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Bug Fix: Filters
There was a bug that, when you enabled filters and filtering of messages written to filtered people, was causing messages that weren't replies ("To: None" because the author hit "Post New" instead of "Reply") to not appear in the board message list.
That bug is fixed.
Major Changes: Filtering/Hiding/Ignore
The "Filter" feature has been radically changed. The changes include the following:
1. It is now available to Free members.
2. It is possible, at your discretion, to also filter messages that are written in Reply to people on your Filter List.
3. When you click "Hide This Poster" in a member's profile, your Filtering is automatically enabled at the same time. This reduces the frequency with which you'll have to use http://www.investorshub.com/boards/filters.asp (Tools->My Filters)
4. My Filters screen simplified somewhat. Each line that displays your filter status is now a link that toggles that status on or off. If the line says the status is enabled, clicking it will toggle it to disabled and vice-versa.
Some caveats are in order:
1. If you've disabled your filtering, using the "Hide This Poster" method to add a filter will toggle your filter back on.
2. Filtering of replies to specific posters is not poster-specific. Whew! Even I don't understand what I just said. Put another way, if you enable the filter of Replies to filtered people, Replies to *everyone* on your filter list will be filtered out. You can't, for example, hide my posts and the replies to them while hiding Matt's posts but not the replies to them.
3. If you don't wish to view Replies to your hidden posters, you still need to go to the Tools->My Filters screen and toggle the "Responses To Filtered People Not Filtered" link. It is off by default.
4. Most Importantly: This is a temporary/test thing in two ways:
1. If it doesn't prove to be a complete solution to the problem it is intended to address, I'll back out this feature.
2. If the overhead on the system proves to be too great, I'll have to revert it to being a Premium feature.
Also, if too much conversation takes place along the lines of "Filter out so-and-so" or "Nyah, nyah, nyah. I've got you filtered now.", I'll remove the feature as it'll be contributing to disruptiveness in the boards.
Please do not reply to this message. This is a Bob-only board.
Minor Change: MDC table
If you've joined the site since the MDC started and your account doesn't have an MDC referral number, the MDC page is going to look a little different for you right now.
There's an additional column for each entry that has the entrant's name followed by "Referred Me" as a link. If you click that link, your account is added to their referral list.
If you joined after the MDC started (your account number is greater than 15843) and you were referred to the site by someone whose name is not on that list, PM me and tell me who referred you and I'll manually make the entry.
If you have any comments or questions, please do not respond publicly to this board. This is a "Bob-only" board.
Minor Change: MDC Listings
Now when you go to http://www.investorshub.com/boards/mdc.asp (available under the "Other" menu), you can click on your own name if it's listed and you'll see the details of your MDC points including names of members you've referred, their membership level, how many posts they've written, and the breakdown of the points they count for toward your score.
Keep in mind that the total points shown there will be less than the total shown on the MDC page. That's because the detail screen only shows points for your referrals but the MDC page takes into account the points you get for your own membership level.
So if the detail page shows 9 people, each worth 2 points (for a total of 18) and you're a Lifetime Subscriber, the score shown on the MDC page will be 38 (18 for your referrals plus 20 for being a Lifetime Subscriber).
Speaking of the MDC, I noticed that most of the people being referred aren't posting much. If at all.
The number of posts a referral makes is an important part of your score. For example, if a member has been approved by Matt for 18 posts per day (most have been), they're worth 2 points PLUS an additional point for every 50 posts they write. If they become a Monthly Subscriber, they're worth an additional point for every 33 posts they write, and so on up to Lifetime Subscribers, who are worth an additional point for every 5 posts they write (plus the 20 points they're worth before counting posts).
Bottom line is that you should send a PM to each of your referrals welcoming them to iHub, thanking them for using your referral link, and encouraging them to join you in discussions.
New features and one change:
The search functions that let you search within a profile or within a board now include links to go to the Previous 50 when more than 50 results were found. Just like it's been for the Full-Text ("Public Message") search for a while.
Of course, since search is a Premium feature, this change will only be seen by Premium members.
Also, the "Go To Post#" box that's visible when reading a board has been doubled in width. It would always accept any size number, but a large enough number (5-6 digits depending on your configuration) would cause the first digit or two to scroll out of the box even though the feature would still work correctly.
