Posts by Dani

Says the person with over 4000 posts and fewer than 10 threads started. Damn you people and your egos.

but for future, can't daniweb keep a pointer to lost accounts so that we can get them in any case ?

If you no longer wish to use your account anymore, you can simply log out, unsubscribe from receiving any emails from DaniWeb, and no longer visit the site. Then your account will be classified as nonactive.

Account deletion is for those people who really have a moral issue with having an account for life in our system, and want to permanently erase absolutely all traces of their account. If it were easy to recover deleted accounts, then they would be no different from what we were doing for the past 10 years that some people had major issues with.

I've temporarily disabled the live preview when posting in the DaniWeb editor.

I've been really looking seriously into why contributions to the forums have been ever-decreasing and so poor lately, and I was able to trace it back to a complete night and day difference the day that we switched from vBulletin to our own editor.

I reviewed some of the history from around that time, and there were a few complaints that the live preview was really lagging on slow computers. I dismissed the issue because we use the same live preview script as Stack Overflow does, and they don't seem to be having any issues. However, I thought it can't hurt to run a one or two day test and see if this really is the cause of our problems. If so, it's a rather easy fix to all of our troubles, wouldn't you say?

I'm not even sure if I can.

I have a bit of a headache and have been in and out of bed all day, so it's hard for me to concentrate on a code investigation right now :(

With the particular code snippet being discussed here, the poster accidentally put the description in the code snippet place and the code snippet in the description place. I reversed the two and must have / might have screwed something up in doing so.

What is the major/minor differences between a signed, and unsigned number? When do I need to worry about this?

If the variable will need to hold both positive and negative numbers, you will want it to be signed. Otherwise, it can be unsigned as you won't need to store the +/- sign.

Because you can post in the Microsoft Windows forum and then just tag your thread with ms-office.

What formulas?! I'm confused.

I have absolutely no clue what you're talking about. Huh??!!

I believe if we keep a poll to decide between whether to have a spellchecker or whether to have the "tab"ing functionality, spellchecker would win. :)

While that may be so, the difference is that without tabbing, people won't post formatted code correctly, and while they might not care/realize about that, it will be a mess for us to constantly clean up. I realllllllly don't want to go back to the way things used to be where we had to manually reformat every other post on the site to add code tags.

I have access to moderator tools on both Daniweb and SO and I don't think editing on SO is any more difficult than editing on Daniweb.

Oh, I'm not talking from a moderator perspective. I'm talking from the perspective of average Joe user who can't tab to indent their code so they just don't bother indenting it.

What I meant about SO was that their audience is aware that SO people are more sticklers, and so by and large they are going to take more time making sure each post is written and formatted correctly and perfect, versus the DaniWeb approach of always taking the path of least resistance and if it's not in your face, not taking the time to figure it out.

You can also create different groups for different Facebook friends, and allow the people communicating in one group (i.e. friends) to not have anything to do with wall posts in oantoher group (i.e. coworkers).

Incidentally, did you happen to use the new feature to ask this question? :)

Is there anyway you could give the end user the opportunity to toggle the reply to be just an ordinary text box. So that way at least we have the choice of the fancy reply box or just an plain textbox + spell checking.

The problem with doing that is that the vast majority of our audience (pretty much everyone who doesn't read this specific thread) won't understand why there are two editor interfaces and we'll end up with a lot of people losing a lot of the functionality such as our improved ability to post code snippets. If you were one of the moderators who manually edited the 80,000+ posts that were posted incorrectly because people were trying to manually type in BBCode instead of using the toolbar, you'd understand why that's just not viable. (Asking for some mods to step in and explain better please.)

^^Stackover seem to have it working. Maybe sounding a bit dumb because it seems to trivially obvious as I'm sure you would have done it... but they seem to have it referenced as a textarea rather than a div with an id and class?

SO's editor is just a regular text box (it doesn't support tabbing for code, or any method to indent code for that matter). That's because SO takes the approach of quickly and cleanly deleting every post that is formatted incorrectly. DaniWeb takes the much more manual approach of cleaning up every post that is formatted …

A failed one :(

I already pointed out the benefit to them and the benefit to us, but the additional benefit to the actual poster is that their questions gain additional publicity and hopefully they'll get an answer quicker by having their questions posted on DaniWeb automatically syndicated to other forums and help sites.

after all there isn't any mention of Daniweb on their website?

I see this simply as rude, plain and simple, to not give credit, but I don't think it makes them "evil". After all, we proactively provide a way for other sites to syndicate our content, and IMHO, in doing so, we give up the right to complain when sites do so.

As we all know, the latest version of Panda (hit in March 2013) was the last one to be pushed out manually. Google announced that from now on, Panda will be integrated into the main Google algorithm and will be a rolling update.

As someone who was hit in November (Panda 22) and hasn't recovered since, I was just wondering if anyone actually recovered in April or May with this new Panda format?

Yes, you can. You can reverse a vote by clicking on the arrow again.

