Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
That'll still be a while. My main focus is still SI, but I'm putting in the quotes features on iHub today mainly because I'm heading out of town tomorrow morning and there's not really anything with SI that I can start/finish today, but a few things with iHub.
We've added a Commentary section to the homepage. IMO, the article we're carrying there right now (it'll be changed weekly) is one of those where you probably shouldn't be drinking a beverage while reading it.
A 160x600 or 120x600 ad is displayed with the commentary, regardless of whether you're a Premium member. We're paying for that particular article and need help offsetting the cost.
We're also going to use Commentary as a separate revenue stream. More details will be available later, but aside from very rare instances, we'll be charging Commentary providers on both sites. It'll be part of a "Commentary Provider" package we'll see where, for a price, a Commentary writer will be able to post commentary linkable from the home page, we'll keep an accessible archive of their previous articles, their articles will be displayed with their own ads, and we'll include some banner, box, or text-link ad inventory as part of the package.
Any interested writers should PM me directly and I'll get them the rate sheets and what the package offers.
iHub now has quotes!
Specifically, the homepage now carries a market snapshot (DJIA is missing because of exhorbitant fees for their data) and any stock-specific board now can display a delated quote and chart right below the iBox. Of course, this can be toggled on and off on a per-user basis.
If your board is specific to a stock, make sure it's located in either the "Nasdaq and Listed", "OTCBB" or "Canadian Stocks" categories and has a valid ticker.
The homepage market snapshot is visible to everyone, whether free, Premium, or not logged in.
To view the quotes associated with boards, you have to be logged in and you have to be a Premium member.
The best part is yet to come.
Can't believe it's been so long since I've posted here.
About a week or so ago, I implemented a new "Filing" feature on iHub, available only to Premium Members.
The Filing feature is a way for you to create message folders on the site and manage the contents of them.
On the "MailBox" screen, just to the right of your name, is a link that says "Manage/Open Folders". Clicking this will take you to the Folder Management screen, where you can create new folders and view or manage the contents of them. Clicking the name of an existing folder will re-display the same screen, but with the contents of that folder displayed.
Also at the far right of each message in your MailBox is a link that says "File". If you click that link, the system will prompt you to click the name of the folder to which to move the message. After you've done so, the message is moved to that folder and you're taken back to your MailBox.
A Folder doesn't care whether a message is private or public. It'll store them all the same.
This morning, I added a number of new features to Filing. They are:
1. A "Return to MailBox" link for filed messages. Clicking this will remove the message from the current folder and put it back in the MailBox.
2. A "Delete" link for each folder. Pretty self-explanatory. It's only functional on empty folders, though. If you want to delete a folder that has messages in it, first return its messages to your MailBox.
3. The ability to rename existing folders.
I consider the Filing system about 50% done now. I won't be making anymore changes to it for a while, though, as I need to get back to SI programming. New interfaces don't write themselves.
Filtering and Cookies Information:
Cookie Changes: #msg-1655268
Filters: Please check your filters here, to make sure you have everything set properly. You may be blocking people from posting to you.
http://www.investorshub.com/boards/filters.asp
Filtering Changes: We'll make things simpler, but for now, if you block someone by way of "PM Block" or "Prevent Messages From This Poster" (in their profile), they can not send you any type of message -- public or private. Nor can you send messages to them. More Info: #msg-1656032
Questions? Let us know on #board-504
MB
Thanks for pointing that out. I haven't heard an outcry yet, but perhaps because people are better-educated about cookies and know that these kinds of cookies are not as evil as some might think. I'm just storing the userID on the user's computer instead of the webserver so that it won't matter which webserver they're on once all the code is converted and we're running multiple web-servers.
For IE/Netscape permission/terminology purposes a "memory" cookie is most frequently referred to as a session cookie. Gets wiped after you close your browser.
If you block someone from sending you messages, the block now applies to public messages.
The checking is a little more in-depth for public messages.
With private messages, the system only checks to see if the intended recipient has blocked the intended author.
