Posts by Dani

I’m super busy working behind the scenes to completely relaunch the entire DaniWeb brand focusing on Dazah functionality. Stay tuned. I took all your feedback into consideration.

I have a plan in place to do the Dazah/DaniWeb integration, in such a way that I'm hoping will contribute to revenue. We'll see what happens, but everything is in motion now. I'm feeling really good about this.

Sorry for the downtime earlier today ... I'm working behind the scenes on merging all of Dazah functionality into DaniWeb.

This means starting out by getting them both on the exact same infrastructure. Dazah has a lot of security benefits over DaniWeb, so I'm currently working on doing a lot of things to increase DaniWeb's security behind the scenes by incorporating Dazah's anti-bot technology into DaniWeb. DaniWeb, of course, has always been pretty secure ... but Dazah was designed as a login platform, first and foremost.

We currently do something a lot more sophisticated than that. ;)

I just also want to point out that, of course, infrastructure changes need to be completed first, or I risk having to redo everything else both before and then again after the infrastructure change.

I want you to realize that I am hearing you when you comment on the changes needed to the homepage and what's wrong with it. It's not that I'm saying, "oh, that's easy to change," and then so I don't do it. It was first brought to my attention a short couple of days ago, in the midst of research I'm currently doing for an infrastructure change planned for this/next week. I've added it to my todo list to tackle just as soon as this infrastructure change is completed.

You know that there's a pain point, you say it "can be easily changed at any time, so what do you do? You ignore it.
You are so obsessed by Dazah that you are failing to hear what everyone is telling you.

I'm ignoring it this week because I've devoted the next two weeks to focusing on Dazah because I need money, and no one has been suggesting any new ways to make money with DaniWeb.

You want pain points, but then this morphs into more on bloody Dazah, again. It's important as an income stream, sure we get that, but we don't care about it. You have tried to convince us for a long time to create apps etc. Nobody's really bothered, not even those you have known for years and would bend over backwards to do you a favour.

That was what I was getting at, though. Essentially I wanted to see how much of a pain point Dazah is, and what other functions of the platform are pain points. Redoing the homepage ... check. That will be redone pretty soon. The problem with spammers ... well, we have a pretty effective spam bot that kills 99% of it (with the exception of a two day window last week where there was a security hole and spammers were able to bypass the spam bot, but that has been corrected). The problem with newbies ... well, that comes down to what the platform looks …

I'm strongly contemplating making some very drastic changes to DaniWeb ... as big as when DaniWeb was onboarded onto Dazah.

Ideas that I'm thinking of are:

• Rebranding Dazah as DaniLogin, a subsidiary of DaniWeb
• Removing DaniWeb from Dazah, and rebranding Dazah for the audience it was initially created for, business professionals in the tech sector (SEOs, entrepreneurs, digital marketers, recent code academy graduates looking to work on projects with others, developers seeking cofounders, etc.)
• Integrating Dazah into DaniWeb, and retooling all Dazah functionality into the DaniWeb website

What pain points would you say sites like Stack Overflow, Reddit, and Quora have? They're not friendly to newbies? Would you say that's the main thing? What else?

Thank you very much for your feedback. I'm trying to read between the lines for anything that I have not already done or tried to revive DaniWeb.

I've said all along that I created Dazah to fix DaniWeb. If it's not able to do that, then I have to go back to the drawing board (which could perhaps mean ditching or repurposing Dazah's functionality) and try another way.

I think the idea of the separate login created more problems than it helped. As of right now, I'm thinking of going back to DaniWeb's own login system (no longer have a separate Dazah account), but take Dazah's features and functionality and revenue stream and somehow integrate that into DaniWeb. However, it would need to be done in a way that both benefits DaniWeb members and brings an additional revenue stream outside of banner ads.

I'm trying to save DaniWeb. :)

What are the biggest pain points you have with DaniWeb?

If you don't visit DaniWeb as much as you used to, what changed?

Where do you go now instead of DaniWeb?

What makes other resources better?

You built it. They will come.

I built it 2 years ago. No one ever came.

To me, DaniWeb is the Dazah app for DaniWeb users. We already have direct messaging and if someone needs to go beyond that, we have (heresy?) other ways to commincate. For this reason the chat app may not fit well in the DaniWeb as I perceive it user base.

