Posts by Dani

What if someone wants to type code that uses the [param=value] format? If someone types [x=y] in their code it should be stripped?

Bold and italic tags are already being used with the language-specific tags for specific keywords. For example, in the line

printf("%d. file has been created\r",i);

the word "printf" is actually in bold in contrast to the rest of the line. However, bold font is hard to distinguish in Courier New (or any fixed width font, for that matter). In fact, when I was very anti-color, and before we had syntax-specific code tags, the reason I conceded to allowing color was because people pointed out that bold and italic tags were not doing a good enough job pointing out specific lines in code.

That's the intended behaviour. When using language-specific tags, snippets are already color-coded. If you want to point out something specific, refer to it by line. If you absolutely have to point something out via color, use non language specific tags.

I'm able to successfully log out on Internet Explorer, FireFox, and Opera on Windows Vista and in Safari and FireFox on OS X.

Reputation is public. However, only moderators and yourself can see any information about your infractions.

>> Reputation-Altering Power
What is that? both you and I (and probably everybody else too) its value is 0.

Hm. I understood that for a moment, but now I see another, different, number.. your 'reputation altering power' on your profile = 9, but your 'rep power' as shown under your name on posts = 31.. aren't they the same thing? That's what I understood from your post.

Mine are different to; on my posts it's 4, on my profile it's 6..

There was a profile bug. It's fixed now.

Visit my member profile and look at the rep section to clarify what I've said.

Green dots = linearly mapped to Reputation points. Rep power = the number of points that you can affect someone else's reputation when you give them a positive or negative comment. Rep power is based on a number of factors including your own reputation, how many posts you have, how long you've been a member, etc. Only thing that's changed = Nothing is secret anymore.

It means you have a reputation power of 3. The blocks have been used to give a graphical representation of everyone's estimated reputation power. The number is the actual value, which I chose to now display. Up until now, users were only able to see their own rep number, but not others.

> The google "entire site" results are just as wonderfully haphazard as the internal search.

If the results Google (a company that made billions off of search) generates for you don't live up to your expectations then I can't imagine how you could expect the results my measley little server returns possibly could.

Well the point I'm trying to make it, for at least those in the know, all forum searches always involve some type of heuristics. Being the only forum out there that actually announces this fact couldn't possibly do anything other than portray a bad image, even though everyone else does the same thing. If it hasn't bothered you for the past 5 years DaniWeb's been alive, and it doesn't bother you on every other forum out there, why does it suddenly need to be announced front and center?

I understand not everyone is familiar with web development. In that case, I'll explain to you ... Google's algorithm uses some level of heuristics. The default vBulletin algorithm uses heuristics, although we've never used this algorithm. The MySQL fulltext search, which we used up until recently as it was no longer able to handle our load, uses heuristics. The algorithm we use now uses heuristics. None of these algorithms have ever returned every post or thread that contains the query word.

To be quite honest, the algorithm we use now is MUCH more accurate than vBulletin's default search (which is why I opted to never use it).

> How about saying that on the search page that you use a heuristic for performance reasons

I think that it can pretty much be assumed whenever querying a huge dataset that some level of heuristics are involved. There would be no positive benefit to having such a disclaimer.

> Any kind of sorting of the output would be preferable to what we have now.

I'll see what I can do.

> So if I want to find a thread where I vaguely recall what was written, I basically have to resort to pot luck as to whether I'll find it or not?

If you use the "search entire site" option in the sidebar you'll be querying Google for the results. You'll probably find these results more to your liking.

> Have you ever considered purchasing a google search engine appliance which seems to do a pretty good job in a reasonable amount of time.

The google search appliance starts at $30,000 and searches up to 500,000 documents. Firstly, that is incredibly way out of my price range, especially since we already have search functionality which works reasonably well for the majority of users. Secondly, the 500,000 document limit wouldn't last us more than another few months tops. There is a mini appliance that for only $2,000 can search up to 50,000 documents, but that would be less effective as what we have now because it would only be able to index half of our current forum threads, no future threads, none of the blog entries, and none of the code snippets.

When the normal search is used, it basically takes upwards of five minutes to process any single request. In fact, the load was so heavy that even with this much more optimized searching algorithm, the entire search functionality had to be offset to a separate server with its own independent searchable post index because the load of actually reading the live post tables was too high.

