New Message Board Software

Josh Cryer · 2005-07-24 03:04:32

I locked the old thread because it had a lot of, well, redundant discussion going on. Please continue here. If you find any problems with the new software (that isn't password related) let me know here. If you'd like any enhancements to be made, let me know here. I'll try to answer any other questions you might have.

An update on the email notification feature which is still slightly buggy; I'll work on it some more this weekend, and change how it displays quotes and whatnot.

Rxke · 2005-07-24 06:17:26

One question, one request (no, two)

Q: what's up with the 'ranking' of posters? I see active, pioneer, regular... members, but not sure that's related to # of posts, surely someone like, say Yang Liwei (approx 500 posts) is an 'active member,' not a regular? (And why is Clark not ranked? :shock: )

Req:
1) "view posts since last visit/mark all topics read" etc. maybe atop of every subsection? I find myself travelling a lot back and forth to the fronpage solely to use those functions...

2) more, silly, emoticons, puhleez!

clark · 2005-07-24 11:38:37

Josh,

I was reviewing the PM records sent to the email box, and I was wondering if you were aware that they all come from your email account.

The PM's from various people will list their Username in the text of the email, but the email notification looks to be coming from you.

How exactly did you hack this?

Josh Cryer · 2005-07-24 15:01:54

Rxke, hmm, you're right about the post rankings, I just arbitrarily set them, and they're totally wrong, give me an idea what rank would be applicable to what post count. I thought 250 posts was regular, and 500 was active, but I'm not totally sure about that. 3000 is pioneer. I need one for 5000 since we have members with that many posts.

"view posts since last visit/mark all topics read"

Not a problem, just need to edit the templates to reflect that. It's a common request on the phpBB forums, I was gunna do it eventually.

"more, silly, emoticons, puhleez!"

Okay, okay! But you'll have to click "View more Emoticons" once I add them. Today? Maybe tonight? I need to get to clark's request first because it's keeping some people from registering.

clark, I have my email in the "return address" of the forum, it lets me diagnose bad email accounts and stuff, however, this is kind of annoying because I get returned PM's and it seems gmail is banned from certain email servers, I need to set up a forums@newmars.com (I wasn't going to, but I've gotten 3-4 bounced emails so far, all "recipient rejected," but they were just because of someone watching a topic, today one was someone trying to register, so I guess that warrents it).

clark · 2005-07-24 16:43:36

Merely in the interest of science here...

Are you able to read the PM's? Me, I don't care. But understanding how this process works might be important to others.

Josh Cryer · 2005-07-24 17:26:26

Nope, I could read the ones that bounced to me (and honestly, I didn't care to), but I can't read the emails that were sent, they just had my email as the return address, which is why it was getting rejected by some ISPs. The return address and the sender origin weren't the same (that's a common thing with spammers). If you look at the "Recieved from" field in the email headers, you'll see it says thuule.pair.com, and not gmail.com, hopefully it'll say newmars.com in it, now.

Josh Cryer · 2005-07-25 03:37:16

Rxke, fixed the vew posts feature thingy. Let me know how it looks to you.

BTW, I'm rebuilding the search database for the next 6-7 hours or slow, so the site may be a bit slow as you browse and post, don't worry too much about it. You probably noticed that searches were coming up rather... slim. Well, that's why. The old posts weren't in the search tables.

Rxke · 2005-07-25 04:18:05

/tinfoil hat mode on/

What! You been watching me searching stuff!!!!

/tinfoil hat mode off/

Heh, I was about to comment on that, search being a bit 'meagre' :mrgreen:

re: the vieew thingy: thank you!

Josh Cryer · 2005-07-25 05:38:17

Okay, we. Won't build the search tables right now. (Not sure if that was my fault or if the server was just going through some routine procedure, but, erm, yeah. Sorry folks!)

BBL.

clark · 2005-07-25 05:42:19

And in the silence I said, "Oh lord, what have you done now Josh."