With public messages, the system checks both the author's and recipient's filter list. If either has the other blocked, it won't allow the public message to be posted.
This means that if I have Matt blocked from sending me messages, he can't send them to me and I also can't send them to him.
Effective immediately, iHub is storing a cookie in memory on your machine to keep track of your account number. This is in addition to the cookies that are kept if you check the "Check this box to remember your Username/Password" box on the login page.
This cookie is different in that it resides only in memory, not on your hard drive. When you close your browser, the cookie is erased.
The simple explanation of why we're doing this is to make it possible to add webservers in the (near) future without having to also add an expensive load-balancer.
The more technical explanation is that your account info is stored in session variables right now. In a simple "round-robin" load-balancing scenario (which is what we'll use), session variables are a bad thing. They're only known to the webserver you're currently on. When you go to another page on the site and your request is served by a different webserver (which will be the case 50% of the time in a 2-server setup), the different webserver doesn't have your session variables, so it has no idea who you are and therefore treats you like you're not logged in to the site at all.
Some of you may remember the problems we had before when we added a second webserver. The problems were caused by the fact that one webserver has no idea what session variables the other webserver had stored for you.
A memory cookie is one way around this. Hidden form fields is another. Memory cookies are much easier, though. A memory cookie is available to every page of the site without every page having to have code added to pass a hidden form field to the next page.
The reason I'm doing this right now is that I'm adding a new feature to the site that'll be "sessionless" and I will eventually make all pages sessionless so that they can be handled correctly by multiple webservers.
When a moderator is viewing a deleted message in the board management screen, the name of the person who deleted the message is now displayed.
Fixed the bug in PM Searching that was causing the "Previous 50" link to take you out of PM Search and into Public Message search.
When you search public messages and click on a message that's returned by the results list, your search terms are now highlighted in that message in the same color you chose for displaying typos in the Preview screen.
Edit: The search term is also capitalized in the message. Anything to make it easier for color-blind people like me.
Edit 2: The search term is also bolded.
Switched the order of "Next 50" and "Previous 50" on board.asp to make it consistent with the rest of the site.
Ages since I've posted to this board!
Message reading done in Batch mode ("Next 50", etc) is now being accounted for properly when determining the number of messages read per day on a board and its score for inclusion on the homepage.
Feature of the Day Board #board-16
Reminder to everyone. Matt and I are the only people allowed to post on this board. I have Matt's approval to impose such a rule on this one.
My previous message wouldn't have been written in the first place except that I didn't notice that the person I was replying to had replied on this board. And I'm a bit more perturbed that they used this board as a way to get in a slam on another poster.
So now when I go to my mail box I won't see the messages from someone I have on ignore and he can't respond to my posts.
We're talking about two different kinds of filtering here:
1. The kind that hides someone from your view.
2. The kind that prevents them from writing to you.
If you go to http://www.investorshub.com/boards/filters.asp you'll see how it's broken out into two categories.
If you've got someone filtered so that you can't see their posts, that won't stop them from posting to you.
The PM-filtering has been expanded so that if you use it, now they can't post to you privately or publicly. And you can't post to them.
Also if I have in on ignore I can't sent messages to him?
Correct, if you use that second variety of filtering.
Is this feature for lifetime members only?
No. It's a free feature and I don't anticipate making it a premium feature.
This really sounds great and be should used by everyone who is annoyed by ONCE.
Well, it was he who indirectly is responsible for my moving this item up on the priority list (after seeing his posts elsewhere), but I should add that his conduct on another site will have no bearing on how he's treated here from an administrative perspective. But it did give me a bit more empathy for the user perspective, so I decided to go ahead and get to work on this. Especially since it's been presented many times as a remaining problem.
That said, I DO NOT recommend wholesale use of this feature on ANYONE. The whole Filtering thing has always bugged me because it DOES get mis-used. Like the guy who PM'd me some time back saying that he has brought hundreds of lurkers to iHub (a fabrication) and instructs them all to filter out Once. If he's eventually proven right in his warnings, I don't doubt that the few people the PM'er really did bring with him will be looking for blood because he told them to ignore Once.