I agree that DaniWeb is the flagship Dazah app for DaniWeb users. But what about other apps for DaniWeb users that do not revolve strictly around direct messaging? What about a code repository or pastebin-type app? What about a job boards app a la Stack Careers? Surely there are other apps or features that could be of interest to the DaniWeb demographic? By writing these apps on top of the Dazah platform, the app has instant access to DaniWeb user data, and users already have login credentials where 15 years of knowledge about them goes with them wherever they log in.

And if you feel that there is absolutely zero need for any other apps for the DaniWeb audience, then wouldn't that mean that there should never be a need for me to work on any additional features for DaniWeb.com because it's maxed out the way it is?

I need help here, and Dazah gives the ability for others to create features for the DaniWeb audience, while giving their apps just as much insight into its users as I, myself, have.

Microsoft bought Skype and, while I can't say that the software has really been improved in any substantial way since it was purchased, I don't think it was made worse or lost market share either. I guess we shall see what happens.

rproffitt, you have web dev experience. Do you see the benefit in creating a Dazah app that's targeted towards DaniWeb users?

Oooh, the company is actually called Proper. When you said a proper one, I thought you added the word 'proper' just because you're British and you UK folks like that word.

You can use window.location.hash to fetch the #hash in a URL e.g. page.html#tab1

You can add jQuery that loads on page load to retrieve the hash and, if it's set to a specific value, switch tabs.

May I ask what results you see? When I google "java problem null pointer" here's what I get:

1. Stack Overflow, which is a Q&A site, not a forum. The big difference here is that Q&A sites such as Stack Overflow and Quora are very heavily curated, with questions that are never too specific to just the OP's use case, and always immediately followed by direct answers to the specific question at hand. These are perfectly optimized for search engines, whose goal is to give people the answer to their question in the fastest and most efficient way possible. Forums are different in that they are less curated for the masses (e.g. we allow OPs to post their code and ask for help finding a bug in their code, which means that we don't optimize for every single page of our site to be otimally designed to help Google searchers). Additionally, discussion threads allow for back and forth posts, which, again, is less optimized for the Q&A method of short, concise question geared towards the masses followed by individual, standalone answers. Discussion forums, on the other hand, are typically geared towards optimizing for / helping the OP or helping the forum members.
2. Also Stack Overflow
3. A tutorial on GeeksForGeeks.org titled "Null pointer exception in Java". Tutorials that concisely answer a Googler's question are, again, optimized for Google searchers.
4. A tutorial / article on Wikibooks.org
5. A tutorial on Javaworld.com
6. A tutorial on Oracle.com
7. A tutorial on Oracle.com
8. A tutorial on airbrake.io
…

I don't get this. Without pairing at the company level how could you know if someone is a potential client? Or are you talking about b2c pairings?

It's been my experience that it's all about who you know. I run a tech forum and I don't want to be matched with Dell. But a specific person who works for Dell Community Outreach, or a person who knows someone who can potentially help make something happen ... those are the connections that can turn into potential partnerships.

In my 15 years of selling advertising inventory to agencies, I work with specific sales reps and follow them as they change positions between companies. A rep I develop a relationshp with when they work at Univeral McCann is going to take their little black book with them when they move to Ogilvy. It's my experience that in most sales-based positions, people take their client list with them when they switch jobs. In fact, many times companies attempt to steal employees from each other because it's the cheapest way of acquiring a lucrative customer.

Either way, my point is that it should all be about the people and relationships between people. The benefits of networking come from relationships with people. Not relationships with entities.

Yes yes yes!

Here's what it comes down to. Forums are old hat. Google doesn't like them. The ad industry has morphed such that publishers don't make much money from ads anymore. Twenty years ago, all the top generating websites were online publishers: Yahoo!, MSN, CNET, etc. Nowadays, they're all close to bankrupt. And you don't hear about forums like you did 5-10 years ago.

There are two types of businesses that make money online nowadays: SaaS platforms (software-as-a-service) where you pay to use their online service or platform, and social media platforms that collect data about their users and have their own proprietary ad platforms to sell targeted ads to these users (Facebook and Google).

Dazah integrates with DaniWeb, offers a robust SaaS platform, and collects and utilizes user behavior in a way never before done: to provide matchmaking between users. I'm trying to save DaniWeb with Dazah. But I need it to gain enough traction and revenue to justify putting effort into working on it.

