Posts by Dani

Answerers need to stop thinking of themselves as "answerers" and more as equal members of a community ... technology is constantly evolving, and no one can claim to know everything. Everyone has things they can learn from others.

Do you propose answerers ask some "quality" questions to which they probably know the answers but that may stretch fellow answerers?

No, because we are all about building a community, and community is made up of people and personalities. If people around here earned a reputation for posting questions they already knew the answer to, we'd just earn a reputation as a community of being fake.

Answerers would start to feel like they were wasting their time helping with even the interesting questions, for fear the askers already knew the answers and they weren't really helping.

Right now the answerers don't have the patience to answer the crappy questions, but we don't really have a big problem getting answerers to answer the interesting questions. If answerers felt they were wasting their time and being tricked into helping people who didn't need help, it would really hurt morale.

You know what would definitely help though? We are not just a Q&A site but a discussion community ... Start interesting discussions about things you're interested or passionate in. Ask questions you really don't know the answer to. Start interesting topics that you actually do find interesting.

That's my point, though. If there were tons of people asking tons of great questions, we wouldn't have a tough time convincing the answerers.

We've been struggling with getting lots of quality askers. That's been the problem.

If we had lots and lots and lots of quality answerers right now, and nothing else, our situation wouldn't change at all.

If we had lots and lots and lots of quality askers right now, I have confidence they would get answered, and our problems would be over :)

By solely focusing on newbies, the more experienced people (those who volunteer their time to answer) get easily and quickly bored answering the same newbie questions over and over again. A lot of the reason why people volunteer is to challenge their minds by helping other people with interesting problems. We lost a lot of members over the past few years because they got tired of asnswering the same beginner-level questions over and over again.

Also, it's incredibly difficult to tailor your audience just to a specific niche beginner level, but not people who are in school and need help with their homework ... and not too advanced either, and just this but not that, etc.etc.

Having people pay to post questions might be a somewhat better idea as it'd at least get rid of most of the "do my homework for me and do it now because I'm more important than all of you combined and all your jobs" type of questions, but it'd also make the site utterly irrelevant for actual real questions as there are free sites like StackOverflow out there already.

Well that's more in line with that we do, which is allow people to ask questions for free, but ask them for a donation for featured status.

Frankly, I did not think Dani would bother replying. Thanks for replying.

Why would I not have replied? I reply to every single thread in the feedback forum, and take absolutely every suggestion …

Don't let unregistered post or vote. Or, atleast don't let them vote. (This'll attract them to register).

Unregistered users currently cannot vote or post, and have not been able to for the past 15 years.

Make it easy to signup. Signup with their facebook, twitter, gmail, etc. accs.

You can currently signup through Facebook, Twitter or Google+.

You've seen on WP blogs that when you want to comment, you atleast need to fill-in your email in the form. Make it like this for the unregistered. They must atleast fill-in their email (during posting) and click the link (that gets emailed to them) in order to confirm the post and confirm their email and to confirm they're not bots. (I'm a bot builder, by the way). That's it. Don't bother asking them for their name, etc. Otherwise, it'd be the same as registering.

Upon posting, you can do one-click signup through FB/Twitter/Google+.

To foil bots or deter spammers, make it an obligation that, posters must fill-in captcha.

We have an advanced CAPTCHA in place that does not even require people to fill in anything. Bots were a problem here about eight years ago when we were using vBulletin, but not anymore. We have not had a problem with bots for a very long time.

Allow thread openers or OPs to list their cpm banners on the top of all their threads. That way, they can earn when each time their threads load …

If Dani can get people to buy into DZ great. It's been up and running for a while now. Any news on it being used for stuff other than DW?

You can use the platform on Dazah.com directly. Aside from that, we got stuck having to wait for the patent before being able to publish what we were doing to get others on board.

Tomorrow I'll look into the link checker thing. I thought that was fixed as well.

Update: my mistake, it looks like some of these actually have put the resources into indexing the web themselves. Hmm ...

Either way, please pardon my saying so and do not take offense ... I guess I just kinda see it as, "I'm having a hard time getting Walmart to carry my product on its shelves, so the solution is to build a Walmart competitor. Then I can put my product in every aisle!"

Some people try to compete with google by launching their own search engine. You could perhaps create a search engine of your own, advertising user privacy for example, and send more traffic to daniweb.

You mean like DuckDuckGo? It's been around for well over a decade, is powered by Google's API (IIRC) and still never truly took off. The market has spoken: people care about personalization more than they care about privacy.

As I've said multiple times, it's a simple fact that Google loves Q&A sites because their end goal is to give their searcher the quickest path possible to getting their query answered. Therefore, they simply love any site that can quickly and efficiently accomplish that. Q&A sites that have a specific and direct question that is curated to mimic what Google searchers are looking for (e.g. generic enough to not be specific to just one use case yet not open-ended either) immediately followed by a suggested answer hits the sweet spot for Google's algorithm.

