's the only way to be sure).
I've had YET ANOTHER person take their time ON A FRIDAY FUCKING EVENING to re-re-re-report a post -- along with a nice big long goddamn rant about the moderation duties performed by my volunteer and largely uncompensated staff -- on a thread that is DEAD AND LOCKED AWAY. A post that's days old, in a thread that won't be allowed to revive.
In fact, the whole Angst Corner thing is likely to get flensed from existence shortly. It's encouraged people to be toxic and worse to CONTINUE TO GRIND AXES. I mean, for the love of the gods, people. There's an OIL SPILL THE SIZE OF NEW YORK on our national doorstep. EVERYTHING THAT'S SAID HERE IS LESS IMPORTANT THAN THAT.
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I like the chatroom. I'm hoping it will soak up some of the 15 or so threads that are pages and pages of:
*hug*
*hug back*
*glomp*
It gets hard to find anything worth looking at, and I prefer to do that sort of rapid fire posting in chatrooms. Chatrooms aren't for enduring discussions. They're for chatting ;) It's a nice room, too. Not overwhelming with features or flash that really just get annoying. (Well, my computer lives on mute. Can't speak to the sounds.)
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I Love THE NEW CHAT FEATURE YAY! WOO!
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Truthfully, Fred, I've been wondering why the Angst Corner has been allowed to live for this long, but that's another discussion entirely...
Still, I said my peace about the chat. I'll truly miss Mac's, and my Secret Hollowed Out Volcano in Weird. I hope something like the Mac's we all remember comes back - somehow I doubt we'd have all become friends with the late Bob in a chat, nor would we have all stood trembling at the threat of Helen's pun dumpster if not for the persistence of chatting threads.
I'm not claiming to have answers for the stupid things people do (like reporting a post in a dead, locked thread...I mean, really...). You can't fix stupid. I suppose there might not be a "right" answer, but I don't see myself spending much time in chat...that's just me, though.
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Mac's will likely come back, but in a reduced, more focused form. Silly stuff and positivity, great! Angst and touchy stuff, bad! One-liner posting avalanches --- hopefully taken to the damn chat room. If your signature is taller than your post, its usually a hint you didn't have that much to say. :)
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That I can get behind. Hmmm... *takes a look at his sig, then this post* I need about eight more sentences...hang on, I'll be back later to finish up...
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Mac's will likely come back, but in a reduced, more focused form. Silly stuff and positivity, great! Angst and touchy stuff, bad!
It's always good to have SOME sort of persistent-conversation place, what with all the differing time zones and work schedules represented in here. I think your condensed version could work well.
One-liner posting avalanches --- hopefully taken to the damn chat room. If your signature is taller than your post, its usually a hint you didn't have that much to say. :)
Hmph. I have a lot to say. I just don't feel the need to say it all at once. ;D
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If your signature is taller than your post, its usually a hint you didn't have that much to say. :)
Hah. I can think of some that almost never have that problem
Hmph. I have a lot to say. I just don't feel the need to say it all at once. ;D
I'm with Shecky on this one. ;D When I start topics, I post what I want to say, all of it. Which usually results in about three paragraphs of posits, thoughts. And, because I write it like an essay, I don't have much to do except direct those questioning me back to the title post for my arguments, which usually results in the thread dying. And I digress. Much like the threads in the spoilers section. ;)
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Mac's will likely come back, but in a reduced, more focused form. Silly stuff and positivity, great! Angst and touchy stuff, bad! One-liner posting avalanches --- hopefully taken to the damn chat room. If your signature is taller than your post, its usually a hint you didn't have that much to say. :)
/looks down at signature.
ouch.
quack.
:'(
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I should mention that we have a sig size guideline: It shouldn't be any taller than 5 lines of text, or 75-80 pixels (with the exception of Remember Bob sig icons). Also, avatars should be less than 125x125 pixels, with the standard 100x100 being preferable.
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/looks down at signature.
ouch.
quack.
:'(
Awww *notices his own sig* Ooops....
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I love the new Chat thing. I have to say, though, I bet it's going to put a massive dent in postings. I think conversations are usually preferable to notes, for most people.
Of course, this might only kill threads like Weird, where people aren't really talking about any specific topic to begin with. And since Weird is like some terrifying, forum-eating monster, I suppose that could be a good thing. Was that the idea behind Chat in the first place?
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;D
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One thing I've noticed with the chat is that there are some members that continually change their names. Once every minute, at some points.
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One thing I've noticed with the chat is that there are some members that continually change their names. Once every minute, at some points.