I am very surprised that Visual Basic found only one error considering this code isn't written in Visual Basic ... it's written in C++.

The search function is not literal in that it won't return all results containing the query string in age order. It takes numerous things into account (such as word density, etc) to return the list in order of relevance based on a score it calculates. To the best of my ability, I have made the search function a happy medium between being able to return relevant content and being able to search 500,000 posts rather quickly without consuming too many server resources .

> What kind of bureaucratic clown requires you to keep records ...

Bill Clinton. Or rather, all of the details of Bill Clinton's 1996 anti-spam act. My web hosting company then has additional policies when it comes to sending out as much email as we do.

> Doesnt daniweb have member pruning?

Firstly, there are many users who log in but just don't post. Secondly, it's against the law for us to delete records. According to anti-spam laws and regulations, we have to retain detailed records on any user who we have ever sent any email to (including welcome emails, monthly newsletters, etc), and need to be able to produce that record upon being asked for it.

It all comes down to the sheer volume of email that we send out. Our monthly newsletters go to roughly 150,000 people in one shot, and that doesn't include the thousands of welcome emails and subscription emails that get sent out daily. Because we do sent out so much email, we CONSTANTLY have to keep proving ourselves to all of the big ISPs out there that we aren't spammers but that the users who receive email from us really did register with DaniWeb. We have to provide so many details about the users, such as the exact time they registered, the IP they registered with, the exact time they clicked the activation email link, the IP they clicked the link with, the actual unique activation link they had, etc., …

I saw that show on the History channel. It didn't say that 2012 will be the apocalypse but rather was clear to say it won't be the end of the world but rather the end of the world as we know it, and that we're going to be entering a whole new era.

I have made a change where users who have fancy JavaScript features disabled instead see an old-fashioned Forum Jump menu towards the bottom of most pages to navigate the site.

Fixed.

When you click the back button in your browser, your computer is loading the cached version of the page for you.

> They seem about 3 times as fast as they used to be last week.

I have a wisdom tooth coming in which seems to have gotten infected. A ridiculous amount of antibiotics have kept me off of the computer for much of the past week and I haven't made any changes at all in the past few weeks.

Unfortunately, however, I'm only at the computer to get some mandatory work done and don't yet feel up to debugging these things. I'm still in a lot of pain and rather nauseous from the antibiotics.

#1
I always like to go by something one of my favorite teachers said to me; if you do what you love you'll never work a day in your life. If computers is what someone is interested in, you think they would rather begin a career in law for a few extra bucks? I wouldn't.

#2
The surplus in attorneys is ridiculous right now. My Economics teacher has a degree in law and said he is making more as a college professor working 20 hours a week, 30 weeks a year than if he were working as an attorney 40hr/week 50weeks/yr. That says something.

Maybe he just is a bad lawyer? It's been my experience that people get jobs outside of their degrees either because they fell in love with an industry too late (i.e. after school) or because they aren't good enough to make it in what they have a degree in. It sounds like your teacher would rather be an attorney than an economics teacher, and a really awesome attorney can make it no matter what - it's just a matter of being good enough to shine through the competition.

Exactly ... you cannot assume that things are so black and white as a member either being in favor of one choice or against all others.

Remember, there is no reason to take a Yes/No/Abstain poll for just a handful of members. The statistics I collect already tell me this information on a much, much more grandeose scale.

When a large majority of DaniWeb doesn't like a particular thing, guaranteed that I am already very well aware of it. A poll indicating so does me no good because it's information I'm already aware of ... and more accurately so than can be gathered from a poll. Instead what I need from you guys is feedback!

For example, I might already know from all of the stats that I collect and analyze that a very large portion of the DaniWeb audience doesn't use the mark as solved link. A poll of 20 or even 30 members asking whether they use the 'Mark as Solved' feature with Yes/No/Indifferent options does me no good because I'm already aware of the percentages with a much, much larger sample size.

However, it's the feedback from you guys that puts reasons behind your actions so that I can fix the problem. For example, WHY don't you use the solved feature. Is it because it's placed in such a bad part of the page that you can't find it? Do you not like the idea of solving threads because you favor ongoing discussions? …

They've been. :) Thank you for the heads up. Some of the stickies no longer applied such as the blogging competition (already won) or the NY get together that was semi-planned for 2 years ago and never happened.

Your rep increases when people give you positive rep and your rep decreases when people give you negative rep.

