Posts by Dani

> I wish I enjoyed the luxury of having defects detected in the field for free by testers willing to push the boundaries of a programmer's efforts to improve the source

There's a difference between detecting a bug and telling the programmer so they can fix it and detecting a bug and exploiting it and letting the programmer find out on his/her own that there's a bug when they realize their code has already been exploited.

> There were several threads over several years pointing out issues, and they seemed to fall on deaf ears.

Rashakil accomplished more in a couple hours of festive hackery than in years of diplomacy.

I have always read all feedback passed my way, regardless of whether I've decided to implement everything ever suggested. However, never once has someone brought a bug to my attention that I didn't fix within the day. Had someone simply brought to my attention the idea that someone could go through the same 5 people over and over again in one day I would have done something about it, but no one ever did that. I can give you a 100% guarantee that if someone suggested that such a bot could be designed, the problem would have been fixed within the day. Instead they chose to just create a bot and set it wild before ever approaching me first.

I just find the whole thing incredibly disrespectful because it's done despite deliberately knowing that you're crapping on everything I've built over the past couple of years just for the sake of some cheap laughs.

As I said, in the greater scheme of things, these types of actions should only be done by those who have already exhausted all conventional channels to get their point across and still aren't being heard - and most likely not even then. It's just all very disrespectful and distasteful and very offensive at a personal level.

Addendum: I don't think that the poll you have for this thread is very fair. It asks the question if whether Pointing Out Issues (Even If Annoying to Admins) is good or bad. I am a huge advocate for constructive criticism and taking in all opinions and I encourage people to point out issues even if I get annoyed that people go on and on about ideas I don't like or if it's annoying because it's a lot of extra work to fix the problems. In that context, I would vote that it's a good thing to let the admins know how you feel even if you think they'll disagree with you (hey, you never know till you ask) or you're constantly annoying them with suggestion after suggestion. I would have voted 'good' if I wasn't aware of the events you were really talking about. In fact, this poll only makes sense in context to those who actually were witnesses to the reputation and IRC events. For that reason, I think the poll is totally biased.

Regarding the reputation spam ...

As if you had to guess, my take on it is that I am very against doing these things. It could have been just as effective to have come to me privately or posted some feedback saying, "Ya know, you can do so-and-so and that would exploit the system" and I would have said, "Ya know what, you're right. I'll have to figure out a workaround." There are times in life when you have to be at least somewhat diplomatic and follow the appropriate channels before taking extreme action. I can understand in cases where the higherups are ignoring you or aren't listening or don't understand and you feel you have no other alternatives available to get your message across. But that wasn't the case here. Diplomacy really does work. You should try it sometime. It seems to me that the appropriate way to ask for a raise at work is not to go on strike the very first day thinking that will get the message across as efficiently as setting up a meeting with your manager.

On a second note, what went on, especially with the reputation system, I took personal offense to because, for me, at least, this site is not just a nice hangout but it's my livelihood and my career that I hope to be banking the next 40 years of my life on. I can understand how you may think it was fun amusement that it just a …

QuickBooks or PeachTree - which would be best for managing an Internet business such as DaniWeb?

A yorkshire terrier and maltese (Sheyna and Mitzi), a corn snake named Felix, two water turtles (Speedy and Piglet), three tortoises (including an endangered Eastern Box ... Shelly, Sam, and Lisa). Previous (now deceased) pets included a fourth tortoise (May), two iguanas (one very smart and gentle one named Michie who died of cancer), two cats (Princess and Shemesh, born as strays in the backyard and lived to be 15+), two hamsters (Teddy and Panda), a guinea pig named Dusty, lots and lots of gerbils, hundreds of mice (bred to feed the snake), two garter snakes (Slimy and Shanashtan), a terrarium of newts, tadpoles, and frogs, little lizard things whose species I can't even remember now, and there must be more but I can't think of it off the top of my head :)

An update is warranted. Unfortunately, my corn snake of 12+ years passed away last month. We've also acquired another tortoise, Frannie.

Hi,

I know you guys are all eagerly awaiting someone with authority to interject and let you know what the verdict will be. I have to say, right now there are no plans to make any further changes to the reputation system.

