Posts by Dani

They are definitely not the same. Some are caused by JavaScript on the browser side of things and some are caused by an actual bug in the PHP code, and they need to be debugged separately.

Plus, we don't know when they all began. Some people are saying last week and some people are saying months ago.

These two issues (the one zandiago posted a link to) are not related. Let's please keep them in separate threads so that we can figure out what is causing them.

When did you guys notice this problem first happening?

I don't see a problem with this because either eng_defined.php OR fr_defined.php would be called, so it would behave just as if all of the constants were defined once. From then on, you can use define to see if the constant exists.

Per jbennet's suggestion, I will look into making the solved threads sortable (when viewing solved threads within a particular forum). It is not possible to sort the memberlist by solved threads, which is what I believe Salem is interested in.

Frustrating doesn't even start to describe the experience that wanting to post a well formated snip of code is at times.
e.g
Example
Spent quite sometime aligning expressions and clicking the darn "preview bottom". When everything seems to look more or less what I wanted, I pressed "Submit" and what did I get?
Garbage!
Tabs from code are over-exaggerated, expressions are wrapped to the next line; defeating the purpose of clear formated code in first place. And what is it that the preview doesn't look like the final result?

Code now appears the same way when being previewed as in the actual post. Also, code blocks now support 80 characters per line.

do you have the restricted MS truetype fonts installed?

dani, what font do you use?

Arial and Verdana.

I think you're misunderstanding me. Check your window manager's font size settings. Not your browser's.

yeah... that's not the problem... i tried Ctrl + 0 and no change... i even zoomed in and out, and same response...

I still think this is the problem, although not in the form of a browser setting. I believe that some window managers can zoom the font in larger than 100%.

80 characters per line did fit at our old font size, but then I was told the font was too small, and so I increased it.

http://www.daniweb.com/forums/thread68511.html

See post #5 in that thread for a demonstration of the old font size.

> Use spaces instead of tabs, and this problem will pretty much go away.

In the example provided, Aia used tabs in the first snippet and spaces in the second snippet.

It's unfair to say that I refuse to admit there's a problem. I know that the tabs are overexaggerated and am still investigating possible solutions (I'm not happy with the brute force method of converting tabs to spaces which only works 5% of the time).

Basically what happened is we used to have a font size for the code snippets that allowed for 80 characters per line. But then there were multiple complaints that the code was too small and way too hard to read, and so I enlarged the font size, and now 80 characters per line don't fit anymore. It's a give and take. The font was only enlarged by one size, so if I reduce it by one size again, we'll have the same complaints we had before.

It's been fixed.

You have your browser set zoomed in.

Yes, min-width works too if you'd like to set a minimum. But basically that code will have a table take up the full width of its container up to that width. You're probably best using divs though.

It was on the bottom for users with JavaScript disabled, since they didn't have access to the menu. They also had fewer options, because not everything available through the menu was also available at the bottom.

Did you get this worked out?

Firstly, don't sweat it. Google only shows you a sampling of the sites it knows about. Just because your backlink count dropped doesn't mean that Google doesn't recognize your link on those sites anymore.

Just keep tabs on your traffic and make sure that this isn't a trend that is affecting your rankings and traffic from the SERPS.

If a decrease in backlinks goes hand-in-hand with a decrease in traffic, you might want to shoot a letter over to Google via Google Webmaster Tools asking if you're banned or blacklisted for any reason and if there's anything you can do to correct it. Prove that you don't buy/sell links and are upfront and honest with them.

Speaking of selling links - you wrote you don't buy any, but do you sell any? Do you do link swaps on your site that might be confused with something that looks like or might look like links that were paid for? If so, that could be what's hurting you.

Sagedavis ... Yup, like height *= 2 to double the height ... Remember to also do onmouseout= to restore the height and width back to normal when the mouse moves off of the images. You might also want to add this.src= and fetch a higher resolution version of the image from the server so that you don't end up with images scaled too big for their size.

Hi,

I use IE7 and it looks fine for me. I assume you fixed it already?

Do you mean that you're using the link: query in Google? This is just meant to be a sampling of some of the sites that link to you. That's okay though ... you don't want all your competitors to know exactly where you get all of your backlinks from :)

Instead, create an account with Google Webmaster Tools at www.google.com/webmasters/ ... It will give you much more detailed information about your own domain.

Yes ... I was making some changes to make it more compatible with IE6. However, it required everyone to clear their cache.

> are these ratings anonymous?
Yes, they are. We keep track of who voted what in the database but don't publish this.

As of right now, the forum system relies on reputation while the blogs and code snippets rely on a 5 star rating system. (For example, if someone wrote a blog entry, you can see what its average rating is, how many people rated, in addition to the overall average rating of all entries by the user).

Creating a unified rating system does make sense, but it would take awhile to code, so is more likely something a month or so down the line. There are a couple of things that I want to accomplish first, such as adding a 'Flag Bad Post' link to the blogs and code snippets.

