Posts by Dani

I'm not saying that our current solution is the best, but if you were to approach me with a comment such as, "Gitter just recently introduced this new navigation method that seems to resonate with a lot of people, and I think it might have great results here as well," then that's something different. The idea of, "We should keep the same consistent behavior of all forums in the 2000s and early 2010s because it's easy, familiar and makes sense" just doesn't work at some point, when all millennials have jumped ship to bigger and better things.

I think your statement that "dont use reddit or that type of site so I'm not familiar with the de rigeur" is worth noting. DaniWeb, and all other tech forums, have lost nearly all their SEO traffic to Stack Overflow, but they've lost their community growth to community sites like Reddit, Quora, and Gitter, because that's where millennials go nowadays. In order remain a functioning business, it's important to keep up with the times, and part of that means having functionality that is familiar to people who do go to those sites.

This was previously answered in another thread.

No, and that's by design. It's in response to the sheer amount of feedback we've gotten lately about the overwhelming low quality of content. It seems almost as if each time someone sees low quality content, it's one step closer to being fed up with DaniWeb.

I decided to go the route of Quora or Reddit or all the other non-Q&A based communities out there, or even Stack Overflow, where it's quality content by default, and only the most hardcore users have to seek to pull the feed of all content. You can vote up content from the all content feed for it to appear in the default quality content feeds that everyone sees.

I need help with implementing MySQL transactions with PHP. Specifically, I'm confused between the flags WITH CONSISTENT SNAPSHOT, READ WRITE, and READ ONLY, what their differences are, and how they relate to table locking. I already read the MySQL reference manual but I'm still confused.

Well feel free to post here and we'll try to help as best we could. What confused you about the boolean equations? Was it double negative, or ...?

Trying to figure out the best tool to create ... So is the purpose of knowing the IP to see if multiple members are using the same IP, or to know the geolocation of the member? And what benefit does knowing the geolocation have?

Creating a web page with a little javascript seems to me like a good place to start because the barrier to entry is relatively low, and IMHO it seems like the concepts would be easier to grasp because there's something visual with a webpage. I've been programming my whole life though, so I'm eager to hear what people who learned programming more recently have to say of how they got started.

Our For Hire section was just very recently disbanded. It existed for over a decade, but never really gained popularity, and today there are so many better places designed to connect devs with employers.

That being said, you could do a Member Search instead: https://www.daniweb.com/connect/users

I'm not really understanding your question. Sometimes you want to just see trends or behavior on a specific segment of your audience. For example, I want to see how many logged in users I get, and how their behaviors compare ot all users who visit the site. Filters let you retrieve all of Google Analytics data but just for a segment of your audience.

And my boyfriend doesn't understand why I don't use Safari. :-/

What am I 3,897 miles away from?

Cambridge, obviously :-P

I think I know what's happening. Your old location is cached in your cookie session. Everyone else can see that you're a Canadian, but you're just not seeing it yourself. If you log out and log back in, it will force a refresh of your cookie data. I'll also look into updating the cookie when you change profile data like this.

I don’t understand what you said other than that you are most likely spamming by linking to your seo company.

I guess we don't have anything great.

Incidentally, the reason why inline image functionality does not currently exist is because I was unhappy with the way the old platform handled it, and wanted to take some time to come up with something a bit better. We're cornered into using Markdown syntax (which, incidentally, still works if you choose to handcode your inline images).

Images are not yet supported on mobile, but they will be soon. The editor we currently use has a new, mobile-friendly version in the works that is expected to be released soon, so we're going to upgrade just as soon as it does.

It's hard to spend so much time focusing on mobile when it's literally 1% of our traffic. Yes, I know, you could argue that if we had a more mobile-friendly site, then our mobile traffic would increase. But our vertical as a whole (programming help) is skewed heavily towards desktop users. We do have a very robust API so someone can make a native mobile app ;) Hint hint.

Awwe Alan, you shouldn't have done that. I plan on getting images working ASAP. Do you still have the post saved in notepad or something? Let me get right on this ...

Ah, thanks. I think my problem is I have a race condition with some AJAX. I'm initiating a request before a previous request completes. However, I'm using session_write_close() immediately after retrieving session data when the script first runs, so it should be releasing the lock before doing any heavy lifting.