I recently had to mass insert a really large text file of strings into MySQL. Here's how I did it.

This code connects to a database. Do you mean just replacing the table with a dropdown?

echo '<html><body><select>'; 
while ($i < mysqli_field_count($link)) { 
    $meta =  
    mysqli_fetch_field_direct($result, $i); 
    echo '<option>' . $meta->name . '</option>'; 
    $i = $i + 1; 
} 
echo '</select></html>'; 

Ah, FusionChart! I'm a big fan. That's what we use for DaniWeb member profiles as well as the stats features on Dazah. As Andris pointed out, the bug is in chartdata.xml

A popular one is https://www.twilio.com/sms

Just because text messaging account confirmation is newer, does not imply that it is better than email verification.

Email verification is still required by all the major ISPs if you plan on building a mailing list or emailing your users for any reason.

Google AdWords is the platform in which business owners and advertisers can pay to advertise their products or services. Their ads show up on Google search results and/or on Google partner sites.

Google AdSense is the platform in which website publishers can be paid to display ads on their websites, by being a part of the Google ad network. Google acts as a middleman between advertisers using AdWords to buy advertising and publishers using AdSense to display the advertising to visitors.

RHT was one of my first stocks as well, back in the day. Held onto it for a decade plus.

Goodness, it's not that complicated!!

• Click the Contribute link to start a new thread (e.g. https://www.daniweb.com/programming/4/contribute)
• Click the link right below the header that says "You are starting a Discussion Thread. Need to do something else instead?"
• Use the dropdown to select Code Snippet instead of Discussion Thread

Are you using any third party software to manage the bidding process? Are advertiser bidding on CPMs or CPCs?

Do you make the process easy for new advertisers to set up a campaign on their own? Or do they have to each contact you and is it a manual process? (Note: instant gratification rocks).

Avoid things that can be seen as buying and selling links because that could get you in trouble with Google in the future.

Got it sorted!

I had to connect to MySQL with the right character set. Just changing it in MySQL wasn't enough.

We are an English-only community. Can you please post your question in English so that we can help you? Thanks!

We need more details. Are you a designer? Developer? What type of project?

Is yours online and called DaniBot?

DaniBot is the name of my telepresence robot at the DaniPad shared workspace in Queens, NY.

https://suitabletech.com/

Once they find a spammable site, they invite friends. Thanks for working this issue.

We have been targeted for attacks many, many times over the years. Because we are on a custom platform, any automated bots they come up with have to be specially written for us. It's typically a cat and mouse game of them spamming, us making changes to our platform to mitigate the attack, them modifying their bot to circumvent our changes, etc. However, it's rare that the cat and mouse game goes on for this long before they give up.

Their threads may have disappeared but their names (often the name is spam) and their 1-800-BUYSPAM messages were still visible on the front page post-ban.

This bug was corrected. Banned members no longer show up as "... Joined the Community" in the activity stream.

Test for 1-800 phone numbers too. How often does a legitimate post have an 800 number?

We are already doing this.

The result is a full two pages of spam postings on the front page before getting to the real stuff.

A lot more than the first 2 pages!! It's been thousands of posts over the past 48 hours. We're being full blown attacked. I'm still convinced the process is largely manual though. I'm seeing no signs of it being a completely automated process. They're activating their email addresses. Using legitimate useragents (which, of course can be spoofed). Getting past all of our CAPTCHAs and Javascript checks, etc.

Been wondering - seeing DW with (hardly) no new content from people like Dani or other staff - is DaniWeb dead?

It's not dead. Traffic has been declining but I've been working super hard to keep the site alive. DaniWeb and Dazah are still my main focus day-to-day.

Hi there! Happy holiday season and early happy new year.

Use WordPress. Use a shared hosting company that offers preconfigured WordPress installations.

It feels like everyone agrees with me that it's rude behavior, though Dani appears to think it's rude, but less rude than everyone else.
If so, the main objection is that it is an unenforceable rule or one that takes more effort to enforce than the effort lost helping cross-posters?

I feel as if I find it less rude than everyone else, as I tend from time to time to do it myself as a question asker. Additionally, I think it's rather unenforceable, or, at the very least, not realistically consistently enforceable.