While all feedback is always appreciated and always taken into consideration, decisions which affect the grand scheme of things are never made exclusively based on feedback or polls from community members posting in this forum. It would be impractical to make a business decision which affects millions based on a tally of pro and con comments posted by 5 or 10 or even 20 people.

Decisions are typically made behind the scenes, using a wide variety of resources such as working with advisors, varoius in-person focus groups, and by data mining statistics such as tracking browsing habits throughout DaniWeb.

For example (a completely arbitrary and theoretical example, mind you), suppose 15 people say they love the navigation drop down menu and 1 person complains about it saying it's terrible. Navigational statistics might prove that only 15% of DaniWeb's audience uses the navigation menu while the remaining 85% go out of their way in their browsing habits to avoid it. In such a case, tracking the patterns of millions upon millions of visitors tells a better tale than 16 comments posted.

Public feedback from members is very important because it adds real voices to the numbers. For example, in the scenerio above, it's clear from the data collected that the navigation menu isn't working and so first instinct might be to remove it because it's doing damage when so many people alter their browsing habits just to avoid it. However, even though 15 people posted that loved the …

Google changes things quite regularly. However, because they are very important to my business, and I work with many Google services such as AdWords, AdSense, Analytics, Gmail, Google News, etc, all throughout the day, every day, in combination with my studying of web usability, I am able to pick up on many things ordinary users might not.

While I do understand where you're coming from, it's just a fact of nature that website usability relies on A/B testing, and constantly testing different methods, and tracking the performance of everything, to see what works best for what audience. For example, moving a little Google ad from directly above a button to directly below a button might result in a 50% increase in revenue.

Thank you.

Can you please try cleaning out your PM inbox by clicking on the 'empty folder' link?

So that I won't be accused of failling to mention it, a UI change made today was to surround the list of sticky threads with a thin box to separate them from the regular threads a bit more.

However, in doing so, I came to a realization as to something I want to say in this post: A lot of the small UI changes I make, such as this one, revolve around A/B testing different things and then tracking statistics to see if usability has increased or decreased as a result. In these cases, beta sites just wouldn't work, as I need sample sizes of 1,000,000+ people in order to get an accurate overall representation.

This is very similar to what companies like Google do when they change their logo to be Goooooooooogle instead to see if it gets more/fewer clicks, and change color elements on their site.

However, for all of the bigger things, a summary of what's changed over the course of the month is always mentioned in the monthly newsletters.

I think I know what's happening. The ads run in IFRAMEs so that they don't slow down the pages as much. It's very possible the IFRAME windows have your browser's focus instead of the actual webpage.

Try clicking on a blank area of the website to give it focus before scrolling.

That's definitely by all means standard for software. However, when was the last time you saw google.com or digg.com or cnet.com or any other large website for that matter publically release such a document? The answer: they wouldn't.

Every change made is mentioned in either this forum or within Area 51. Changes which affect the majority of our audience I discuss here. When I want to have more elaborate behind-the-scenes discussions, or changes that typically affect only the regular members, are discussed in Area 51.

Sometimes I won't go into a ridiculous amount of detail with each and every thing. But I will definitely post something such as, "I've just redone the look of the blogs page. Tell me what you think!" I might also get into detail such as, "I've just redone the look of the thread pages today by moving the 'Mark as Solved' link towards the bottom of the page near the quickreply instead of the top, because it's more intuitive there, since someone is only going to mark a thread as solved after they've finished reading the thread and saw their question was answered."

Check your control panel settings.

You're seeing a stripped down WYSIWYG editor because you have JavaScript features disabled. Because the bumble-bee tooltips are gone, you can now safely return to reenabling JavaScript features. The ability to disable all of the JS features is really reserved for people with very slow computers or dial-up connections, so they can still have an enjoyable DaniWeb experience even though it may be lacking in some of the more elaborate (and less necessary) bells and whistles.

As mentioned in a previous post, the vBulletin editor has rather messy code, and I was unable to find an easy way to add additional buttons to the Quickreply box. The next version of vBulletin is going to be migrating to the Yahoo! JavaScript API which means the QuickReply box will be rewritten for the most part. So I'll take a look at it when that happens. In the meantime, I'm not going to waste hours of time trying to figure out h ow to add a button to code that is so messy that the developers have already acknowledged it's being rewritten in the next version.