You could use a js and a css minifier with a version after them (e.g. the timestamp of when the minified happened e.j. app.js?156855452) that way when you change things none should clear their browser cache (in real word production projects that is not an option to ask from visitors)

Yes, we already do that, to a degree. We roll our own JS and CSS minifier that then caches the minified version of the file server-side. We use a query string with a version number, but that part is manual, and I only update it about once per day, despite making about 500 code changes daily this first week of launch. Once things settle down a bit, it will be a non-issue. That being said, I can look into something that stores the version and automatically tacks on the query string, but I don't think there's a super easy way to do that with my current setup.

You're welcome. Thanks for the suggestion!

I think this is the first big design change we’ve had that didn’t come with a ton of mixed reviews right off the bat.

Both bugs already fixed ... You're no longer redirected to a 404 and the form isn't at the bottom anymore.

The thing is, when you're in mobile, and you're navigating between DaniWeb and DaniWeb Connect, the hamburger menu remains, but it toggles different menus.

OK, then what you're experiencing is the intended design.

I'll wait for more feedback to see if it should be closed automatically.

No, it's just supposed to hang out at the bottom of the page (and not cover up any posts).

All fixed. Thanks for the catch!

OK, I'm able to reproduce this! Hold on while I investigate ...

You can use CSS to hide ads. You would do something like: div class="ads ads-header" style="display:none">

However, hiding ads via CSS just makes them invisible to the end-user. The ads are still loaded. Loading ads but not letting the end-user see them is a massive TOS violation with just about every ad network. You need to ensure the Javascript for the ads does not run at all on those pages.

Hi there!! Welcome to DaniWeb :)

My latest estimate is in a week or so. In reality, it will most likely be closer to two weeks.

I've never tried hosting it myself, so I'm not sure. I vaguely remember having to set the font weight to something specific. I think it was that if I used fas the font weight had to be 400 or something like that. 600 for solid? I forget what it was.

A bunch of years ago, I wanted to migrate away from DaniWeb being on vBulletin into our own in house platform. I had limited experience writing an app entirely from scratch, and no MVC experience at all. I read that CI was a very easy framework to get up and started with MVC, and that it stayed out of the way a lot. I've since iterated upon DaniWeb significantly, and designed Dazah on it as well. I like that it's incredibly lightweight, meaning that you can take advantage of MVC functionality and URI routing, etc., but it isn't emeshed into every single line of code. It tends to be pretty performant and bug-free for me.

So I use Font Awesome very heavily, and here's what I do. (In fact, I randomly saw your question while actively on the fontawesome.com website!)

Firstly, I use their CDN, as so:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://use.fontawesome.com/releases/v5.3.1/css/all.css" integrity="sha384-mzrmE5qonljUremFsqc01SB46JvROS7bZs3IO2EmfFsd15uHvIt+Y8vEf7N7fWAU" crossorigin="anonymous">

Then, I use fas, fab, or far ... for solid icons, brand icons, and regular icons. This changed in Font Awesome 5. Previous versions just had them all under fa but this latest version you need to specify the category. I typically use the solid versions (fas) with the exception of things like Facebook icons or social media brand icons, where I need fab. Try using fas fa-users instead of fa, and make sure you're using the latest version from the CDN.

Oh, very cool. Was Coldfusion ever popular when you were working on it? I don't know many people who have used it post-Macromedia days.

Yes, welcome back! What do you do for work?

I've mostly been working day and night on the new version of the platform, and traffic is pretty poor in general. I'm pretty hopeful that things will start turning around when the new version launches.

Hi there! Welcome to DaniWeb.

Sorry for taking so long to respond to this.

We were not hit by a penalty; Of that, I am sure. We were hit by an algorithm update that affected a lot of UGC content, most notably, tech-based forums. All tech-based forums were hit at the same time. At the same time as all tech forums were pushed down, StackOverflow was pushed up. There's another thread about this somewhere around here, but the main point is that StackOverflow is very heavily curated and moderated in such a way to be designed to put searchers first. This provides a great experience for Google users, and therefore Google notices and sends more traffic to the site that would be the best experience for them.

The problem is that, for better or for worse, us forums are left having to reinvent our models in order to compete. It's not that our forum has any worse content than any other tech forum out there. It's simply that discussion forums, as a whole, are not as great an experience for Google searchers as Q&A sites are.

The merging of Dazah and DaniWeb means one big, highly configurable user profile that combines the aspects of each.

Yeah, we use email as well, but he's saying that email isn't instant, and he wants something instant.

Stay tuned for something better in the new version of DaniWeb, launching soon!