Most of my work lately has had little to do with programming and more to do with business development. And what time I've been putting into programming has mostly been behind-the-scenes stuff like handling in-house ad delivery and email opt-ins.
I've just put something into production we call the MDC. This was suggested by a member (who I'll identify if they like) and I immediately fell in love with the idea.
MDC stands for Membership Drive Competition. It's a contest to see who can bring in the most new members to the site. Cash prizes. Decent cash prizes. As in $1000 for 1st place.
I'm bushed right now, so I'll wait until tomorrow to send out an email to everyone explaining it. For those who're curious right now and want to get a head-start, just hit the "Other" menu link and look for "Membership Drive Competition". It'll spell it all out.
I'm sure we'll encounter pitfalls and missed opportunities with this one, but we'll see how it goes and apply any lessons learned when we do another one of these down the road.
Major Change: Account Aging
I finally implemented routines to take subscription expiration dates into account.
Yes, that means people who had monthly subscriptions basically had non-expiring subscriptions until today. The subscription expiration date was being stored, but nothing was being done with it.
In cases where subscriptions should have expired prior to today, I set them to expire 3 days from now.
When a non-lifetime subscription gets within 5 days of expiration, a PM is sent telling you so. The same is done again when there's 1 day left, and if the date has passed, the account is downgraded to non-premium.
As the PM notes, if your account will expire soon, you don't need to wait until it expires before renewing. The system takes unused subscription time into account. So, for example, if your account expires 15 days from now and you renew today for 6 months, your new expiration date will be 6 months and 15 days from now.
If anyone thinks they've gotten the renewal notice in error, please let me know via PM.
Advertising change:
I'm excited to announce that CyberTrader is onboard as an advertiser on a trial basis. Let's make 'em glad they went with Investors Hub.
We've got a box ad for them on our homepage and they're in the rotation for banner ads.
I've also added a new page, available under the "Other" menu, that lists our advertisers and tells a little bit about them and have included a link to that page under "Our Current Advertisers" on the homepage. This way, even if you don't see ads because you're a Premium member, you can check out our advertisers.
Just go to "Other" then "Our Advertisers".
Hopefully we'll see that advertiser list grow.
Really cool new feature:
Now you can configure the site to give you an audible alert when a new message has been written to you.
This only works for subscribers, and only from the Favorites page. Now you can turn off the "Alert Browser Window" feature if you like, make sure you've got Auto-Refresh turned on for Favorites, select a sound, and just leave a browser window "camped" on the Favorites page. When a new message is written to you, public or private, your computer will let you know. Even if you're in another room.
The new feature is configurable in the "My Settings" screen, as are the other items I mentioned.
Go to "Tools" on the site's menu, then select "My Settings" and scroll to the bottom. You'll see an option called "Sound for New Message Notification".
Next to it is a drop-down containing the names of the sounds that can be selected. There's also an option for "None" (the default). Right after "None" is an option called "Random". If you choose this one, each time an audio alert is played, one will be randomly selected from the list.
The next two choices, "Communicator" and "Doorbell" are probably the most suitable for use at work.
A word of warning: Though I don't personally consider any of these really, really vulgar, and wouldn't mind my 13 year old daughter hearing any of them, some of them are at least "off-color". The "South Park" ones comes to mind. If you've got delicate sensibilities where language is concerned, you're better off avoiding ones with names you don't recognize.
To help you with sound selection, the selected sound is played whenever "My Settings" is loaded. So, if you choose one, hit Update (always remember to hit Update when you've made changes on this screen), the screen will refresh and your selected sound will play.
If you're bored or just want to hear all of the choices, select "Random" and keep hitting the Update button.
Some folks who've tested it have reported problems with it such as lag (the sound plays long after a new message is received), and I'm experiencing minor problems with it on dialup in that it plays part of the sound, pauses, plays more sound, etc, while it slowly downloads it.
If you experience the same problem I've been having, I hope you'll find that it'll eventually go away as your browser caches the sound files. I've set up the directory they're in so that they never expire, meaning if your browser has cached a copy of the file, it won't try to download it again from the site. I hope it won't, anyway. This could eat up a lot of bandwidth.
And if you know of a really good mail-related wav file I should add to the list, post me a message on #board-504 with the URL and I'll see about adding it. We've got about 30 of them now, and I don't want to go past 40.