The reasoning is a simple one. When I visit any of the main categories and see the listing of Featured Members, I recognize all of those names as people who are experienced or post a lot about those subjects. And when I visit the Member List and search by Reputation, I recognize all of the members with a lot of rep points as being those members who contribute the most and are helpful, knowledgeable people. Similarly, there are very few, if any, members who contribute a lot of their time and expertise to helping others here on a regular basis, and are left out in the virtual rep desert.

In other words, as it stands, the reputation system currently works. Sure, you might not be accumulating rep as fast as you'd like, but that leaves something to strive for. But, the bottom line is, right now the reputation system is actually serving its intended purpose of identifying those people with awesome reputations in our community, and there is no reason to change it.

I know this is a dead thread by now but rereading it after all this time has brought back some memories. 3,000 visitors per day. 10,000 visitors per day ... we're more than 10X that now! :)

Spammers have ruined it for the rest of us :(

I believe that Webmaster Tools only reports the last date your HOMEPAGE was crawled.

To ensure a high quality of tutorials, they must all be passed through Davey. What you need to do is manually enter the URL of the newthread page ... ie www.daniweb.com/forums/newthread.php?f=XXX where XXX is the forum ID of the tutorials forum. Upon submitting, the tutorial goes into a queue where it has to be manually approved.

Currently DaniWeb uses both image verification during registration in addition to requiring new members to click a link that is sent to them via email upon registration. If the user doesn't click the link within 7 days, their account is permanently suspended. Additionally, if DaniWeb tries to send out a welcome email but it bounces, then both the username and the email address are permanently blocked from any new registrations.

Even with all of these measures in place, spam is still a problem on DaniWeb, although it could be much worse. Most of the spam we've been getting lately have been actual members doing self-promotion for their websites and such as opposed to those horrid spambots.

Who is your ISP?

> I don't see how editing a post can get you in a difficult position.

• User posts a question
• Multiple people reply
• User realized their problem was a mistake on their end, and so go back and edit their original post replacing it with "oops!"
• Thread no longer makes any sense.

• User has many posts
• User has difference of opinion / disagreement with forum management
• User goes back and edits all of their posts replacing them all with jibberish
• Hundreds of threads no longer make any sense
• User's actions negatively affect many other members whose posts no longer make sense

Both of these scenerios have occurred dozens of times, in addition to having quite a few other problems with allowing users to go back and edit what they've originally posted.

I'm not quite sure why your textbox contents are emptied when your browser loses focus. This is the first time I'm hearing that.

Originally there was no limit. It was added out of necessity due to much abuse which landed us in many a difficult situation. I can only suggest you put your long posts together in Notepad or such before publishing them.

At this stage of the game, it is not feasable nor worth the server power to wipe a clean slate and recalculate how much reputation power a user should have had at the point in time when they handed out reputation to someone else.

It just isn't worth that level of detail to "fix" the system.

In doing the recalculation, I kept it simple and did not touch the amount of reputation points handed out each time. In other words, if someone like Christina positively repped someone for a Tech Talk thread last month, that user would still get the full benefit of Christina's previous rep power.

Because the Coffee House is, for the most part, a hang out, and it's still nifty to let people give and receive comments about each other's posts, and have post-specific rep bars within the postbits ... even if it doesn't influence the bigger sitewide picture.

Reputation earned in the coffee house does not get added to your own reputation number, nor does it count towards your rep power (how much influence your rep has on others).

After some investigation, I did find a bug in my script which recalculated everyone's reputation. Rep is being rebuilt as we speak and will be completed shortly. Stay tuned.

building --> skyscraper

Check out MagpieRSS. It makes it *very* simple to incorporate RSS feeds into a PHP-driven site.

The way that I got started with DaniWeb was that I personally responded to every single post that anyone made within 12-24 hours of it being posted. It almost didn't matter that the site was completely empty as long as the people who did come got instant satisfaction. That's what made them come back and tell their friends.

I'm not sure if it's been mentioned already (I'm too lazy to read this entire thread) but vBulletin forum system is about to release add-on blogging software that integrates with their forums.

Good luck! Unfortunately, that's a really oversaturated market right now (there are way too many webmaster forums out there). You might wish to provide free classifieds ads for the freelancers.

