Posts by Dani

I wrote an About page for Dazah today, and was really hoping to get some opinions and feedback.

https://www.dazah.com/welcome/about

Thanks so much in advance!!

If you cant find the cause, can you maybe just remove the url from that post? That would at least solve the issue for our site.

From my perspective, the issue related to your site is already [temporarily] resolved: you added our IP address to your firewall, and the problem is mitigated for the time being. I am much more concerned with why it is happening, how widespread the issue is, and potentially how many other websites are being affected by this bug.

I still haven't, I'm really sorry. I can't find anything in our logs that is showing that we are attempting to retrieve your site, and the databse query is not picking up on your URL either.

I've also seen many times where a newbie will mark their own new thread solved because they don't realize what the button means.

Temporary fix: YYYY-MM-dd format

Sorry!

Or just click in the search box while anywhere within the Web Development forum, and PHP will be one of the choices to come up.

We've been going back and forth. Seems to be a bug on my side but I can't get to the bottom of it.

It was me. :) The little quotation mark icons at the beginning and end of the quote are broken now though. But at least it's not gone.

Incidentally I tried adding a semi-colon at the end of the UPDATE statement (before the END) but that didn't seem to work either. :-/

I have no experience with triggers. I did some Googling and came across something like this:

CREATE TRIGGER members_username
    AFTER UPDATE ON members
    FOR EACH ROW BEGIN
        update posts
        set posts.username = NEW.username
        where posts.userid = NEW.userid
    END

I'm getting an error message saying:

You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'END' at line 9

That seems more like what I need then.

P.S. Any advantages to a normalized database vs denormalized for an extremely read-heavy, write-light database?

But how do you tell it that the username column should update?

My database is denormalized.

Funnily enough, I have absolutely no experience with MySQL foreign keys. I'd like to change that :) My database schema is rather complicated, and I have a lot of work ahead of me, but let's simplify things.

Suppose I have

Members Table:
id (PRIMARY KEY)
username
first_name
last_name
company
etc

Posts Table:
id (PRIMARY KEY)
message
member_id
member_username
etc

So now what I'd like to do is find a way to use foreign keys (I don't even know if this is possible or what it's designed for) to tell MySQL that posts.member_id relates back to members.id and posts.member_username relates back to members.username. Therefore, if someone changes their username and their record in the members table is updated, all of the posts by the member (whose records also include the username) get updated simultaneously as well.

Doable?

Looks as if Firefox doesn't support HTML5 date picker

Time for me to come up with a backup plan.

Yes.

What is the username in question?

Hi,

Unfortunately I don't have the ability to go into a deleted user's profile in order to make the change. Deleted profiles are entirely inaccessible.

I've sent you a private message. You should be able to reply to it.

Hi,

Firstly, you can choose to disable ads from within your member settings.

Secondly, we don't have any cron jobs running 25 after the hour that attempt to request any external pages.

We do have a cron job that attempts to fetch external pages that people link to within posts to ensure that the link is valid (so that we aren't linking to broken pages). However, it certainly doesn't re-check the same link every hour, and like I said, none of the cron jobs we have related to links run 25 after the hour.

Can you please send me a private message with the full URL so that I can investigate this further please?

1. Newbies do not have the ability to make up tags ad hoc. They can only use existing tags.
2. The new tag picker I think does a good job at encouraging the reuse of existing tags over creating new ones. Unfortunately, the tag picker is very new, and the vast majority of anarchy and messiness is from before its creation. I agree there is a bit of a cleaning up process from years of abusing the tag system when it was not a primary means of navigation. However, I do believe that, after the initial clean-up, it won't be a big concern moving forward.
3. Moderators have the abilty to merge tags that are synonyms.

Darn CSS columns are really causing me trouble.

Yeah, you should be seeing the HTML 5 date picker as opposed to a standard form textbox. My research indicated that nearly all people have web browsers that support the date picker nowadays. :(

I fixed your formatting by adding a blank line beneath each quote. This is how Markdown works. It's not unique to us nor unique to our recent design change.

Try YYYY-MM-dd

(Sorry, are you using an older web browser?)

Ddanbe, I think he's asking about DaniWeb's donation system. You can donate $1 or more per month, and every question you start (unlimited questions) as long as you are an active donor comes with benefits such as being seen by more people, etc.

There's room next to the rep count (or is that rap sheet?)

Not at all resolutions. Perhaps I'll do a username in bold or something, but that's not necesarily going to make sense unless people know. Perhaps a hover popup that has a member's badges and post count. Let me think about it and I'll try to get something implemented within the next couple of days.

I can never win. Either people yell at me for having signatures too big with badges taking up too much room, or people yell at me for trying to condense the signatures into the little line above the post.

https://www.daniweb.com/tags/geeks-lounge

We needed to move away from just being another regular ole forum because forums have been dying for years. We needed to innovate to keep relevant.

We've now essentially transformed from multiple forum categories housing hundreds of pre-defined forums and subforums ... into fewer than 20 forum categories + forums housing an infinite number of tags about an infinite number of topics.