Rxke · 2005-07-25 19:01:19

I see we can now opt post topics as stickies...
Isn't that a decision you'd rater leave to the moderators? I mean, if everyone starts posting stickies, the whole board will be stickies only in no time...

Or did I get moderator powers inadvertedly? :shock:

clark · 2005-07-25 19:20:32

ewww. The board is -sticky-.

Josh Cryer · 2005-07-25 21:29:00

clark, heh, I really doubt it was my fault, but I did go into panic mode for sure (like how if you accidently delete a file you frantically search for a way to recover it). Went and installed phpMyAdmin, and the SQL server wasn't responding (it would take more than a few thousand queries a minute to take down an SQL server), so I breathed a little, but wasn't satisified until it came back up.

Rxke, stop pointing out the bugs! I hate you! Just kidding. I noticed that as soon as I installed the Calendar mod, and I cannot for the life of me find the checkbox to turn that off. Just an an epiphany that it's probably in the forum permissions, so I'll go look now.

Freaking Admin control panel is so complicated.

clark · 2005-07-25 21:35:13

Damnit!

Okay, so I need to work on this whole logging in thing, apparently.

Cause either a guest beat me to it with the eaxact same post, or I done did not sign in.

So yeah, what he said.

Josh Cryer · 2005-07-25 22:05:27

Uh huh, it's probably you guys' fault for doing searches while the rebuild was going on. C'mon, you know you did it.

Rxke · 2005-07-26 02:11:00

That's called -ahem- stress-testing. Lots of people get paid for doing that, you know?

When I saw "server shutting down" coming up on my screen, I could very vividly feel a perturbance in the force, like a thousand Mars-freaks screaming "noooooooo!", then, nothing...

(Yea, yea, all messed up citation, not very into the starwars franchice, I am.)

Josh Cryer · 2005-07-26 05:33:56

Hehe, still haven't fully rebuilt the search tables (though they seemed to get 28 thousand posts last time we tried), but you ought to have plenty of results if you try it. I'll rebuild them again sometime when it's dead around here, I was kind of busy last night to do that.

idiom · 2005-07-27 03:21:22

I am soo happy. Mostly about the little orange pages that show up when a post is new, indicating I haven't read it. Saves a lot of time that does...

Josh Cryer · 2005-07-27 06:40:47

Glad you like it idiom, just a warning, though, if you sign out for more than 24 hours, all your posts are marked "viewed" even when they have not been. I'm working on a patch for this, but it's ridiculously elaborate, and doesn't sit well with some of the other mods I have done.

I rebuilt the search database last night. So, for example, you can http://www.newmars.com/forums/search.ph … posts]view all my posts, and http://www.newmars.com/forums/viewtopic … =#159]find the last one (or first one, depending on how you look at it), pick out a phrase from that post, and search for it, and it will pop up within a few seconds.

Josh Cryer · 2005-07-28 10:50:30

phpBB critical error, Could not connect to the database.

This occurs when we have a lot of activity going on here, or the host itself is getting swamped with connections. I will email our host to make a special case for NewMars since we have more activity than other sites usually do. 20k hits a day is pretty impressive.

So if it happens, just reload, it'll go away.

Josh Cryer · 2005-07-28 16:40:20

Someone, or some thing, is doing massive searches on the forum. This has been causing the SQL timeouts today. I am turning off search capablity for Guest users. Sorry Guest users, but you will now have to register to do that.

clark · 2005-07-28 16:42:25

Obviously an attempt to find intelligent life here.

And the search continues...

Josh Cryer · 2005-07-28 16:46:12

Probably mindless spambots that search for appropriate topics to spam, without realizing that they need to register to post. Though I'm not sure. I didn't get a chance to grab any IPs. I load up phpMyAdmin, and, once it actually loaded, there were several dozen search queries going on. It was very very weird.

clark · 2005-07-28 16:50:16

Probably mindless spambots that search for appropriate topics to spam,

I shall remember this the next time I do a search.

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