Instructing others to ignore someone is very dangerous territory, IMO. Everyone should make that decision for themselves, with a clear understanding of the dangers involved (like being able to filter out semi's because they annoy you on the road, then stepping out in front of one you couldn't see). I very strongly disapprove of anyone using Filtering of any kind as anything but a personal tool. Whether it be public or private recommendations to Filter someone or public comments that someone has done so.
Even if annoying, the contrary point of view is very deserving of close attention, in any endeavor. Neither you nor I should be recommending specific use of the Filtering feature, although I support Matt's occasional recommendations of using it when dealing with people who just can't behave themselves when they see specific posts.
Filtering Limitations Implemented
Premium members are now limited to 200 Filters and Free members are limited to 5. I also ran a routine this morning to pare down any filter lists that exceeded these limits. It took us from having 9483 filters to having 4899 and the difference in webserver loading, though small, is noticeable. This is a function of individual filter-list size more than it is the total number of filters on the system.
Major addition to Filtering: Message-Blocking
What used to be just Private Message (PM) blocking now applies to public messages, with a twist.
If you go to a person's profile, you'll see a link there for blocking messages to you from them. If you hit that link, or hit the "Block Messages" link when reading a private message from them, they will no longer be able to send you messages, privately or publicly.
The twist is that if you do this, you also can't write to them.
Minor new feature and a minor bug fix:
Subscribers now have a link at the top of the screen, where ads appear for non-subscribers, that shows the current status of Filtering. Clicking the link will toggle the status and return you to the same screen.
Where this will be handiest is in your MailBox which is one of the few remaining places it's possible to see a message from a Filtered person. If it's a public message to you. With Filtering turned on, if you click the message, it'll mark the message as read and take you to the next one. If you decide, by looking at the subject line, that you'd like to read the message, toggle the top-of-screen link to "Filtering Off", and you should be able to read the message.
The bug fix pertains to the batch-reading mode.
I've been doing a lot of modification to how message queries work, especially with regard to filtering them. In doing so, I'd caused a bug in which the "Next 10" (or whatever number) link would be active even if the current batch contained the last message on the board. That's fixed.
Bug Fixes: Surveys and Message-Filtering
1. The main Surveys menu wasn't working correctly with older versions of Netscape. Fixed. Thanks to STINVESTOR for showing me this one.
2. If you hit the new messages link for a board now, and the first new message is from someone on your filter list, their message will be skipped. Hopefully, if the first several messages are from Filtered people, they'll all be skipped, but I wasn't able to test this. If ALL new messages for that board are from Filtered people, the system will take you to the Board screen instead. Thanks to the many people who've pointed out this bug to me for a while.
I just put a new version of board.asp (the routine that lets you browse a board) into production.
This version should be much faster and overall speed of the website should go up noticeably. This version causes about 50% less web-server loading than the previous version, which should be noticeable since this is the 3rd most frequently used routine on the site.
It should also handle filtering more "correctly". With the previous version, if you hit a Next 50 or Previous 50 link, the number of messages you'd see would be 50 minus the number that were filtered out. Now it should return 50 regardless.
A minor addition is on the left side, right above "Go to post #", a filtering status message to show you whether you're viewing the board unfiltered, filtered by author, or filtered by author and recipient.
As always, PM me or post to me on #board-504 if you find any bugs, as this was a pretty major change to an important routine.
And there is still a lot of work remaining to make it even more efficient.
Some changes were just put into production that deal with message-filtering.
1. The filters are now stored differently in the database. Rather than a long "filter string" containing all of the filters, there's a separate table with one record for each filter.
2. Much of the work of filtering out unwanted posts, especially when reading in batch mode, has been moved to the database server, which should make life easier for the webserver.
3. The above change plus some other changes to the way filtering is handled in batch mode should result in speedier batch-mode screens and will likely result in the whole site being a little bit faster because of less loading on the webserver.