Changes and a major new feature:
The MailBox page no longer contains links for "Edit My Profile" or "Reset Counter". The former is redundant because there are other places containing that link. The latter is unnecessary because MailBox counts keep the proper number on their own now.
What's been added is Private Message searching.
In the Search box at the top of every screen, the "Full-Text" in the dropdown has been changed to "Public Msgs" and a new option for "Private Msgs" has been added.
If you use this choice, a search of all private messages to and from you is possible.
Thanks to AKvetch for suggesting it and helping me test it. It's another of those features I've already found a lot handier than I'd expected. Especially since I currently have 169 messages in my mailbox and thousands more I've written or read that're in my archives.
Minor new features:
"Cancel Post" button now prompts you to make sure you want to cancel the post. It doesn't work in the Preview screen, though, because of the way Preview works.
Profiles now include Signatures so it's easier to see what your signature looks like when you change it.
"My Settings" explained.
There are many aspects of the Investors Hub interface that're configurable on a per-user basis.
All of them can be reached in the "Tools" menu and are in the "My Settings" and "My Interface" options on that screen.
"My Interface" deals with "look and feel" aspects of the site such as page colors and what the menu looks like. It's explained in detail at #msg-336778
In this message, we'll cover "My Settings", which controls things that aren't so much "look and feel" but more along the lines of "How I want the site to work".
Occasional reference is made to "Batch Mode" and "Next 10". These terms mean the same thing, although "Next 10" has evolved into a bit of a misnomer. These terms refer to the ability to display more than one message at a time on the screen. Originally, Batch Mode meant the ability to display 10 messages on a single screen. Now it's possible to display 10, 20, 50, or 100 messages at a time. This feature is available to Subscribers only.
The items controlled from this screen are:
1. Whether or not the "Favorites" page will automatically reload itself and at what interval it will do so.
2. Whether or not the current date and time (East Coast time) will display on the Favorites page.
3. How to sort "Favorite Boards" and "Favorite People" on the Favorites page.
4. Whether or not to display a menu at the bottom of every page, no pages, or just certain pages.
5. Whether or not to display/play graphics/sounds embedded in messages.
6. Whether or not to mark messages as having been read (removing them from your MailBox) if you encounter them in "Batch Mode" or "Next 10" view.
7. Whether or not the browser window that's open to the Favorites page will alert you when new messages are received.
8. The number of messages per category to display on the "MailBox" page.
9. How many messages to include per page when viewing them in "Batch Mode".
10. Whether or not a "Board" page will auto-reload, and at what interval it should.
For each item, select a value from the dropdown in the right column. Don't forget to hit the "Update" button at the bottom of the page or your changes won't be saved.
Some of these items are only relevant to Premium Subscribers. Anyone can change them, but the changes won't do anything for free members. Such items are noted with "(Premium)" after their name. If an item is available to everyone, it's noted with "(Everybody)".
Favorites Auto-Refresh (True=On, False=Off) (Premium):
If you'd like the Favorites page to reload itself on a regular basis, set this item to "True". The default value is "True".
Favorites Refresh Rate (in seconds) (Premium):
This determines the interval at which the Favorites page will reload itself. The available choices (in seconds) are 15, 30, 60, 120, 180, 240, and 300. The default is 15.
Favorites Date/Time Display (Everybody):
Determines whether or not the current East Coast date and time are displayed on your Favorites page. Select "On" or "Off" from the dropdown. The default is "On".
Favorite Boards Sorted By (Everybody):
This item controls the order in which boards on your Favorites page are displayed.
Choices are:
Name: Sorts boards in ascending order on board name.
New Posts: Sorts boards in descending order on the number of unread posts they contain.
Date: Sorts boards in descending order on the date and time of their most recent posts.
Ticker: Sorts boards in ascending order on the Ticker assigned to them.
The default is "Name".
Favorite People Sorted By (Everybody):
Controls the sort order of the people you've added to your Favorites page.
The choices are:
Alias: Sorts in ascending order on Alias ("screen name").
New Posts: Sorts in descending order on the number of posts that person has written that you haven't read yet.
Date: Sorts in descending order on the date and time of each person's most recent post.
The default is "Alias".
Bottom Menu Display (Everybody):
Determines whether or not to display a menu on the bottom of the page, and on which pages to display it.