I’ll fix that when I get home later tonight. I know what happened. (Switched computers I was using and Git was out of sync)

This problem has been fixed. I'm sorry it took so long to fix, but I'm on vacation (a friend's destination wedding in Vermont) and I didn't realize that an SSL certificate expired and DaniWeb.com was unable to communicate with the Dazah API.

These kinds of problems will no longer exist after the DaniWeb/Dazah merger goes live in about a month.

I'm going to try my best to work on improving the mobile experience in the next version. However, can you shed some light on the specific functionality that is frustrating you in the mobile experience? (I don't browse DaniWeb from mobile, and it shows!!)

Hi there,

Thank you for your suggestions. It's hard for me to comment right now because I'm just so busy working so hard behind the scenes to upgrade the site to the new version. Hopefully you guys won't be disappointed when we launch (hopefully next month).

At that time, I'll be super open to making changes and improvements to the platform itself.

The biggest things that the relaunch coming next month is aiming to do is:

• Migrate revenue away from advertising and instead more towards the Dazah model of end-users paying to be matched with each other (question askers paying to find answerers, mentees paying to be matched with mentors willing to help them, etc.)
• Simplify the user interface so that it's more friendly to people new to DaniWeb
• Fewer ads and "fluff" content on forum thread pages
• Create a modern interface that is more attractive to millenials ... forums tend to have high turnover rates overall, so it's important to be attractive to newer users in order to constantly get new blood in here
• Homepage, landing pages, and navigational pages retooled to promote quality content written by members with a higher reputation, and push down questions asked by students and newbies (the newbies/students will be steered towards paying to be matched with potential answerers, until they build up enough reputation by demonstrating a history of quality content)
• This model is designed to give them instant gratification since the algorithm attempts to match people with those who have the highest probability of responding quickly based on their past behavior

I think it’s cached on our end as well.

While I can't fathom why "thermalprint" is in the forum menus or why C# is now missing, the upcoming changes appear to again move further away from the usual programming forums.

A spammer promoting Thermal Print tagged a huge load of threads with 'thermalprint' so that there would be more threads tagged with that than C#.

I went to the Tag Moderation page and removed the tag. The top navigation menu is cached so it's just a matter of it rebuilding itself. (Clearing your browser cache might due to the trick.)

Not really a technical writer, per se. More like a technical marketer, I guess. Someone who can take everything going on in my head, and explain it in one sentence, or in a few words. I lack the ability to do that. My boyfriend insists that I have a very tough time being able to see other people's perspectives.

You have an audience here who are expert practitioners in IT, web services, etc etc. Hundreds of man-years experience in designing, developing, supporting exactly this class of software/service. We don't need pretty pictures. But you think we are too thick to grasp your concepts and need to be forced for our own good, like children with spinnach. And no, we won't be "forced" to do anything except make a choice...

You insult us all.

I am NOT implying that you guys are all too thick to grasp my concepts. Not at all. I'm saying that I have a problem explaining things that are in my head. The entire thing makes perfect, perfect sense in my head. But I just have a really hard time conveying what's in my head. It's just not one of my attributes. Keep in mind, I created DaniWeb in college, and I've always done all of the development work on it by myself. I've never worked on a team before like that, so I never built up the skills to take all the concepts and how they fit together in my head, and convey them in a way that makes sense.

That's the exact same thing that happened with Dazah. I designed the website based on all of the concepts in my head, and NO ONE -- I mean, NO ONE -- can figure out what it offers or what it means without me having to take a long time to try to explain …

Am I worried? I've been super duper worried for the past few years. Two years ago, I developed Dazah to be DaniWeb's savior. I needed Dazah to survive in order to keep DaniWeb going.

However, two years of failure later, I've realized a few things. Firstly, the two separate brands (Dazah and DaniWeb) are confusing to most people. User profiles being maintained on Dazah are confusing. And, in hindsight, I've done a very poor job getting across to people through the website layout and design what Dazah is, what its benefits are, how to use it, and how powerful it really is.

However, that doesn't change the fact that I still need everyone to be onbord with Dazah in order for DaniWeb's survival. Therefore, after raising questions for the past few months about what you guys think of Dazah, the reasons you don't use it, and what DaniWeb's biggest pain points are ... I've decided to go back to the drawing board with both sites.

All the functionality of Dazah and all the functionality of DaniWeb will be completely retooled into a completely new platform that all lives under the DaniWeb brand. All of the powerful Dazah features and functionality will be front and center when you go to DaniWeb.com. I'm working with a UX expert who will help me convey the messaging I need to convey in a way that will hopefully make sense to the masses.

Am I worried? Of course. I've been worried for years. But do …