If people overuse or abuse a feature in the chat, they can be sure I'll be investigating how to remove that feature. :)
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i like that we can still chat to eachother
thank you iago
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Is there any way we can be able to open more than one channel (at the same time)? The different ones are kind of pointless right now because no one ever goes on anything but the public one. The only way to get a coordinated group of people in one of the channels would be to keep popping back and forth inviting people, and then you'd continually have to do that to make sure that if people came in you could give them the heads up about where everyone is.
Another idea for if you follow through with that (I'm not even sure if this is possible) is that you could only make the dice feature available in the games closet, because it's getting insanely annoying in the public channel.
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Not possible.
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Is there any way we can be able to open more than one channel (at the same time)? The different ones are kind of pointless right now because no one ever goes on anything but the public one. The only way to get a coordinated group of people in one of the channels would be to keep popping back and forth inviting people, and then you'd continually have to do that to make sure that if people came in you could give them the heads up about where everyone is.
But that's precisely how we handled it back in my day, when the internet was a strung-together net of tin cans. :D Seriously, if we wanted to discuss something that was verboten in that room, we either took it to private chat or to another room entirely, and if we wanted latecomers to know where we were, we had to have a designated person popping back and forth to message the original room.
It's not hard.
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Is there any way we can be able to open more than one channel (at the same time)? The different ones are kind of pointless right now because no one ever goes on anything but the public one. The only way to get a coordinated group of people in one of the channels would be to keep popping back and forth inviting people, and then you'd continually have to do that to make sure that if people came in you could give them the heads up about where everyone is.
Another idea for if you follow through with that (I'm not even sure if this is possible) is that you could only make the dice feature available in the games closet, because it's getting insanely annoying in the public channel.
With the dice rolling, some people who continue doing it have said that if you ask, they'll stop. Because I guess some people don't consider it to be a sticking rule unless Fred says it in his big red moderator voice. Also, there is an option to ignore people, if it gets to be that annoying.
My only complaint so far is that people using the different styles will use fonts to match the one they use, but which is very difficult to read on other styles. Like bright yellow/blue/green being good for the darker/black styles, but headache inducing on lighter styles.
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I use the subblack2 theme, and have found that ALL fonts stay the off-white/yellow color, so to mitigate the color issue. So I haven't experienced the color issue. Of course, it could also be dependent upon the web browser you use as well as OS.
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I use the subblack2 theme, and have found that ALL fonts stay the off-white/yellow color, so to mitigate the color issue. So I haven't experienced the color issue. Of course, it could also be dependent upon the web browser you use as well as OS.
Is that with colors enabled? If not, the colors will stay the same. But for myself, I use the colors to keep track of who's saying what.
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Since all the computer stuff is way over my head, would it be impossible or just really annoying to erase traditional threads after 30/60/90 days? That would fix the diggers, maybe. The chat thing is fun, but has almost no history.
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Is that with colors enabled? If not, the colors will stay the same. But for myself, I use the colors to keep track of who's saying what.
Ya know, I dunno. :P I'll check it.
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Since all the computer stuff is way over my head, would it be impossible or just really annoying to erase traditional threads after 30/60/90 days? That would fix the diggers, maybe. The chat thing is fun, but has almost no history.
Really annoying. There's essentially one person doing the regular code-type work on the boards, and he's got a life. I think it's pretty reasonable that he wants the boards to be as low-hassle as possible for him - I know I'd prefer it that way if I were holding the bag.
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Really annoying. There's essentially one person doing the regular code-type work on the boards, and he's got a life. I think it's pretty reasonable that he wants the boards to be as low-hassle as possible for him - I know I'd prefer it that way if I were holding the bag.
That's why I asked. Never mind.
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That's why I asked. Never mind.
Hey, you can't know if you don't ask.
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Hey, you can't know if you don't ask.
You can /experiment\ ;D
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We're *also* going to be giving most community topics about a 90 day window for inactivity before they go away -- but that's a manual (and now that I'm doing it, tedious) process and probably won't be done with high consistency. Pruning makes the database leaner, which will help the site function better.
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We're *also* going to be giving most community topics about a 90 day window for inactivity before they go away -- but that's a manual (and now that I'm doing it, tedious) process and probably won't be done with high consistency. Pruning makes the database leaner, which will help the site function better.
Ouch. There's no way to add automatic topic pruning? Or is it just that doing so would prune off inactive topics that need to be kept like the rules, stickies, etc. ? If it's the latter, I'm sure something could be figured out to make it work and thus easier. But if it's just not available, you might want to look into it (or better, I'll look into it and provide links :P), I'm 99% sure we had automatic pruning set up on the forum I ran for my last MMO Guild.