It's not that Google is anti-DaniWeb. Google would love us just as much if we were able to figure out a way to hit their sweet spot too. The problem is that Stack Overflow already has the perfect combination of features and functionality to hit the sweet spot for Google and for the end-user.

You have to design something that is not just great for Google, and not just great for your end-user, but fills a gap in the market as well and solves a need. And creating a platform that is designed to be just what Google wants, yet, in actuality, is just a poor replica of Stack Overflow, isn't exactly going to win us any awards.

We can get our Google traffic back ... but we have to solve a need in the market that gives Google searchers the answers they're looking for quicker and more efficiently than Stack Overflow currently can.

Although I wish I could take credit, Davey, our resident community administrator, writes all of the newsletters, and I'm sure he'll be around here in no time to give his appreciation.

Your generous donations are much appreciated!!

Non-tech support questions are allowed throughout the site. New threads can be support questions or if you just want to open a discussion about a topic. :)

Either way, we are discussing this via PM already, so ... :)

mysqli_query is probably returning FALSE on failure, instead of the results of the query. I don't remember what it is offhand, but there should be a way to pull the error message.

Thank you for posting all of this, Davey! Nice to see 3 upvotes, but I was hoping at least someone would comment. Oh well. :-P Can't have everything, I guess!

I was up working on SEO until 5 am last night, and now it's 4:30 and I'm coding away. Does anyone have any good tips to help with insomnia?

I tend to work late into the evenings, and I get such an adrenaline rush from coding (I'm a nerd, I know) that I have a hard time winding down. Then, when I finally do, my mind tends to wander while I'm trying to fall asleep, and I keep thinking of things I can implement and, well, there's no time like the present! I try to put them off until morning but that just makes me more anxious and then I end up getting out of bed a half hour later instead of right away.

Help?

I'm on my cellphone so I can't look it up at the moment, but if it doesn't, there are definitely robust editors that do support drag and drop file upload.

Oh what a cute moose!! :)

Oooooh, when they said head they meant the <head> section of the HTML document! Not in your head as in mind! Mind blown

In comment.php, you are retrieving Post ID via $_GET[] as opposed to via $_POST[]. GET is for query strings, such as comment.php?post_id=123 while POST is for data submitted from a form such as this one.

<form method="POST" name="form" action="comment.php">

    <div class="form-group">
        <input class="form-control" type="text" id="name" name="name" placeholder="Your name..." />
    </div>
    <div class="form-group">
        <textarea name="comment" id="message" class="form-control" placeholder="Your comment..."></textarea>
    </div>
    <div class="form-group">
        <button type="submit" class="btn btn-success" name="submit">Comment</button>
    </div>

</form>

You can see here that you are passing in name and comment via POST, but you are not passing in post ID anywhere. You need to pass post ID into the form as well, preferably as a hidden input variable.

<input type="hidden" name="post_id" value="<?php echo $_GET['post_id']?>">

Think of Dazah as just another feature in the DaniWeb umbrella. Right now, people only come to DaniWeb when they have an immediate tech support problem they need to solve, and then they leave immediately after. My hope is that people will start coming to Dazah just to meet people and chat on a more regular basis, and not just when they have a problem.

I think nowadays you can't be a one trick pony. Stack Overflow has their Careers and their Chatrooms, etc. Just being a product that people come to when they have a problem and stumble upon from a Google search isn't going to cut it anymore.

Not to mention ... Dazah and DaniWeb aren't really two separate apps. There's only one login system involved with one single user account. Not any different than going to Google Accounts to manage your Youtube profile. Or going to Stack Exchange to manage your Stack Overflow email settings. Or going to Microsoft Accounts to manage your OneDrive. etc.

We've broken away from being a one product shop. That one product is failing and we needed to pivot. We might have multiple apps and products now, but there's still one user account and your conversations and settings follow you across both apps.

I promise you I do not take anything as an attack on DaniWeb or Dazah. If anything, I appreciate your passion.

What it comes down to though is that I think you are looking at DaniWeb as a tech forum and you're not quite seeing how Dazah fits into that or why it's necessary or useful. However, that's because you're looking at DaniWeb for what it always has been, which has been a tech forum.

We established a few posts up that there is currently no need or market for a tech forum such as DaniWeb. Between Stack Overflow, Reddit, Quora, etc., everyone's support needs are already met there.

Therefore, I needed to pivot DaniWeb into something else entirely. That "something else" is more along the lines of Dazah's functionality.

Hi there,

I'm really sorry you experienced that problem!! How frustrating!!!!!

Did you hit the back button on your browser upon being redirected to the Dazah signup/login page? Unfortunately your post is supposed to be stored and then populated back into the message field upon completing the Dazah signup/login.