Just to add ... we've now moved our most-updated tables, such as the post table, to MySQL type InnoDB as opposed to MyISAM. InnoDB uses row-level locking as opposed to table-level locking and therefore won't succumb to the locking problem we were experiencing with new posts. The reason it was just implemented is because it does use up more system resources, and therefore I was waiting for the move to a more powerful server.

> But to get rid of the bumbles, ...

Midi, the "bumble-bee" behaviour of the tooltips following the mouse cursor around no longer happens. The tooltips now work the same way that they used to pre-a couple of months ago when their so-called "bumble" behaviour was introduced.

Salem,

Thank you for your comments. I'm going to quickly respond to some of the points which you brought up.

(1)

If I didn't work to continually improve upon DaniWeb, we would still be the small technical support forum for just Windows and Mac that we started as. If it wasn't for all of the evolutions and new innovations of the site, the C and C++ forums, where you spend most of your time, and the entire software development category, for that matter, wouldn't even exist. To highlight some of the most recent changes, the reputation system would still be in its default buggy behaviour and there would be no way to browse through threads in a forum without having to hit the back button continuously.

In fact, all of the changes that have been made within the past months have certainly not been done just to "test my web programming skills" but instead come as either a direct request or need from the community, based in large part from feedback here in this forum. The changes made this month, for example, which include the similar threads feature, the behaviour of tooltips, the reputation system, the redesign of the blogs pages to more prominently feature member usernames and the blogs the entries belong to, the addition of syndication buttons, have ALL come as a result of feedback passed to me by members.

It's important to note that there are 200,000 members. Even if you only …

Well they don't bumble anymore :)

Floating popup windows??

I can understand those who have been complaining about the way the hovers have been following the mouse cursor around as of a couple of months ago. But now it's back to the way it's been for the last 2+ years with no complaints?

About an hour ago I made a change where the hover tooltips no longer follow the mouse cursor. They also now wait for you to pause over the link before they go into effect. This is the behaviour they have been at for the past 2 years complaint-free. The complaints around them started coming in a few months ago when I changed the behaviour to follow the mouse, hence being like "bumbling bees" following you around.

Actually that's not true. We were having a problem with some of the JavaScript features on the page causing problems like people's browsers hanging and freezing up, and taking a ridicoulously long amount of time to load. Since I knew it was a JavaScript problem, but didn't know exactly WHICH JavaScript was the cause, I provided the option to disable each of the JS features I thought was the culprit one at a time, so the problem could be debugged systematically (excluding one at a time for a large group of members, since everyone seemed to be experiencing different problems depending on their system). It turned out that the problem was related to the rounding corners script for everyone, and so that has now been removed.

I believe this is the problem that people were experiencing in the past. I'm not sure, as I don't use Firefox or a spell checker.

I'm sorry, but I'm still incredibly confused how the SpellChecker is related to anything. I don't have any suggestions for you at this time.

Hi,

1.

If you remember, the option to disable the various JavaScript style elements was temporarily added to help debug all of the extremely slow page rendering and JavaScript timeouts that were being spit out when I updated the look of DaniWeb a couple of months ago.

Narue and others were experiencing timeouts where their web browsers would seemingly hang, but I didn't know what was causing them. So to help figure it out, I added the option to turn off each of the JS elements one at a time:
Turn off rounded corners
Turn off dropdown menu
Turn off hover tooltips

It turns out that, for all members who were complaining, it was the rounded corners that were the culpreit. The hover tooltips and dropdown menu don't cause any browser slowness.

In doing a quick run through the database, I noticed that the vast majority of members had disabled "rounded corners". Very, very few (fewer than 10) disabled one, or both, of the other two options.

Therefore, I went ahead and permanently turned off the rounded corners option yesterday, and so there was no reason to have this option in the control panel anymore. I don't feel there is a need to clutter up the control panel for just 10 out of 200,000 members.

However, in its place, I did add an option to disable ALL JavaScript, DHTML, and AJAX on the site in one massive swoop. This is …

According to another forum, it seems vibrantmedia intellitext has something to do with it.

Since I have them well and truly nobbled, and have never seen this popup, there might be something to it.

I have to call my Vibrant rep today about something else anyways, so I'll ask while I have him on the phone.

One of the networks or ad agencies delivering ad campaigns on DaniWeb is running it. I need to figure out which one.