My main reason for not wanting to change the rules is because they've worked great for us for 15 years. They only stopped working when the site stopped being activate and we stopped getting quality content entirely. So I don't really want to adjust the rules to cater to the current state of affairs.

Had a eureka moment. This just ain't any fun anymore. This is like pulling teeth. All the poncing about pandering to trolls and softly softly with pisstakers. I'm gone. Account deleted. Good luck. 10 years is enough for me.

Would be super, duper, duper sad for you to leave, no doubt about that. However, on the flip side, I've been trying every which way I know to try to "fix" DaniWeb, and I'm probably more burned out than everyone else here combined. DaniWeb is still, and always will (for better or for worse) be my baby, but I'm as …

OMG I just answered my own question without even realizing it! Apparently I saw the setting six months ago and still don't know what it does. OMG I need to bed.

It says:

Ad balance is under maintenance

Your Ad balance settings have been reset and your revenue isn't affected.
Our engineers are working on it. Please check back again soon.

I still believe he's a victim in many ways. However, it was more that I suggested he doesn't realize what he is doing wrong, and he responded to that by boasting in this very thread that he was acting nasty on purpose.

As you may already know, i tend to give a ridiculous amount of slack while trying to bring together a global community with people from all different cultures and backgrounds, who are all offended at varying levels. However, at the end of the day, it all always comes down to intent for me.

I don't believe in infractions if you didn't realize you were doing wrong. In UI's case, a lot of his behavior came across to me as either autistic or simply not experienced with social interactions and not knowing any better. But admitting that he knew what he was doing, going so far as to admit it makes him feel empowered when everyone bends to his whim, suddenly makes those posts that were previously a gray area now infractionable.

Still waiting for links UI.

He can't reply because he's now been banned.

I know many people who are autistic. Typically, their behavior could border on being trollish, and most certainly impolite, rude, and inappropriate, but it's just about always unintentional. Sometimes, upon pointing inappropriate behavior out to them, they tend to get defensive, which might be due to embarrassment; I'm not sure.

However, I must admit, that is not what I'm seeing here, based on UI's responses. He's now admitted point blank in this thread that he acts nasty to specific people on purpose. I've now read just about most of what he posted in this thread (I admit I skimmed a bit) and I still feel as if he's a depressed, lonely person who has a genuine craving for social connections with others. I still feel like there might be some reason why he genuinely does not know any better, or perhaps more accurately, know how to make friends, or truly comprehend what it is that he's doing wrong. I also feel as if he treats these online forums as his entire existence ... and the same way that in the real world, we're surrounded by people we like, people we dislike, people we are indifferent to, people who are nice, people who are nasty, etc., he seems to transpose that concept onto the people in these online communities he joins. It's almost like he feels there must be an assortment of each category with a token person in each category. I also feel like he wants to feel like he's …

I just noticed yesterday that FB Messenger ate my asterisks. Today, I just noticed that it was actually parsing my asterisks into bold! And it parses Markdown's syntax for italics too! I swear this is new. Try sending someone a message with Facebook and you can do: *bold* or _italics_ ... Yes, it's not exactly Markdown b/c Markdown requires two asterisks for bold, or else it functions as a synonym for italics with one asterisk. But still ...

There's no reason other than trying to stir up trouble to speculate on someone's religion. If someone wants to inform others of their religion, that's up to them, but it's a private matter. You don't ask people about it, you don't speculate about it, particularly in a PHP thread where it has ZERO relevance.

I attend a lot of networking events for tech entrepreneurs and VCs, and are questioned more times than I can count, upon me handing them my business card, "Dani Horowitz ... That's a Jewish name, right? Are you Jewish? Dazah ... is that Hebrew? It sounds like it might be Hebrew." I honestly cannot tell you how many times I've had people speculate and ask me if Dazah is Hebrew simply because I have a Jewish last name ... all in the name of trying to make small talk at these networking events, or perhaps just to strike up a conversation, or learn more about me or Dazah. Or, perhaps, I'm the nutty one and Dazah really is Hebrew-sounding, since everyone else seems to think it is. I don't know as I don't know Hebrew. Either way, it happens across many professional networking events here in Silicon Valley. I can assure you none of the commenters were purposefully trying to stir up trouble. But I can assure you it's something I get a lot.