4. When reading in Batch mode, you'll get 10, 20, 50, or 100 messages now, no matter how many messages are skipped because they're filtered.
On April 28th (Monday), I'll be doing the following:
1. Removing all but the first 200 filters for premium members. 200 filters will now be the limit.
2. Removing all but the first 15 filters for free members. 15 filters will become the limit for free members.
3. Implementing a "sleep for filters" routine for free members. How this will work is that as a free member's number of filters goes up, so will the amount of time the system "sleeps" or pauses before outputting screens. This gives the webserver a bit of a break. There will be no extra pauses introduced for the first 5 filters, but for each filter beyond 5, the system will pause *on each screen* for 1/10th of a second. So, if you have 7 filters, that'll result in a 0.2 second pause on each screen and if you have 10, that'll result in a half-second pause per screen.
Pauses of less than half a second will likely not even be noticed, even on broadband. But they'll give the webserver some breathing room in return for making available a feature that has not only always been considered "value-added" (and therefore charged for), but also does impose a load on the system.
Filtering is now disabled for free members. This change is permanent. Filtering is a Premium feature.
Major Change: Subscription Pricing, Lifetime Membership, and "Filter" feature.
This is in 4 parts:
1. Effective 4/1/03, Filtering will no longer be a free feature. Today is an unusually busy day on the site and the servers are showing the heavy burden, but when I temporarily (for about 5 minutes) disabled Filtering, the burden let up a LOT. So, it'll be available only to Subscribers effective 4/1.
2. Partly because I'm making Filtering unavailable for free soon, we're offering Lifetime Subscriptions again, but only until the end of April. Lifetime Subscriptions are available effective immediately, at a price of $169.95. If you are currently a Monthly, Semi-Annual, or Annual subscriber, the cost of your current subscription will be deducted from the cost of a Lifetime membership, but only until the end of March. For example, if you're currently an Annual subscriber, you can purchase a Lifetime Subscription for $100 ($169.95 minus the $69.95 cost of your current subscription).
3. Effective 4/1/03, Subscription rates will be raised to $8.95 for Monthly, $49.95 for Semi-Annual, and $89.95 for Annual. Lifetime Subscriptions will remain at $169.95 before they become unavailable on 5/1.
4. Effective immediately and while quantities last or until the end of April, we will include a free iHub Taglines t-shirt with all new Annual or Lifetime subscriptions (or upgrades to Lifetime). When we have received confirmation of your subscription, we will contact you for size and shipping information for your free t-shirt.
Minor Change: Happy Hour
I've added 2 Happy Hours, from 5:00 to 9:00 PM Eastern on Saturdays and Sundays.
This is a temporary change and I want to see how it goes.
Bug Fix: Filtering Substring Bug
I *think* I've got this one squashed finally.
The bug was that if you had someone filtered, the effect was that anyone whose account number was part of the account number of a filtered person would also be filtered.
For example, if you filtered poster 12345, the system was also filtering poster 123, 234, 345, 12, 23, etc.
This should no longer be the case.
Let me know via PM if you're finding differently.
Minor Change: Password Reminders
Ahhhh! The true code monkey has risen again while the Boss is in Vegas.
Because of the volume of requests I get with people that know their e-mail but don't know their alias, I added another option to the password reminder page.
You can now put in your Alias or your e-mail you registered with to get the reminder. Either will work.
http://www.investorshub.com/boards/get_pword.asp
MB
Surveys Change: #msg-763527
Also, "Research Links" on the Favorites page is now "Favorite Links" and the layout is more like Favorite Boards and Favorite People.
I think this qualifies as a Major New Feature:
http://www.investorshub.com/boards/browse_store.asp
New Feature: Order Form for MDC and Tagline winner T-Shirts
#msg-736536
I should have an online store up and running for the remaining t-shirts in a few weeks.
Minor Changes: Subscription screen
1. Added verbage stating that payments need to be made in $US.
2. Made it possible to mail in payments for monthly subscriptions.
Minor Change: Handling of signatures
My previous one should've said "New Feature". Oh well.