Choices are:
Next10: Display the bottom menu only while reading messages in "Batch Mode". This selection is only relevant to Subscribers, as they're the only ones with access to Batch Mode.
Nowhere: Never display a bottom menu.
Everywhere: Display a bottom menu on every page.
Note: Selecting "Everywhere" carries with it a small and likely not noticeable performance penalty.
The default is "Next10", meaning that by default, nonsubscribers never see a bottom menu and Subscribers see a bottom menu only while reading messages in Batch Mode.
Play Embedded Sounds (Everybody):
At Investors Hub, it is possible to include sounds and pictures within messages. This selection allows you to toggle the playing of sounds on and off while reading messages. If you select "On", any sound embedded in a message will be played. If "Off", an embedded sound is replaced with a link that says "[Suppressed Sound Link]" that, when clicked, will play the sound.
The default is "On".
If you're on a dialup connection and frequently read boards with lots of sounds embedded in messages, turning this off can improve site performance for you.
Display Embedded Graphics (Everybody):
This works just like "Play Embedded Sounds". If you select "On", embedded graphics are displayed. If you select "Off", they're replaced with "[Suppressed Chart Link]", which you can click to see the chart.
The default is "On".
If you're on a dialup connection and either frequently read boards with charts in the messages or just don't want to see the graphics, turning this off can dramatically speed up message-reading.
Mark Messages 'Read' in Next10 View (Premium):
This controls whether or not public messages to you are marked as having been read when reading messages in Batch Mode. When a message is marked as having been read, it no longer shows up in your "MailBox" screen and the number in parentheses after "MailBox" (the total number of unread public and private messages to you) is adjusted accordingly.
Selecting "On" will mark messages read if you encounter them in Batch Mode. Select "Off" will leave them marked unread so they'll still be in your MailBox.
The default is "Off".
Alert Browser Window On New Messages: (Premium)
This setting is only relevant if you're a Subscriber and also have Favorites Auto-Refresh set to "True".
If you go to the Favorites page and leave your browser there, then go do things in other programs or other browser windows, this setting can be used to alert you to new messages that have shown up on your Favorites page or your MailBox.
The choices are:
On: Alert you if any new messages are written to you or if any new messages are written to any of the boards on your Favorites page.
Off: No alert.
Messages To Me Only: Alert you only if new messages have been written to you.
The method of alerting depends on what you're doing when the Favorites page reloads and a new message is found. If you're working in another browser window, you're taken back to your Favorites page. If you're working in another program, the taskbar button for the browser window that is on your Favorites page will blink.
If you're usually working in another browser window, it can be distracting or annoying to have your system jump to the Favorites page, so you should keep that in mind when setting this item.
Personally, I'm usually working in another program, so I'm not taken back to the Favorites page; it just flashes on the taskbar, so I have it set to "On".
The default is "Off".
Messages Per Category in MailBox (Everybody):
This is the one I get asked about the most.
This setting controls how many messages in each category will be displayed when you go to the "MailBox" page. The choices are 10, 20, 50, 100, and 500.
If you select 10, the MailBox page loads pretty quickly. If you select 500, and you've got hundreds of messages in any of the MailBox categories, performance can be pretty bad. It can take a while for the server to process the request and even longer for the results to arrive at your machine.
If you should have more messages in your MailBox than are actually displaying, it's because this setting is set below the number of messages in your MailBox. For example, if you have 15 private messages, but only see 10 of them, it's because this field is set to 10 and you should change it to 20 or more.
This setting also controls how many messages to display in your "Archived Inbox" and "Archived Outbox" screens, both of which are accessible from the MailBox screen.
If you need to search for a private message ("PM") written to you a long time ago, you might want to temporarily set this number to 500 so the Archives will display the most messages possible.
The default is 10.
Messages Per Batch in Batch-View (Next10) mode (Premium):
This setting is only relevant for Subscribers because only they have access to Batch Mode.
This controls how many messages at a time should be displayed when you're reading a message and click the "Next 10" or "Previous 10" link. If you change this number, the change is reflected in the link. For example, if you select 20, the links become "Next 20" and "Previous 20".
Choices are 10, 20, 50, and 100.
The default is 10.
Board Refresh Rate (in seconds, 0=no auto-refresh) (Premium):
This works just like Favorites Auto-Refresh except that it applies to boards. If you "camp" on a board, this setting can be used to have the system automatically reload that page at the interval you select so you can do other things while Investors Hub reloads the Board for you. A lot of people use this so they can just jump back to the Investors Hub screen and see at a glance whether or not the board they were camped on has any new messages.