Google sitemaps can be found by all engines by referring to them in the robots.txt file. For example, Sitemap: [url]http://www.site.com/sitemap.xml[/url]

This weird, I had maybe 4-5 reps from coffe house and it drop too much for me, from 4 bars to only one. Why so? Minimum 75% of my reputation was hard worked for in tech forums, reporting span, double posting etc.

same i had 7 now 3?

i do loads on the win2k/nt/xp forum

Remember, when someone with a lot of rep power gives you positive reputation, it impacts your rep more than someone with a little rep power. What you're noticing is most likely happening because of people like Christina who had a LOT of Geek's Lounge reputation, and so one rep from her outweighed like 10 posts from newbies thanking you for solving their technical problems. That reputation is now gone. However, EVERYONE'S reputation has decreased significantly. In the long run, reputation will be more accurate moving forward.

I do not want add extra work to Dani, but if she can contact each member with his/her full printout of reputation befor deduction and mark reputation which will be not counted that would be nice

You do realize there are 200,000 members, right? :) But ... umm ... what would be the benefit to this? Posts that you've received positive rep from in the Coffee House are still displayed inline within the posts and the latest reputation in your control panel and member profile still includes Coffee House rep.

Post count is meant to be a reflection of how much you've contributed, and therefore contributions to all forums counts equally. The reputation system, however, was designed to be a metric of how knowledgeable or helpful a user is in answering technical questions, and for that reason the Coffee House reputation points no longer count towards a user's overall rep power.

Nice idea, but a question, will our present rep recieved from the coffee house be eliminated?

Reputation you received from the Coffee House will no longer be factored into your overall Reputation Power. However, as you can see here (via your post in this thread), all posts still have their own individual rep bars and reputation does still exist in the Coffee House.

Hi,

Due to conversations that have been going on in the Area 51 forum for quite some time, as well as in our IRC channel, I have decided to make reputation no longer count within the Coffee House category.

To quote Davey in Area 51, "reputation is meant to be a metric of the members value to the support side of the community, so a newbie can quickly see if the person answering their question is more or less likely to know what they are talking about. It was never intended to be a slap on the back thing for boosting the ego of ones friends or destroying the fragile ego of others."

As a result, I feel that disabling one's reputation power in the Coffee House is the only viable alternative towards reestablishing any type of significance to reputation.

It should be noted that the only change being made is that positive or negative reputation you receive for a Coffee House forum will not affect your reputation. As a result, it will not taint the overall rep # sitewide.

It is still possible to give reputation to Coffee House posts, comments will still show up in member profiles, and you will still be able to see all of the reputation comments handed out inline within posts. Additionally, posts within the Coffee House that receive reputation will still display a little icon indicating so and everyone will still be able to see at a glance …

Hi. Welcome to our community. I look forward to many future conversations!

Hi! Welcome to DaniWeb :)

Hi. We run one Apache box and one MySQL box right now. Both machines are 1.8 ghz dual core dual opterons with a couple of gigs of ram.

I've fixed this bug. Thank you for pointing it out! :)

> Come on Dani, even you know very well that people who don't use code tags after they have been warned 2-3 times are not the ones who would like to stick around.

I agree with this. I am referring to members who screw up on their first few posts by ignoring the watermark and announcement threads. Reread my scenerio :)

> A 'tech savvy' member who has a 'lot to offer' would definitely try to learn how to use code tags and understand the forum rules.
Eventually, most likely. But many wouldn't make the time investment until they see whether or not they like the site ... aka after at least two or three posts.

Sorry, I disagree. Picture this scene = You're having a horrible tech issue you've been trying to fix all day and you're completely frustrated. You find this forum from a google search that seems to cover the topic and you decide to give it a chance because you have nothing to lose. You take the minute to register. You take the minute to wait for your confirmation email in your inbox. You take the minute to check your email and activate your account. You take a couple of minutes to find your way around the site and navigate to posting a new thread. You FINALLY get to ask your darn question, knowing you will only have to wait you don't know how long for a reply. At this point, are you really going to make the time investment into reading allll of the forum rules before you even post without even knowing if this site is worth investing even more time in? First you'd see if the site worked for you. If you get a reply which impresses you, then it will make you want to learn more about the site. But for all you know, this site could just be not for you. You're not going to spend an extra 10 minutes before you even get to post reading a long list of rules, only to find out the site doesn't have anyone on it who can answer your question.