Two changes. First, the change I made yesterday actually works now. I forgot to put a key part of it into production until this morning.
Also, I've implemented the same change in batch message-reading.
If you go to Tools then My Settings and change the last item ("Show Signatures in Messages")to "No", you won't see signatures in any public messages written after about an hour prior to this post.
Minor Change: Handling of Signatures
From this point on, any messages that have signatures embedded in them also have tags inside them that I can programmatically use to find the signature. This does not apply to messages written before about 5 minutes ago.
What this means from the user perspective is that if you've got a Premium account, you've gained an option on the "My Settings" page ( http://www.investorshub.com/boards/my_settings.asp ) that says "Show Signatures in Messages". If you set this to "No" (the default is "Yes"), then when you're reading messages one at a time, you won't see signatures, assuming the message was written *after* I put this change in place.
There's no way for me to make this apply to older messages.
This is going to be a Premium-only feature. Non-premium members can change that field all they like, but it won't have any effect on message-reading.
Also, it currently only applies when reading messages one at a time. Once this has been in production for a while and isn't causing any problems (or I've squashed any bugs I've created), I'll do the same thing with batch-reading mode.
Bug Fix: Batch Message Reading
There was a bug in batch message reading (aka "Next10") that was causing the system to display messages you'd already read in the previous batch when you clicked "Next 10". This was happening in the system skipped messages in the current batch because their authors and/or recipients had been filtered.
I believe this has been fixed, but let me know (via PM) if it hasn't been.
Minor Change: Top Boards Scoring
The scoring for Top Boards has been too dynamic, with boards changing as much as 5 positions on the list in an hour. This is because for the average daily posting volume component, I was using only posts in the last 24 hours.
I've changed it to use posts for the last 72 hours (3 days), so it should still be pretty dynamic but not as much so.
Having it use 3 days made the query more expensive, but not prohibitively so. Oddly, 3 days seems to be the cutoff. If I make it use 4 or more days, the "cost" of the query skyrockets.
So, 3 it is.
Minor change in MailBox, Keep/UnKeep, and bug fix:
Now there are 3 categories in MailBox rather than the 4 that used to be there. The 3 categories are:
1. Private Messages
2. Public Messages
3. Kept Public Messages
What went away was "Kept Public Messages To Me". Now they're all handled the same whether they're written to you or not. Along with this change I fixed the bug that was preventing UnKeeping of public messages you'd kept that were written to you.
Major New Feature: Board Surveys
I've just implemented Board Surveys. They are (should be) specific to each board on the site and any board moderator can create, edit, and manage surveys on any board they're moderating and anyone can participate in these surveys and view the results, as long as they're logged in.
Because of the size of this new feature, and the likelihood that it'll need a LOT of tweaking to make it work ideally, and a lot of verbage explaining how to use it, I've started a new board just for discussing this feature.
#board-1541
Minor Change: Mark as Last Read in Batch Mode
For you premium members out there, when you're reading messages on a board in batches of 10-100 (you do know you can configure this batch size, right?) you've gained a "Mark as Last Read" link on each message.
Minor Change: Handling of "Keep" and "Mark as Last Read" functions.
The "Mark as Last Read" has been working well in the "Menu Buttons" version of the interface, so that function has now been incorporated into the "Text" version of the message-reading interface.
It has also been made a Premium-only feature. If you don't have a premium account, definitely stick around for Happy Hour this week to try out this feature.
I've also temporarily put off my plans to do a "super-tweak" walkthrough of our most frequently-used features because I've started working on another new feature that'll bury the needle on the Coolometer. One of those things that's a real bear to write, but I started on it last night and worked on it until about 4 in the morning because I'm really excited about getting this one implemented.
Major Change: Top Boards List
I've changed the formula for producing that list and was able to speed it up dramatically. With the previous version, I found that if I hit that list in two separate windows at the same time, I could spike the server at 100%. Didn't say anything earlier because anyone could've seriously dragged down performance just by repeatedly hitting that page.