Choices are 0 (no refresh), 60, 120, 180, 300, and 600.
The default is 0.
If you have any questions about settings that weren't answered in this message, please don't reply here. Instead, use #board-504.
So many changes, so little time to report them.
1. I've added a menu option called "Other". Live!Chat has moved there, along with other things.
2. In the "Other" menu you'll find a handy little WordFinder. Useful for crosswords. Plug in the letters you have and underscores for the letters you don't, and it'll list all possible words.
3. The "Other" menu also contains the fastest Anagram Solver I've ever seen. It'll only solve one-word anagrams, but whaddya want for nothing? A rubber biscuit?
4. Surveys! The Demographic survey has been redone and is now one of the surveys in the "Other" menu. Not only can you opt in for it, each answer is selected from a drop-down and "No Answer" is always a choice. I should point out that no identifying info about you is associated with your answers. One table stores the answers and a separate one just records the fact that you took the survey. Any survey, for that matter. That way people can only take any given survey once.
5. Any survey I add other than the Demographic survey will have publicly-viewable results. Check it out in the two other surveys we currently have.
6. The Boards menu item has changed a bunch. It got several new listing formats. Now you can list all boards on the site by Category, Group, Ticker, Size, or Name. Be patient if you're on dialup. It lists *all* the boards except when listing by Size, where it'll only show boards with at least 100 posts.
Forgot to post a change here that happened Thursday.
Made a two-part change.
Part 1: Made all routines call the same function to determine whether to make a feature available (based on subscriber/non-subscriber) rather than determining them in-line. Minor increase in efficiency, plus it made it possible to do part 2.
Part 2: Implemented a site-wide "Happy Hour". During Happy Hour, the software considers all users to be subscribers. No ads, and access to all Premium features is given.
Currently "Happy Hour" is Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 3:00 to 4:00 PM Eastern.
Useless new "feature" that might be fun for some.
http://www.investorshub.com/boards/wordfind.asp
Minor change: Archived Private Messages
I just changed it so that the number of messages displayed on the Archived InBox and OutBox is determined by the number selected in the "Messages Per Category in MailBox" field of the My Settings screen rather than being hard-coded.
Bug fix and minor change: Profiles
Apostrophes included in the "Quote:" part of your profile should no longer show up as double-apostrophes.
Also, after you've made changes to your profile, you're taken to your profile rather than to the homepage now.
Minor change to an existing feature:
The "Go to Post #" routine when reading a board now takes you to the 50 messages containing that post number rather than straight to the post itself.
New Feature: Expanded Keep/Unkeep functionality
There are now "Keep" and "Unkeep" links on all public posts; not just the ones written to you. If you see a post that you want to keep track of, even if it wasn't written to you, you can hit Keep and it'll be available in your MailBox in a new section added for these messages.
The "Unkeep" aspect of this new feature works the same way it does for messages written to you. When you hit "Keep", the link changes to "Unkeep" for subsequent viewings of the message. You also have an "Unkeep" link for each of these messages in your MailBox.
This is a Premium feature, so it is only available to Subscribers.
Minor new feature: Referral Codes
The Subscribe page now shows the Referral Code you entered when you initially registered for the site and gives you a link you can use to change it.
Referral codes are used to identify accounts to enable group discounts on subscriptions and/or to earmark a portion of the proceeds of those subscriptions to be sent to specific charities, so if you were given a referral code to use, you definitely should use it.
Bug Fix: Email routines
All email routines should now work correctly. This includes:
1. Subscribing to Chairmail.
2. Sending Chairmail.
3. Requesting password reminder.
4. Reporting TOS violation.
Let me know on #board-504 if any of these seems to be broken still.
Known Bug: Chairmail Signup
It was brought to my attention this morning that the routine where you subscribe to a board's chairmail was bombing out. I checked and it's bombing out at the point it's supposed to send you a confirmation email, so I made the same change to it that I made to all the other email routines: Telling it where it can find the email server.
Didn't help.
So I've kludged it for now until I can concentrate on it next week. You won't receive a confirmation email, but you'll still be subscribed to that Chairmail list.
Bug Fixes: Email
Password emailing and TOS reporting now work on both servers.