Give me one possible reason other than an attempt at cyber-bullying and causing discord for UI to publicly speculate …

When otherwise polite and respectful members get drawn into responding to outrageous claims and accusations

As we keep reiterating in this thread, members all volunteer their time. No one here is forced or required to waste their time responding to outrageous claims and accusations.

As the saying goes, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. You can't, on one hand, keep insisting that you are a volunteer choosing to spend your time how you wish, and on the other hand, be angry and hateful towards someone because you were forced to have to deal with responding to their outrageous suggestions and ideas.

In the case of UI, or anyone else, asking a question across multiple sites, and not cross-referencing them, such that you feel like you wasted your time helping someone who already had the answer ... well, in cases like that, I certainly see why you might be irritated by that.

But with regards to the context of this specific thread ... no one has a right to be angry at the other side for being pulled into a flame war and for having their time wasted as a result of being forced to participate in it.

If you read the initial post of this topic, and didn't agree with UI's ideas, you could have just moved on, or, at the most, commented on what ideas you thought had merit and which ideas you thought were silly. However, you can't blame UI for the …

When I refused to apologise arguing that I have not broken your TOS and if it was a big crime here to ask the same questions that have been asked elsewhere or if it was a big crime to ask the same questions elsewhere which have already been asked here then that should have been made clear in your TOS.

Our TOS does say "Do not post the same question multiple times" ... However, you're right in that the rule is more so aimed at the same person asking the same question on DaniWeb more than once. It's not really a rule to not ask the same question across multiple forums because each forum is comprised of different people and discussions and conversations can go in very different ways and approached from different angles. It's sort of asking two different groups of friends for advice and engaging in two entirely different discussions about it. As AssertNull pointed out, the big problem with doing this is that your question might have been answered to your satisfaction in one place, and you didn't let the folks in the other place know. My suggestion is that, when cross-posting across different sites, you link to the other threads so that everyone can see what help you got there already and maybe approach the problem from a different angle. This is just my humble opinion. Others here may disagree with me about this strategy.

And then you can do a search on …

2-3X net profit as a valuation sounds reasonable. Does your site have any proprietary technology? How much money does your site make? A $75K valuation would mean you take home $3000/mo after all expenses.

I believe that, in the case of an accident, the entity most at fault or most negligent should be held responsible.

If it was a result of user error or user maintenance, such as not properly cleaning off the sensors from snow, not ensuring the car has installed the most up to date software updates, using the device beyond its recommended lifespan, not undergoing regular maintenance and ensuring that all hardware is operating normally, etc., then the car owner is at fault.

If it was a result of a programming glitch, or something beyond the end-user's control, then the car manufacturer who allowed their code to be released into the wild is at fault. We cannot blame a specific Tesla engineer, for example, for a bug that may have accidentally been introduced and was not caught by any quality assurance before making it into the wild, or an engineer who programmed the ethical algorithm they were instructed to. The car manufacturers should be responsible for the algorithms they release as well as ensuring the proper QA checks exceed their standards, as the software is used in life or death situations.

In other words, the entity at fault is the one whose behavior or negligence contributed the most to the accident.

I don't really see much of a unique ethical dilemma at all, beyond what our civilization already deals with when it comes to technology that is life affecting.

For example, if Johnson&Johnson releases a critical medical …

Millenials and the younger generation (essentially, everyone younger than 35 years old) went through their teenage years in the Internet era. Today, the very vast majority date online. They meet people online. They ask people out on dates online. They get to know potential significant others online. They enter into relationships online. They maintain friendships online. They break up online. They take classes online and engage with their teachers and professors online. They search for jobs online, and, if they're lucky, they may even get hired online. Quite realistically speaking, online chat is their primary form of communication, and has been throughout their teenage years and beyond.

If you are in a face-to-face conversation I can see asking a not quite thought-out question. But when you have the time to compose your thoughts and ask a question online, there is no reason not to put some thought into composing a coherent question.

This may be the way that you see it and think of it. But for everyone who went through their teenage and later years online, they treat every word of online communication with the same amount of deliberate thought and intent as you treat your primary form of communication.

"1337 speak" / chat speak was born because people were unable to type as fast as they could speak aloud, and as online chat slowly became the new primary form of communication for the younger generation, a shorthand way of communicating evolved to compensate for the lack …