Team colleague = retired moderators, charter members, and close personal friends of Dani
Featured poster = People that were awarded member of the month (speak to "happygeek" about how to get chosen)
Moderator = members of the DaniWeb team who devote time to deleting spam, moving misplaced posts, etc (invitation only)

Click on reply w/ quote to quote their post and see what their bbcode looks like.

The problem that the poster of that thread used list bbcode for each line within their code. Look at their bbcode.

Hmm ... it seems to work? I'm not sure why it doesnt work in that thread.

Testing 1-2-3
Testing 1-2-3
Testing 1-2-3
Testing 1-2-3
Testing 1-2-3

I see what you mean. Let me look into it.

No. Pagerank / PR have nothing to do with website traffic.

Server issues. Don't ask. :( A few other threads around here about it.

Walt, please confirm this thread can be marked solved (or do so). Thanks.

3) You don't need to look at every single thread. When you visit the latest thread in the listing, the entire forum gets marked read.

There are three ways to mark a forum read:

1) Double click on it's folder. This works from the homepage as well as from the forum pages.

2) Use the dropdown menu from the forum page.

3) Forums are automatically marked read when the last new thread is read.

Poor Walt ... being frustrated all this time and the solution was so simple. The reason why this happens is because the URL for the new post icon takes you to a page called newpostinthread.html, which then looks up the last post for you in the database, and redirects you there. However, by the time you click the icon to have it look up the post, it's too late, because it's already been marked read.

Haven't you noticed all these months that when you double clicked the folder, the icon turned from yellow to greyed out in real time?

Hahaha! Double clicking on the folder name has been marking the forum as read ever since vBulletin 3.5, which we upgraded to a very, very long time ago (well over a year).

However, if you ever had your Control Panel preferences set to have clientside scripting off (i.e. that option in the CP having to do with the hover tooltips) then that feature would have been disabled as well.

I was being rather tongue-in-cheek. In one post you say you can recall a whole bunch of threads where the last post you saw was #3, you haven't visited since, and now there are 12 posts. In another post, you say you can't even begin to recall what you visited a few days ago, so there is the possibility that you subconsciously were surfing around the site and clicked on it without realizing it. Ya know what? Don't mind me :) It's 5 am and I haven't slept yet after two days of working on the Subscription Spy.

It would :) Cool. However, it would have to be existing threads that you visited, then hours later other people replied to, and you never went back to them.

On another note, if you don't remember what you visited 5 days ago, then how do you know that the system is broken? :)

Remember, don't click into the threads when you give me the list, otherwise the database will just say they were all last visited today.

Nope, as I suspected, cookies aren't used at all. Can you please give me an up to date list of roughly 5 threads that you've visited within the past 10 days along with when you suspect that you last visited them? I'll see if the time/dates you think match up with what the database thinks.

I'm still trying to learn how vBulletin tracks thread marking times. I know it's entirely database-based but I'm not 100% sure whether cookies are used as a backup if the database turns up no results.

As mentioned in my second to last post, I have been looking into it. I think I may have come on to something that might explain what you're experiencing.

To conserve database storage, threads are automatically marked read if they have not been accessed for 10 days (at that point, they're considered abandoned as it seems pointless to endlessly store in the database when every single user last visited every single thread, so we only store the last 10 days worth for each user).

Hi and welcome :)

I'm not having a problem. Can anyone else confirm?

It's an overflow bug in older versions of IE. Upgrade to IE7.

I'm not quite sure what you mean. There is a message box confirming that your reputation was sent.

I won't have a chance to look into this until later today, but in the meantime, maybe this will help. This is a copy/paste of information related to Read Thread Marking from the vBulletin control panel:

This option controls how threads and forums are marked as read.

1. Inactivity/Cookie Based - once a user has been inactive for a certain amount of time (the value of the session timeout option) all threads and forums are considered read. Individual threads are marked as read within a session via cookies.

   This option is how all versions of vBulletin before 3.5 functioned.

2. Database (no automatic forum marking) - this option uses the database to store thread and forum read times. This allows accurate read markers to be kept indefinitely. However, in order for a forum to be marked read when all threads are read, the user must view the list of threads for that forum.

   This option is more space and processor intensive than inactivity-based marking.

3. Database (automatic forum marking) - this option is the same as a previous option, but forums are automatically marked as read when the last new thread is read.

   This is the most usable option for end users, but most processor intensive.

We have been using option 3 for roughly a year and a half. Before that (aka pre-vBulletin 3.5) we were using option 1, as it was the only thing available back then. We decided to switch because allowing it to be database-based instead …

Hmm ... it only happens in Software Development? Very strange. I'm wondering if this has something to do with the fact that you visit this forum the most frequently ... I'm really not sure.

The features related to new posts and posts since last visit and marking forums read is all standard vBulletin (unhacked), and I don't use any of these features myself, to be able to fully grasp what's not working right.

Is ANYONE else experiencing this problem? Does ANYONE else notice the Software Dev category behaving differently?

Remember, you need to double click the yellow folder icon on a forum to mark that forum read.

Narue, I know that you use these features - have you noticed them not working correctly?

Yeah, that's it. Hmm ... is it really that big of a deal? You shouldn't even be ending up at those pages.