I'll test it out a few times and see if I can reproduce the problem.

In the future, no matter what site you're on, I always suggest to just hit Ctrl+A (to select all) followed by Ctrl+C (to copy) so if the submit button doesn't go through for some reason (web browser times out, Internet glitch, etc.), you haven't lost your post.

Basically here's what it boils down to ...

I've run out of ideas on how to turn DaniWeb around. I've tried everything and anything I could think of, but all of my friends who used to run tech forums (DreamInCode.net, DevShed, JustLinux, etc. etc.) are all in the same predicament I am. Google just doesn't like forums anymore.

I came out with Dazah and got really positive feedback initially, and then decided to merge it with DaniWeb as a means of helping to turn DaniWeb around. Pretty much as a last ditch effort because I don't know what else to try.

Nevermind. I got my answer.

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HI saladin and welcome to DaniWeb. Seems you're a bit confused what we are or what we do. What are you referring to? What are you trying to do?

Yay!! Welcome :)

When a member votes a question down with a reason, then its negative votes show up when browsing the list of threads, so you can quickly choose to ignore downvoted questions.

You can't change reputation in this feedback forum, sorry.

This functionality already exists with Dazah.

Every DaniWeb member has a Dazah account. Dazah allows its users to attach metadata to other users. Metadata are essentially key/value pairs attached to a privacy setting (The privacy setting can be set to only you can see it, everyone using DaniWeb can see it, or everyone in the Dazah ecosystem can see it).

You can attach a note to User A that has a privacy setting set only to you and says something like "This guy is annoying." You can attach a note to User B that has a privacy setting set to all of DaniWeb and says something like "Don't waste your time with this guy. He never follows up after asking a question."

I think it would be a realistic feature request for me to integrate a front-end for this into the DaniWeb UI.

In the meantime, you can implement it yourself with a fancy Greasemonkey script or a simple Chrome plugin. Essentially you would need to use an AJAX call to the API to set/get the metadata, and display it prettily wherever you want it along with a little textbox form to add new.

Haha, I'm not going to talk up Dazah's selling points unless he says he's looking to create a chat-based social network or seems like he has a need for our user matching algorithm.

For a forum system, I would go with Xenforo or perhaps even Discourse. However, it seems as if you're not very technical. Wix is great if you want point and click simplicity, but you're going to be very locked in. A lot of hosting companies will offer open source solutions (Wordpress, phpBB, etc.) out of the box through their point and click control panel.

That's the plus side, Jim? :(

jkon, essentially what you're asking for seems to me like a combination of reputation and post comments. For example, https://www.daniweb.com/members/479282/jkon/comments

We used to have a comments feature in member profiles and literally NO ONE used it, so we got rid of it.

Wouldn't be great to have a memo btn next to each user name that each one of us could write comments for that person , so if we have comments for that person we can see them.

How is that different than what we have via our existing member comments page, which has the added bonus of tying into reputation and being able to gauge individual member posts.

It turns out I had the right idea. I just read that Stanford is migrating its introductory courses from Java to Javascript, since JS is the language of the web nowadays.

http://www.stanforddaily.com/2017/02/28/cs-department-updates-introductory-courses/

I vaguely, vaguely recall that #! URLs are no longer properly indexed correctly as of about a year or so ago. I might be completely off on this one though. I remember reading about it when I was doing some AJAXy stuff that affected the browser back/forward buttons and URL state awhile back.

I think it's super important to pick a language that has a lot of recent, practical applications and has a strong community around it. Newbies to programming I think would appreciate seeing the language they're writing in actually being the same language as was used to create software they actually use, as it makes it all relevant when they can see tangible practical applications to what they are learning. For the more advanced yet young students, I think having a strong community around the language opens up a lot of opportunities for them to hit the ground running on their own, and really be self-motivated to expand their skills beyond the classroom. For example, if they see that the language they're learning in school has a large community around it, they may be more inclined to join the community themselves, and participate in open source Github projects, etc. in their free time.

I downloaded the .dmg file for OS X, dragged and dropped the application into the Applications folder, and then attempted to open the application. It just kept resulting in that error message. Ultimately restarting the computer fixed the problem.

YES! Today is the second day without codeine cough syrup and so far, so good. Just a few bad coughs throughout the day but pretty good for the most part.

Better to let a few dead links through for now instead of killing everything.

We're not killing everything. We're just killing the links when servers return clearly incorrect / confusing status codes. For example, LinkedIn doesn't like bots, so they return an http status 999, which we silently ignore. However, Microsoft seems to not like bots, but they are returning http 404 errors which are reserved for old pages that no longer exist. If the server tells us the page doesn't exist, we have no way of verifying whether they're lying to us because they don't like bots, or if the page really does not exist. IMHO, it's a badly configured server to purposefully lie by using an http status code that is specifically reserved for a different purpose.