Fewer pre-defined categories. More possibilities.

I changed the name just the other day from Web Applications because people were thinking it was for web development related questions. I forgot to flush the cache.

The Forum ID # for Web/Cloudy Applications is recycled from the forum ID # for C++. Let me investigate why your C++ endorsements are still lingering and haven't been migrated to Software Development.

You can also type C# into the top search.

jQuery is a front-end javascript library. You are trying to load it the way you would load a PHP CodeIgniter library. Put this in the HEAD section of your HTML template:

<script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.4/jquery.min.js"></script>

I think this is fixed.

I reduced the font size a tiny bit (I still want to keep it bigger than code within regular posts), and I forced the tab stop to 4. (Not sure why it was defaulting to 8??) That should do it.

I honestly think the problem is the tab stop is 8 spaces instead of the normal 4. Not sure why that is. I'll investigate after I get all of the tag moderation stuff done that I'm in the middle of.

There's no way it's a bot though. It has to be being hand-submitted.

Seems being the operative word, because it's the same size as it always was. It just looks bigger in this design for some reason.

The problem with the code snippet you linked me to is exacerbated in that the poster used 8 spaces for each tab stop, and intended 7 tabs in. In my head, there are ~80 columns/line, and he has 60 columns of spaces. I'm happy with the font choice, so I'll see if that one snippet is an anomaly. If there are others like it, then I'll reduce the font.

You only need to submit a code snippet 1% of the time, and typically only regulars do so, so it made sense to me to clean up the interface a bit.

Yes, that's always been our functionality. We don't keep track, in our database, what the last post you saw was.

Sorry, I agree with Google. Your site is not loading for me.

Correction. You need 5 posts + 5 days of membership. And, not or.

As it is, we don't get much bot spam because of the CAPTCHA system I have in place, which also employs some Javascript trickery behind the scenes.

Remember the vBulletin days?

No, I didn't fix it yet. Statistics like that just get automatically recounted once a day to fix inconsistencies in the database (since we don't use database transactions with rollbacks).

Here's the thing.

You need to get past the initial sandbox (5 posts or 5 days of membership, whichever comes last) in order for the ability to create new tags. First time posters can't tag their article with My-company-name. It's always been that way.

But, as a simple textbox, it was frustrating for newbies, because they had no idea what tags existed already or what they could use, so everytime they started a thread and entered tags, they'd get an error message saying they couldn't use the tags. And they didn't have a clear grasp of why.

No problem. Tags were optional. So I just disabled the tags field for newbie posters, and life went on for the past year or so like that.

However, since tagging is no longer optional, I felt that we needed a better way to make it easy for newbies to understand our tagging system. So what I do for newbies is, instead of presenting them with an autocomplete textbox, I first make them choose the forum they want to post in, and then I present them with a list of the 20 most popular tags in that forum. Then, they can click up to 5 tags they want to add to their article. So far, it's been working out really well, because I've been keeping a close eye on whether there's been an increase/decrease in newbies starting threads, and what tags they are using.

For an example of how this works, the same system …

Davey, that's a design flaw in the UI. The tag cloud that appears at the bottom of the page, aside from not always being representative of just the tags the current article has been tagged with, but rather related tags based on the forum its in, and other tags in common, is heavily cached. I just successfully removed and then re-added the 'tags' tag to this article, and while the tag remained in the bottom tag cloud, it successfully removed itself from the list of tags (after the first post of the thread).

In the meantime, know that what you're doing is working, and it's just a UI glitch that needs updating.

Grr, ok.

It also really needs to be understood that our tagging system has already existed, primarily unmoderated, for years and years and years. There are already tens of thousands of tags in the system, not all of them that great. I think that since we're migrating over to making the tagging system a bigger part, a massive cleaning up of our existing tags is in order. We're essentially moving into a filthy house and then getting mad at people for not cleaning up after themselves. I'll work on manually cleaning up some of the tags in the database tonight, and tomorrow I'll code up functionality for moderators to browse/delete/merge tags.

And tag hell is already starting, someone created a "wow" tag for example.

I think we do a pretty decent job at encouraging the reuse of existing, relevant tags. I've been keeping a close eye on the threads posted by newbies and first time users to see if there is an increased level of confusion, and so far nothing seems any worse than normal.

But yes, unfortunately someone did hijack the WoW tag (a tag that's been in existance for many years for articles about World of Warcraft). Their thread was in a subforum of the Community Center, and because all of our Geeks' Lounge threads were moved up to that top level (which included all our wow discussions), our system presented the WoW tag as a suggestion.

having to type in a search string every time I enter the site to look for say Java topics, and then getting not just those but javascript as well (because Java is a substring of Javascript) is doubly irritating.

You shouldn't have to type anything. You shoudl just have to click in the box and select from the dropdown list. If you're on the homepage or somewhere generic, the list includes our top sections (java being one of them). If you are somewhere within our programming section, the list is even more focused.

Do you have a better alternative to offering an easy way of finding one of now thousands of categories the site covers?