Edit: Chairmail should be fixed now, too.
Let me know on #board-504 if you encounter anything not working correctly on Server 2.
You can tell which server you're on by looking at the lower right corner of any screen on the site.
Guess this counts as a change worthy of noting here. <g>
Today was our first business day with the new webserver installed and both of them running under full load.
Apparently they did just fine, but there are a few changes I need to make throughout the site. Things that worked fine when there was only one machine they could possibly run on, but don't work now when they're running on the new machine. The main culprit here is anything having to do with email.
Bug Fix: Board Creation
It should now be impossible (or at least much more difficult) to have an untrapped error occur when you create a new board.
If one does, though, you should be able to hit the Back button on your browser and all the info you entered will be intact for editing.
If you don't hit your Back button, you can now still go to the Create Board screen and at least the text you entered for the iBox will still be intact.
When you enter it, it's stored in a session variable that is cleared upon successful creation of the board. If the board wasn't created successfully, the session variable isn't cleared, and the iBox portion of the Create Board screen is filled in with whatever was in that session variable.
New Feature: Membermarks in Profiles
Profiles now contain the number of people who have placed MemberMarks on that person.
New Feature: Spell-check Add-on
Since Spell-check is only available to premium members, so's this new one.
When you Preview a post, if you click the "Edit Message" button to make some revisions to it, you're presented with a list of typos right above the message box.
New Feature: Previous 50 on Search
If a Full-Text search returns 50 results, you'll see a link above and below the messages that says "Previous 50". Hitting this will take you to the previous 50 messages meeting the same search criteria.
This is only implemented for sitewide Full-Text right now, but will be added to the Profile and Board searches later if it seems necessary.
New Feature: Advanced Search
I've added Advanced Search functionality to the routines that search within a member's posts (available on their Profile page right below their profile) and within a board's posts (available on the board's page above the iBox to the right side).
New Feature: Advanced Full-Text Search
This is only available to Subscribers.
Previously, our Full-Text search would return only messages that contained all of the words you entered. I accomplished this by taking each word you entered, throwing out the ones that're too short or too common, and ANDing the remaining words. So, if you entered "Fatt Matt" as your criteria, it would return all messages containing both words.
Now, if you're familiar with query structure, you can include a "/" (pipe) symbol at the beginning of your search and that instructs our search engine to process your entry as-entered.
If you're familiar with the way SQL handles full-text searching, just keep in mind that we don't do FREETEXT in the searches. Only CONTAINS. Anything legal in a CONTAINS function will now be legal in a search here that starts with a "/".
If you're going to trigger the advanced search by including the pipe symbol, make sure you comply with all the rules for searching using CONTAINS. For example, the use of quote marks.
Here are some examples of how to use Advanced Search:
/"Fatt" OR "Matt"
Returns all messages containing either "Fatt" or "Matt" in them.
/"Fat*" AND "Matt"
Returns all messages containing the word "Matt" AND any words beginning with "fat". So if a messages containing "Fat" and "Matt", will be returned, as will messages containing "Matt" and "Fatima".
/"Fat*" AND NOT "Matt"
Returns all messages containing a word that starts with "fat", but not containing the word "Matt" in them. So if a message is "Matt loves Fatima", it won't be returned.
/"Going" NEAR "Moon"
Returns all messages that have the words "Going" and "Moon" in them, and they're close together. Don't ask me how SQL defines "close together". I don't know. But I noticed that doing a search on /"Going" NEAR "Moon" yielded a different result set than just Going Moon.
/formsof (inflectional, go)
Returns all messages containing any form of the word "go", such as "go", "gone", "goes", "going", or even "went".
Seems complicated, eh? Keep in mind that if you're not cozy with the advanced query stuff, the old format works just fine. The advanced stuff is only enabled if you start your query with the "/" symbol.
If you use the advanced query, you're on your own to bring yourself up to speed. This is mostly only going to be useful to people who are already programmers or at least have a lot of experience with advanced queries. If you meet these criteria, and are still having trouble with the advanced queries, post a message to me on #board-504 with the exact text you're entering in the search box.
At this writing, Advanced Search only works on site-wide searches, but I'll have it working on Profile and Board searches shortly.
Edit: For some reason, the site likes to convert the pipe symbol to a slash, so this message is displaying the wrong symbol for you to use.