Besides, I point you back to Stymiee (our …

It did nothing to the following example I cut out of another earlier post.

from datetime import date

It will only work if you have matching opening and closing tags. So you need to close that /font as well :) I've also noticed that for some reason the strip button doesn't work in wysiwyg mode, so make sure the top right A button is depressed.

I agree that it should be a priority to not lose a new DaniWeb member. Sure - they may initially come just to get their one question answered. But if it is a good experience for them, they will return or tell their friends. If their first experience is a negative one because they didn't entirely realize how DaniWeb is set up, then we might have lost a potential tech saavy member who otherwise could have had a lot to offer.

EVERY new member is important and should be thought of as a potential regular ... we have to make them feel welcome enough to want to return or they won't. I would say that about 90% of all regular DaniWeb members first came here because they were having some sort of problem (whether it was with hardware/software or a programming issue or whatnot) they wanted resolved, and then they stayed because they got a quick, friendly reply that encouraged them that this was a nice place. IMO if too many people are posting once and never returning, it's because we're not doing a good enough job welcoming them and encouraging them to stay.

Give DaniWeb newbies some slack because they really just don't know - they're not out to violate the rules. Instead focus your "being irritated" energy on the people who should really know better but violate the rules because they really just don't care or want to troll.

The properties that are invalid are *all* related to the display of the banner advertisements which, unfortunately, just don't render the same in IE and FireFox without specifying the additional parameters, as IE and Firefox appear to have different default behaviour when it comes to the rendering of IFrames. I probably could replace them with CSS and will most likely do that later today. Thanks for the catch.

My bad experience with Opera comes from quite a few years ago. I forget the specifics, but I believe there were alignment issues and a few other small glitches that annoyed me enough to made me stop using that browser. I haven't seen Opera in use in years, however.

According to traffic statistics, Opera users spend an average of 34% more time on DaniWeb than the average user. This leads me to believe that there is nothing untoward going on with Opera's rendering of DaniWeb to the point of making the site unusable.

What I like about the iPhone is the interface is much more like a full featured phone and iPod and much less like a PDA with a phone feature, as Windows Mobile is. I think the iPhone makes a good primary phone.

I hate to be so blunt ... however, I've found that Opera consistantly does not follow XHTML/CSS standards and a very small percentage of the DaniWeb audience uses that browser. Additionally, I am not a fan of Opera at all, having used it a few years back, and therefore don't have it installed on my own machine to test. Therefore, I will be very blunt in saying that there are no plans to make DaniWeb Opera-compatible right now as it would be impossible to do without a working Opera installation myself.

I give huge kudos to Apple for ensuring the iPhone synchronizes not only with OS X Mail and OS X Address Book but also with Microsoft Outlook for Windows. It completely works with Windows XP and Windows Vista 32-bit.

Shortly after Windows Vista came out I purchased the latest Microsoft Webcam for my Vista 64-bit PC, and it was a couple of months before 64-bit drivers were available for it! For those of you who remember, it also took over a year after Windows XP x64 edition was released for Adobe to come out with a 64-bit compatible version of Adobe Acrobat - which has a HUGE presence in the Windows business market. Give Apple some slack for not having 64-bit drivers out right away for the iPhone.

I, yes I, just got an iPhone and I'm very happy with it. I migrated to AT&T / iPhone just yesterday from Verizon Wireless and a Treo 700W (Windows Mobile smartphone). I am a little pissed that I can't synch my contacts or email because the iPhone isn't compatible with any 64-bit Windows OS. Therefore, I'm forced to synch it via my mac instead of my shiny new Vista 64-bit PC which I currently use as my primary machine.

I'm not familiar enough with the .htaccess file to know why the followsymlinks option wouldn't work for you. You're simply stating to follow symbolic links.

No, that won't solve the merging problem. What you need to do is explain to your moderators that in the field where it asks what thread to merge with, to enter the old, vB standard format in the form http://www.site.com/forum/showthread.php?t=100

If it were true, I suspect it was from years ago when meta tags played a more important role.

Does googlebot spider IFRAME tags? Do they actually follow the URL as if it were a link? Or do they spider the contents of the IFRAME as if it were part of the included page? Unlike JavaScript, there is no client-side parsing that needs to be done with IFRAMEs. Just curious if anyone has the answer.

I believe every page should have unique keywords and description meta tags. For me, it's a usability issue.

I've noticed site: being updated but the toolbar is stagnant for me.