So sorry about that!! That's what happens when I directly upload the file my designer gives me without double-checking it first.

It was moved from the top to the bottom because it was taking up valuable real estate at the top and yet never clicked on. It receives just as much traffic with a link just at the bottom.

C# can be used for both web development and non web development applications. To that end, while PHP is primarily used for web development, it can be executed from the command line as well. Basically we've adopted the tagging system as the new primary means of navigation here at DaniWeb, realizing that the category/subcategory structure is really not perfect at all.

Dreamweaver for design me thinks.

I am seriously considering extending the competition because it seems that the first few weeks were spent learning the API and creating frameworks around it, as opposed to developing the meat of an application.

You're welcome :)

So you mean like what we do on this page?: http://www.daniweb.com/web-development/web-design-html-and-css/15

You need to use jQuery, yes. Here's our code. You will need to modify it for your own needs:

<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
$(function() {
    var header = $('#static-header');
    var body = $('#body');
    var offset = header.offset().top;
    $(window).scroll(function() {
        var new_position = $(this).scrollTop(); 
        if (new_position > offset) {
            if (!(header.hasClass('fixed'))) { header.addClass('fixed'); }
            body.css('margin-top', header.height() + 'px');
        }
        else if (new_position <= header.height() + 30 && header.hasClass('fixed')) {
            if (header.hasClass('fixed')) { header.removeClass('fixed'); }
            body.css('margin-top', 'auto');
        }
    });
});
//-->
</script>

And then the CSS

div#static-header.fixed
{
    position: fixed;
    top: 0px;
    width: 100%;
    opacity: 0.90;
    ms-filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=90)";
    filter: alpha(opacity=90);
    z-index: 2;
}

Basically he pointed me to the IPN log thingy when you're logged into Facebook which shows all of your past transactions, and it is true that a decent percentage of them from the past few weeks have an empty 'message' area where it's supposed to have the details of the transaction account sent to the merchant. I'll investigate in a bit and see if the donations that aren't in my database happen to correspond to the ones that are blank on the PayPal log page.

I just got off the phone with PayPal developer / api tech support. This is apparently a high priority issue on their end that has been ongoing for about 2 weeks (the problem being that their servers are being hit-or-miss transmitting the relevant data back to the merchants). That smells like bullshit to me, because a PayPal high priority issue like this should not be going on for 2+ weeks. But who am I to say.

IPN showing wrong time, http response and no IPN data

Product Level 1:    Merchant Services
Product Level 2:    Order Management
Product Level 3:    Instant Payment Notification (IPN)
Date Created:   04/18/2013 11:30 AM
Last Updated:   04/18/2013 11:30 AM
Status:     Pending Fix
Integration Phase:  Live
Severity:   General Info
Environment:    PayPal Live Site

Hello Dani Horowitz,
My name is Messan with PayPal Merchant Services. We spoke on the phone earlier.
We are aware of this issue and we are working to resolve it. I will further update you with more information as it becomes available.
If you have any additional information or updates to your issue, please use the instructions in this email to update your ticket.
Thank you for your patience.

I'm trying to debug my PayPal IPN code. Here is my PHP code:

if ($this->input->post('payment_status') == 'Completed' AND in_array($this->input->post('txn_type'), array('web_accept', 'subscr_payment')))
{
    $query = 'cmd=_notify-validate&' . http_build_query($this->input->post());

    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr');
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $query);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
    $result = curl_exec($ch);
    curl_close($ch);

    if ($result == 'VERIFIED')
    {   
        $donation = new Donation;
        $donation->insert(array(
            'userid' => $userid,
            'amount' => $this->input->post('mc_gross'),
            'timestamp' => now(),
            'paypal' => $this->input->post('payer_email'),
        ));
    }
}

The official documentation is here: https://www.x.com/developers/PayPal/documentation-tools/code-sample/216623

It only seems to be working about 75% of the time. I think that for the remaining 25%, the payment_status isn't 'Completed' or an invalid value is spcified for txn_type. I don't want it to work on refunds, etc. From what I can tell, there is no distinction between one that worked and one that didn't (i.e. it's not like one was an eCheck and one wasn't, etc). Anything I can look into?

I'm still unsuccessfully working on it. In the meantime, I manually promoted your account to Sponsored.

Because, after a lot of deliberation among the moderation team over many years, it was determined that 'shit' was not offensive enough a word to be censored.

Who here thinks that it should work on thread pages? Show of hands, please.

That's so weird, really?? It doesn't happen when you're in an actual thread, but it should work on all non-thread pages (homepage, all navigation pages, control panel, etc)

Oh ... I forgot. I'm supposed to ask something. Sorry I broke the game.

Deal or no deal: A Manhattan loft that's bigger than a closet (no, seriously, they exist)

DaniWeb was coded using CodeIgniter. I really like the flexibility, how lightweight it is, and the fact that I don't feel weighed down with tons of bloat because we actually do use a significant portion of the built-in functions.