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I've written a perl script that'll take care of 90-95% of the job, actually. I just need to get the all-clear from Pris so I can point it at the other boards outside of the Community area.
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I've written a perl script that'll take care of 90-95% of the job, actually. I just need to get the all-clear from Pris so I can point it at the other boards outside of the Community area.
Ah, ok. That makes more sense :P Just for future reference though, what SMF version are you using? I assume it's 2.0?
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Ah, ok. That makes more sense :P Just for future reference though, what SMF version are you using? I assume it's 2.0?
I wouldn't make that assumption. The 2.x line is still all "release candidate" with its versions. Not ready for primetime, for my taste. :)
If you look at the bottom of the page you'll see the version we're on! :)
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I wouldn't make that assumption. The 2.x line is still all "release candidate" with its versions. Not ready for primetime, for my taste. :)
If you look at the bottom of the page you'll see the version we're on! :)
Ah, duh, I probably should have checked more thoroughly (brain fart) :P Anyways, I was going through the mod list for various SMF versions. A lot of good stuff there. But it's well.. a lot :P
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Does the board by board purge built into SMF not work? I've never tried to use it on my board. Or is that what you mean by manual?
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Does the board by board purge built into SMF not work? I've never tried to use it on my board. Or is that what you mean by manual?
It doesn't appear to work when you have many thousands of topics with hundreds of thousands of messages. Nor, even, on a board with a much smaller set than that. It ran out of memory, and looked like it had removed a number of topics, but when I ran "recount forum statistics", all the topics re-appeared. So I had to make a perl script that did the job for me, partly by itemizing the task into a series of smaller queries and delete statements.
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Wow. *bows to your awesome*
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Some parts of this can (and should) be done more elegantly, but this is the script.
#!/usr/local/bin/perl
$time = time();
$timeago90 = $time - ( 24*60*60*90 ) ; # 90 days ago
$timeago360 = $time - ( 24*60*60*360 ) ; # 360 days ago
$boards90 = "41,42,1,40,28,39,37,36"; # comma delimited list of board IDs that have a 90 day expiration
$boards360 = "22";
# ($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday,$isdst) = localtime(time);
# $year -= 1;
# $timeago = timelocal($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year);
use DBI;
# Replace with your connect information
$dbh = DBI->connect("DBI:mysql:DATABASENAME:localhost","DATABASEUSER","DATABASEPASSWORD");
# The prefix for my boards is "jbc_". Yours is likely different. You'd need to change that prefix wherever you find it below.
print "Beginning 90 day scan\n\n";
$sth = $dbh->prepare(qq(
select b.id_topic, m.subject, m.posterTime
from jbc_topics b, jbc_messages m
where b.id_last_msg = m.id_msg
and b.id_board IN ( $boards90 )
and b.isSticky = 0
and m.posterTime < $timeago90
));
$rv = $sth->execute;
while ( $row = $sth->fetchrow_hashref ) {
push(@topics,$row->{id_topic});
print "$row->{id_topic} ($row->{subject}) " . scalar(localtime($row->{posterTime})) . "\n";
}
print "\n\nBeginning 360 day scan\n\n";
$sth = $dbh->prepare(qq(
select b.id_topic, m.subject, m.posterTime
from jbc_topics b, jbc_messages m
where b.id_last_msg = m.id_msg
and b.id_board IN ( $boards360 )
and b.isSticky = 0
and m.posterTime < $timeago360
));
$rv = $sth->execute;
while ( $row = $sth->fetchrow_hashref ) {
push(@topics,$row->{id_topic});
print "$row->{id_topic} ($row->{subject}) " . scalar(localtime($row->{posterTime})) . "\n";
}
print $#topics + 1, " topics found\n\n";
print "\n\nBEGINNING TERMINATION in 5 seconds\n\n";
# Pause five seconds so you can kill the script from actually deleting topics. Point of no return after the break...
sleep 5;
foreach $topic ( @topics ) {
print "Expunging topic $topic\n";
$sth = $dbh->prepare(qq(
delete from jbc_messages where id_topic = $topic
));
$rv = $sth->execute;
$sth = $dbh->prepare(qq(
delete from jbc_topics where id_topic = $topic
));
$rv = $sth->execute;
}
print "Now that this is done, you need to 'Recount all forum stats' to get the boards to look right!\n";
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Some parts of this can (and should) be done more elegantly, but this is the script.
CODE MONKEY ALERT! RAISE SHIELDS!