I just changed the system so the pipe or the slash are recognized as valid prefixes for Advanced Search.
Bug Fix: Unusual cut/paste characters
For some people on some browsers, the site was having trouble displaying/interpreting unusual characters like left and right apostrophes and quote marks (as opposed to the "normal" straight up and down ones).
That problem should be fixed.
If you cut and paste from another site and get a weird string of numbers where you expect some kind of punctuation, let me know on #board-504
Minor Change: Public message in MailBox
Public Messages now have a "Remove" option just like Private Messages have always had in the MailBox.
Bug Fix: Dropped ">" characters when previewing
The site was dropping ">"'s from posts if you used Preview, so "<g>" was showing up as "<g".
That should be fixed now.
Let me know on #board-504 if you notice anything else weird happening with Preview.
Bug Fix: Handling of deleted posts
If the last message on a board was a deleted one, an error message was being returned when trying to go to it.
Now if the last message has been deleted, a message is displayed to that effect and a link is given to go to the last non-deleted post for that board.
Change: Handling of deleted posts
When a post was deleted but there was a link going to it, the system would jump to the next non-deleted post for that board and not change the URL, so it looked like the non-deleted post you were reading was the deleted one.
Now if you hit a link to a post that was deleted, you get a message informing you that the post was deleted and giving you a link to the next non-deleted one.
To see it in action, try going to this deleted post: #msg-457578
Changes: iBoxes, Messages, and Preview
Most notable change is that Preview should now display embedded charts just as they'll display in messages. Let me know on #board-504 if this is not the case. If it seems to work correctly for a while, I'll work on having it treat embedded sounds the same way.
We've been having an occasional bug with iBoxes being empty when you jump to boards. I have yet been unable to make it happen consistently, so I'm hard-pressed to figure out what's causing it, let alone how to fix it. I just put a change (kludge, really) into production that should either fix the problem or help me identify one thing that isn't causing the problem. Let me know (on #board-504) if this is not the case.
While I was messing with iBoxes, I made a change to the way iBoxes and messages are processed that should (and seems to have) reduce system overhead a bit.
The technical explanation is that a function that was being called had a ton of lines and I couldn't figure out exactly what it was doing, but my guess is that it's scrolling through messages one character at a time and replacing all carriage-return/line-feeds with the HTML equivalent, "<br>". I replaced this with a new one-line function that simply has "msg=replace(msg,vbCrLf,"<br>") in it.
Let me know if messages start displaying weirdly or if any element of them is missing.
While I was at it, I changed the routine for checking to see if you've got sounds and charts toggled on or off when displaying messages. Rather than checking it (and making the necessary pair of database calls) every time you read a message, it now checks those once then remembers what you have them set to.
Let me know if the chart and sound toggles aren't working or if charts and sounds are being rendered incorrectly when you have them toggled on.
Cool. I think everyone will really like what's on the horizon for Knobias and iHub. The CEO's a former SI'er like myself and shares my mindset of "Do just one thing and do it as well as you can." That's why each of our companies has so much to offer each other and our members. I just do message boards. They don't. No overlap whatsoever, and between the two, some of the best "state of the art" in our respective areas is offered.
We (me and Knobias) are working right now on some other cool things to offer iHub members. I expect we'll start seeing some of them come to fruition next week.
Please do not post to this board. This board needs to remain an undiluted list of features and changes.
If you have any questions about features or changes, post them to #board-504 or PM them to me.
New Feature: Knobias Quotes/News/Profiles
I'm very pleased to announce that Investors Hub and Knobias have agreed to work together in key areas that are of benefit to users of both sites.
Currently, we're starting out with the simpler things, which means that as of now, boards here that are about specific stocks now contain a link below the iBox that'll pop open a new window taking you to a Knobias "Quotes and Research" page. And visitors to Knobias see a button with their quotes linking to the relevant board on Investors Hub.
I don't know how "fresh" the quotes are, but I've been very impressed with the quality of the "News" items which also contains Knobias-generated alerts for things such as noteworthy price or volume changes, block trades, new intraday highs/lows, and news from the main agencies.
This is the first of many things we are discussing doing that are of benefit to users of both sites.
Like me (and Chip from StockCharts), the CEO of Knobias is also a former SI'er.