Now it's no longer the case. Running that screen results in only a tiny blip on the database server.
Most of it was because, since I was dealing with such a complex formula, I really didn't write it well at all. Okay, I wrote it very poorly.
But the biggest killer was including posting activity to a board for the past 30 days. That's changed.
Now the formula takes the following into account:
1. Total posts on the board.
2. Total posts on the board in the past 24 hours.
3. Total bookmarks (turned out the previous version wasn't counting this) for the board.
4. Bookmarks placed by people who have posted in the past 30 days.
Because I'm looking at posting activity in the past 24 hours instead of the past 30 days, the results are a bit more dynamic; they can change dramatically from day to day. For example, non-stock boards will probably move up in the rankings on weekends and drop back down during the week.
The scores on all boards have changed as a result, but are largely in the same ballpark. And because of the inclusion of total bookmarks into the equation (even though "Active" bookmarks count for more), the rankings of some boards have changed.
Anyway, not only does this screen run extremely fast now, running it shouldn't be adding overhead that the other processes have to deal with.
Major Interface Change Option:
Now you can go to Tools->My Settings and there's a new field there called "Show Message Navigation as:"
For this item, you can select "Text" (which is the default) or "Menu Buttons".
If you choose Menu Buttons, your "Reply Publicly", "Reply Privately", etc links above and below messages become menu items just like your top menu. The effect is especially dramatic if you've chosen any of the 3-D effects for your menus. And this Message Navigation menu will take on all the attributes of your top menu, including 3D effects, colors, fonts, etc.
This navigation setup is done a lot more efficiently than the text style (which I'll tweak later to be just as efficient) so a minor increase in speed might be noticeable.
Coolest of all, though, is that in the "Menu Buttons" interface, we've gained a new option when reading messages called "Mark as Last Read".
If you hit that when reading a message, it'll take you back to Favorites, and the system remembers where you stopped reading in that board. Clicking the New Posts link on the board will take you to the message right after that one. Solves a few problems right there.
Try it out and let me know (not via public reply here) what you think.
Change to Free Members featureset: Auto-Refresh
To ease some of the workload on the servers, and because Auto-Refresh of ad-viewing pages could be looked upon unkindly by our advertisers, I've disabled Auto-Refresh for the Favorites and Board pages. This time for keeps.
Minor Interface Change: Read Last 50 (by person)
Each message in the 50-at-a-time batch now contains "Keep", "Reply" and "Replies" links.
Reading 50 at a time by a single person is a Premium feature, so only Premium members will see this change.
Minor Changes and bug fixes:
There are a couple of new buttons available on the "My Interface" screen courtesy of The Original dpb5! and NoMoDo. They're presets you can use to try out a whole different look and feel for the site.
Thanks guys!
Also, if anyone can figure out the #RGB for Raging Bull's colors, I'd appreciate you setting up a config to have those colors and I'll add that as a preset on that screen. I'm too colorblind to do that one.
I think I've got the "menu buttons" version of message-reading done. Let me know (via Private reply to this message) if I haven't. Some other bugs I encountered in it were that "Keep" and "Unkeep" weren't even remotely working correctly. That's fixed now. And I also did away with the superfluous handing of Keep when it applies to messages written to you. Later, I'll go through and export such "Keeps" to the other format and do away with that heading on the MailBox page, taking us to 3 message groupings there instead of 4.
Cosmetic Changes and Bug Fixes:
Been busy this morning and taking a small hiatus now from banging out code for a while. Have to keep burn-out at bay.
Here's what changed this morning:
1. Removed the "Block PM's from this Poster" link in the Private Message screen.
2. Added 3 menu options (in your selected menu colors, hopefully) between the PM you're reading and the message it's replying to. These options allow you to block further PM's from this person, hide public posts by them, or add them to your Favorites page.