Hopefully we're acting friendlier now by specifying a referer and useragent.

Yes, this website is very poorly configured. I can understand them choosing to not waste bandwidth on bots. However, they seem to:

• return a 404 error on a HEAD request
• return a 500 error on a GET request where a referer is set but a user agent is not set

I'm now making full GET requests (instead of just HEAD) setting the referer to the actual URL of the post that the link appears in, and the user agent to DaniBot. It's more bandwidth, obviously, but hopefully it will allow us to bypass servers that don't like bots, without us faking our user agent or being a bad bot.

We're still going to get bad results for servers that actively reject requests where the user agent has a Bot in the name, or isn't a known user agent (Mozilla, IE, Chrome, etc.) However, I think we have to be good botizens as well.

Hi Sam, welcome to DaniWeb.

The best way to be a valuable member of the community is to do just that ... participate, respond, and demonstrate your value. You will then earn a reputation among our community and will become respected. A positive reputation and respect and trust among your peers is the best way to gain business.

Because Google wants to constantly improve its algorithm. It releases updates every single day. Some might affect your site. Some might not. Sometimes, the combination of updates is what affects your site. Penguin is only one of many of these algorithm factors.

Storing the actual social network portion of a chat app in one makes a lot of sense, though. It's the perfect use case for a graph database.

Yes, I realize that storing messages in a graph database would not be ideal. For my use case, I was trying to store who has an existing conversation with whom, who is included in which audience segment, and which audience segments are included in the current Dazah API access token's "app bubble". Therefore, a single Dazah app would be able to find all of the converations I'm in, the people I know who I'm not yet in converations with, and degrees of separation, with other users accessible within the current application's scope.

Dazah is a chat API and I would like nothing more for you to give it a whirl. You can check it out here: https://www.dazah.com/developers

I originally created Dazah with MySQL because it's what I knew, and I felt it would be the quickest thing I could get up and running with the skills I already had. However, as I attempted to scale it, I became increasingly worried it wasn't the right tool for the job.

My biggest challenge was adapting MySQL to the concept of user nodes, metadata attached to those nodes, relationships between user nodes to determine who is in a conversation with whom, etc.

My friend recommended Neo4j to me because, as a graph-based database, where you can create nodes, properties for nodes, and relationships between nodes, it was the super ideal fit for my schema. However, after working for an ENTIRE VERY LONG DAY with a friend of a friend (who has now graduated to just friend status) who is very experienced with Neo4j in the world of big data (isn't it awesme living in silicon valley?!), we together determined that MySQL was the best fit after all.

What it boiled down to was that I was doing so many performance hacks in MySQL that it felt to me like it was not the right tool for the job because my queries were getting increasingly "hacky" IMHO. It constantly felt like I was trying to stick a square peg into a round hole. Couple that …

So php and java tags were curated due to non-noobs using them in the community center?

Yes.

So the more visible they are, the more they're chosen and therefore the more visible they are, the more they're chosen... arghhh!

They were chosen due to non-noobs using them in the Community Center. However, non-noobs are not given a selection in which to pick from, but rather are encouraged to type out their own. Therefore, the cycle is not as strong as you imply. Additionally, they are curated only based on recent activity.

I was being sarcastic because I run this forum. As a forum owner, why would I want you to spam me? :)

That being said, I recommend you check out XRumer. It will probably be what you're looking for. Good luck.

Oh, sorry. I'm on my phone and it was hard to understand your question. That's just how th bro see file uploaded works. It automatically shows the file name of the file browser for on the local system. You can't populate it with your own string.

Perhaps instead just remove the file input form and replace it with "file name successfully uploaded".

What do you think of the changes?!?! Friendlier sounding??!!

The Moz tools as well.

I don't use Pinterest, so I can't speak for what Pinterest users are looking for or what content they find attractive or unattractive. However, I do use Facebook to promote DaniWeb, so I can give you feedback on that side of it.

First thing, I'm incredibly confused what you offer. Home of Funny Pictures. Make Money Selling Ad Impressions. Which are you? Are you targeting people who want to laugh? Or are you targeting media sellers who want to make money selling ads? I'm confused.

From the pictures posted on your facebook wall, it looks like you're trying to get people to laugh. However, if you hadn't asked me to review your page, I never would have even scrolled down to see the first picture. I think the biggest thing working against you is your profile picture. It looks like you're trying to be a media agency targeting publishers. The black/grey weave background makes it look formal, and that doesn't help either.

<<hug>>

If you just want to sell tshirts and such, just use Cafepress. You upload the artwork, specify what you want it to be available on, and they take care of everything else.

Check out http://ta-lib.org/