New Feature: Boards Refresh
If you leave your browser "parked" on a specific board, it'll now refresh/reload at the same interval you have Favorites set to refresh. If you've got Auto-Refresh turned off, neither Favorites nor Board will refresh on their own.
Change: Message Filtering
Message Filtering has been disabled for non-subscribers and enabled for all subscribers. Non-subscribers can't enable filtering, although they can set up filters for later use.
This should also solve a problem with people being able to specify filters but not noticing that they're disabled by default. Now if you can use filters, they're enabled by default until you disable them.
Filler message to get past the clicking-new-posts-when-the-newest-is-deleted bug.
#msg-441220
Edit: Everyone, keep in mind this board is for me to post only. Keeps the dilution down to, oh, about zero percent. <g>
This board should only contain posts from me announcing new features and bug fixes.
#msg-441176
Filtering currently only filter out messages FROM specific people. A filter will be added later to filter out messages TO specific people, but it's pretty low on the list as I don't expect it to be used very often. The current version of filtering is only being used by about 40 people as it is.
New Feature: Message Filtering
A couple more facets of message filtering have been added.
If you've got a user filtered out, now the filtering is as complete as it's going to get. It was already filtering them out from batch mode reading, but now the system also won't list messages from them when you browse a board and will skip past their messages when you read messages one at a time.
Currently, the filtering is available to everyone. However, tomorrow I'm making it available only to subscribers, so everyone should be able to get a chance to see how it works.
There are many more kinds of filtering for me to add right now. This should only complete the public message hiding aspect. I'm not sure which aspect I'm tackling next.
Note: Filtered-out users' posts will still be visible in any of the following scenarios:
1. You click "Replies" on a message and they've written one of the replies.
2. You click on a link elsewhere that takes you directly to a message of theirs.
3. You click on the number of new posts in a board and theirs is the first unread message on that board.
4. You're a Moderator and are reading messages in the board management mode.
FYI about Subscriptions and My Interface
Until this weekend, every time you loaded any page on the site, the webserver was making a request to the database server to find out your account level and another to find out what your My Interface settings were.
It's a relatively inexpensive read, but when it's done hundreds of thousands of times per day, it adds up something fierce.
This weekend I changed it to make those calls only once per user and store the info in session variables. This way, the webserver already has that info and doesn't need to ask the database server for it. Should be noticeable performance gains.
The downside is that when you subscribe, though your account is updated appropriately in the database, the webserver often won't know about it. The same can be true of My Settings.
For that reason, if you subscribe and you still don't seem to have access to premium features, check http://www.investorshub.com/boards/my_account.asp to see if the database is aware of the change (either you subscribed via Verisign, or we manually processed your PayPal or Mail subscription), and if it shows that you're a subscriber, log out then log back in and the changes should take effect.
I just added code to make it reload the session info for My Interface when you make changes to it, but I haven't done so for the Subscription process yet. That will take a little longer, as the testing is a lot trickier.
Well, somewhat. I also just now added code to make it reload the session info for your account level when you go to the Tools menu to look at your account.
Bottom line is that for now, if you subscribe or make changes to My Interface and the change doesn't look like it "took", log out then log back in.
Change: My Accounts screen
Added field: Remaining Posts Today
If you're a non-subscriber or are on a posting restriction, you can see how many posts you have left that you can write today. This number is updated in realtime.
If you're a Subscriber or Grandfathered, the number shown will be 255 minus how many posts you've written today, but it's meaningless. Remaining Posts Today is checked at posting time for non-subscribers.
I also fixed a problem with this screen that made it show PeopleMarks for the 100 people with the highest number of peoplemarks. Now it shows the number for everyone.
It also should run faster, but I doubt it'll be noticeable on that end.
http://www.investorshub.com/boards/my_account.asp
Changes: Speed Tweaks and bug fix on Favorites
Favorites wasn't displaying the bottom menu. Now it is.
I made changes to the way read_msg.asp (the routine that reads messages one at a time) and board.asp (the routine that lists messages on a board) to make them load much smaller function libraries than they were loading. This should make a noticeable (to me) difference on CPU utilization of the webserver.
So far, so good. Utilization was around 25-30%, but now it's spending most of its time as low as 11% and as high as about 20% with occasional spikes into the low 30's.
Let me know immediately if you see weirdness with either of these routines.
Explanation of part of Message Filtering:
#msg-433184
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