3. While working on this, I found a bug in filter removal. If you went to your filters and UnBlocked PM's from someone, it would not only UnBlock their PM's, it'd kill the rest of your filters. If anyone got caught by this bug and lost their filters as a result, let me know and I'll copy them back in for you from the filter backup I made yesterday.
4. Fixed an annoying little display quirk Matt had been complaining about. A space was getting embedded between "Sent By:" and the author's name when reading PM's.
Major New Feature: PM Filtering
It is now possible to block specific people from sending you private messages.
Anytime you're reading a private message, right above the message is a link that says "Block PM's from this member". If you click that link, the author of that PM will be added to a separate filter list.
You can maintain this filter list along with your "Hide Posters" list on http://www.investorshub.com/boards/filters.asp or by clicking "Tools" and going to "My Filters".
You can't block someone in advance. The only way to block future PM's from a person is to click the Block PM's link while you've got one of their messages on your screen.
If there are abuses of this (someone sends you abusive PM's but has you blocked so you can't reply), let me know and it shouldn't be too awfully tough to make sure that if you block someone, you also can't write to them.
Minor Change: Reading One Person's Message In a Batch
If you're a Premium member and have a person peoplemarked so they appear on your Favorites page, now if you click the number of new posts by them (you did notice that's clickable, didn't you?) it'll show you all of those posts in forward chronological order.
It used to show their most recent 50, in reverse order, just like clicking "Read Last 50 Messages" in their Profile.
This should satisfy the people who want to read a person's messages in reverse order as well as those who want to read them in forward order.
In case anyone reading this wasn't aware this feature existed to begin with, any person who you've added to your Favorites page (by clicking "Add PersonMark" in their profile or in any post they've written) will have their "New Posts" count increment on the Favorites page just like happens with Boards on that page.
If you're a Premium member, that number is clickable and will take you to all of those recent posts on one screen, regardless of which board they were written to.
Major Interface Change: Filtering
Okay, I think I've got this down to a user-friendly way of doing things now.
No more of this confusing box on the "My Filters" page requiring you to enter the *number* of each user you want to filter out.
Now there is only one way to hide a poster: By going to their profile and hitting the "Hide This Poster" link. The system will take you back to their profile and the link will change to "UnHide This Poster" so you can undo it.
Where it really gets cool is on the UnHide and Filter-Management side of things.
If you go to the "My Filters" page (Tools->My Filters) or http://www.investorshub.com/boards/filters.asp you'll see that your filters are now arranged in a list with their number, alias (clickable to see their profile) and an "UnHide" link. Clicking the UnHide link will remove that person from your Filter list so you'll be able to see their posts.
If you've got a huge Filter list, and that page is a little slow loading, blame yourself then PLEASE pare down your list to no more than 25 entries. Roughly.
I'm going to make another change soon to the way filters actually work behind the scenes so I can get another (hopefully the last) bug squashed in filtering. But I want to let this change stay in production for a few days first.
As always, if you encounter a new problem this solution has caused, PM me. Don't reply publicly to this post.
Edit: Before putting this into production, since it also involves a new format for storing filtering info (to facilitate the upcoming bug-squash), I wrote and ran a program to convert all old filters to the new format. This program also weeded out invalid filters, like the ones that had names instead of numbers.
Let me know if your filtering list is screwed up after this change. I did make a backup before running the conversion program.
Another Bug Fix: Filtering
If you enabled both levels of filtering, it was possible in some instances to have the single-message reading mode skip posts that had no recipients. I'm still not sure exactly which scenarios were causing this, but now it shouldn't be possible for any scenario to cause it.
Followers
|
51
|
Posters
|
|
Posts (Today)
|
0
|
Posts (Total)
|
302
|
Created
|
01/02/02
|
Type
|
Free
|
Moderator Bob Zumbrunnen | |||
Assistants Bob Zumbrunnen |
Posts Today
|
0
|
Posts (Total)
|
302
|
Posters
|
|
Moderator
|
|
Assistants
|
Volume | |
Day Range: | |
Bid Price | |
Ask Price | |
Last Trade Time: |