No deal, I recently got DaniWeb appraised for much more than that.

@Dani:- you have not provided solution for my note2 probem.I am not able to login using chrome in note2.The lightbx is opening and then closing automatically.Please provide alternate way to login either if lightbox is not visible.I was able to login some time ago.i have also posted this but till now no slution available.

I was not able to reproduce this bug until today. I noticed that it was happening on my iPhone 5, and I was able to look into it and fix the problem.

Text is shown of the thread over daniweb header.

I'm not sure what you mean, but if you're trying to say that when you are scrolling down, the header becomes transparent and scrolls down the page with you, this is the intended behavior. It goes back to being non-transparent when it's in its rightful position when you scroll back up.

If user name is too long than it is coming in thread description.Either use word-wrap or word-break property to get rid or show only data that fits the screen and then show by dots.

Yes, I need to do something about this. The reason it is like this is because it fits perfectly based on the maximum number of characters we allow in a username. However, when people use the 'Log In with Facebook' feature, it uses their Facebook username, which bypasses our maximum character restriction. We can add elipses (...) after a certain number of characters, but …

When on forum listing pages, as you scroll down the page, the top navigation menu floats down with you.

Unfortunately with forums, it's not true that build it and they will come. If we went ahead and created a new forum, that new forum would remain empty. As pritaeas says, our Web Design forum is most appropriate here (although I understand that you might not be talking about web-based applications at all). Maybe even the top level Software Development category.

The idea with the tagging system are that there are an infinite number of possibilities ... tag something with ui-design in the top level Software Dev category, for example.

New forums will be added upon seeing extreme interest in them, but the tagging system has pretty much taken over the old-style forum structure.

I believe that DaniWeb take "ownership" of posts so that they can legally store and manipulate them, however, someone from DaniWeb would have to officially confirm/deny this.

Yes, that's true. However, and please don't quote me on this, but in the future this might be modified to change from taking ownership to being granted an exclusive, irrevocable license. From what I understand, this would allow us everything we need while not being the one liable for defamation, illegal content, etc.

Pretty sure I've read in the past ownership is taken to help fight against scraping sites

While this is somewhat true, we pick and choose who we pursue very carefully. We only go after sites that copy all of our content and then show us in a bad light, or sites that are harming us by being there in some way. Between our RSS feed and our new API, sites have been syndicating our content for years and years, and it actually, believe it or not, helps us in Google when other sites do that, ever since the duplicate content penalty came into existance.

If your database is small enough (not more than a few megs in size) then you can upload an .sql file. However, I would not recommend doing this through phpMyAdmin's web-based interface for anything larger or you'll end up with timeout errors.

There's Microsoft Silverlight.

But I would say it would be HTML5/CSS3 with a Flash fallback, yes.

Fixed. Now code snippets do.

DaniWeb was hit and recovered from Google Panda three times already. It's possible to recover. It just takes time.

Changing the domain name is not the quick fix you think it is. If you don't fix what Panda doesn't like, then the new domains will be hit by Panda in no time. Additionally, for each 301 redirect you do from the old domain to the new domain, you lose some PageRank, making it all that much harder to recover.

Good luck!

No matter what we do, there are going to be people who think it should be different. They used to scroll / collapse, and we got people who didn't like the page movement or found it annoying the other way around, so we stopped. :)

Yes, it is. I'm still trying to figure out why sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

I'm sorry, I'm just not able to reproduce your issue.

I know I promised not to make anymore drastic changes to the API, but ... well ... I lied.

The two API write operations (voting on posts and watching/unwatching articles) used to always respond with a JSON object in the format success: true or success: false

Now, they return the following:

• If successful, a JSON object with information about the action that was performed
• If unsuccessful and JSON was requested, an HTTP 400 error
• If unsuccessful and JSONP was requested, a JSON object with a bad request error message

Problem with all the possible logical and other operators e.g. LIKE / IN and nesting of subclauses.

Basically all of the filtering / sorting that we provide through the API is limited to the functionality that is needed for the existing DaniWeb website. (Effectively giving you the ability to recreate a production DaniWeb).

Unfortunately we can't provide every possible combination of filtering because the sky is the limit when it comes to potential uses and possibilities, beyond what we already do on the DaniWeb website. For example, the only filtering we currently do here is allow moderators to search by username, which is functionality built into the API.

In a production environment, you might actually wish to consider recreating a database (or perhaps a no-sequal database such as MongoDB) from the API requests, and then querying your own database.

Oh I see. OK, I'll look into the code thing :)

Does that imply that filter can only be used on the last one? It appears so, just like it confirmed. If so, is it similar with the forum_id in the "Fetch Articles" call for a member?

Yes for both filter and forum_id.

Oh, and pasting lines of links in a code block formats without newlines.

Not sure what you mean. Can you explain?

The payment actually went through. Much appreciated. It is a bug with the system not promoting your account. I'll get this resolved shortly.