is happily being the wheel rather than a rusty old spoke
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Good. I suspect the speed increase might be more noticeable to broadband folks. The tweaking had nothing to do with changing the amount of data that has to go over the wire to your browser. Instead, it was to decrease the lag, or how long before the system would *start* delivering the data.
Okay, so lemme throw this idea out that just popped into my head:
Grandfathered and Premium Members get unlimited access to it.
Free Members get limited access to it based on the number of public posts they make. Say, 15 minutes for each public post.
The mechanics of it likely wouldn't be too much of an issue, and really that'd be my problem anyway.
How would you feel about that kind of limitation.
iChat is pure cost, no revenue as it stands. It arguably gives other revenue streams (ads and subscriptions) a little more "Ooomph", but I'd like to enhance that affect either by making it available only to subscribers, make it a separate subscribable feature, or make it contribute to other revenue streams via posts (which non-subscribers will read, along with the ads).
I'd like to see iHub bring it in-house so we have more control over it and can provide as much power as it needs. I was also wanting to make archives publicly available and am a bit surprised it's that unpopular an idea. I can understand, although the stronger argument for me is that chat has no permanence to it, and permanence is one of the things I find attractive about message boards.
As you can tell, I haven't made up my mind yet about *any* aspect of iChat, and plan to spend quite a bit of time getting feedback on it before doing anything.
The only thing I'm really leaning strongly toward at this point is making it a Premium feature so that only Subscribers and Grandfathered folks can use it. And I'm nowhere near 100% convinced on that one yet.
As outlined in the iBox, I have the following concerns about the Live Chat feature:
1. Cannibalizing public posts. I suspect a lot of activity is happening in iChat that would be public posts if iChat weren't there. iHub makes (very little) money from public posts because of the ads non-subscribers see when they read them.
2. It's available to free members, so iHub may never see a dime from its presence here.
3. I understand it's a bit unreliable.
So, let me put the following ideas and questions out there for some feedback:
1. Any guesses how many iChat users are non-subscribers?
2. Is it a valuable enough feature that if it were moved in-house, people would pay a small amount to have access only to it? I'm thinking an amount smaller than the cost of a lifetime subscription here. And either including it as a Premium Feature of the site, or charging a tiny amount monthly for access to it.
3. Would it be helpful to archive daily conversations and make them available on the site?
4. How's the speed and reliability overall? iHub is running on some serious horsepower so if speed and reliability are issues, moving it inhouse should quickly solve any such problems.
5. Basically, is it worth paying for? The inhouse version is far from a cheap date.
6. How many people are here only because we have that feature? If we didn't have it, would we lose a lot of our "invisible" population?
7. Any idea that'd make it more valuable to everyone who uses it.
8. Any ideas how iHub can "get paid" due to its presence here?
I'm open to any and all comments.
Bob Z.
I hear ya. Currently, I'm too busy to actively manage my accounts, but I'm still in UCU, F, QTRN, and JNPR. None of those are really on-topic here, but they're companies I like for my very long time-frame.
More in the vein of this thread, I do continue to watch THDO, but it's more like rubbernecking while driving past a horrific auto accident. I got out in the low 2's (took a hefty loss) when they took on some toxic financing that effectively capped their price at $2.77. I see it's $1.46 today. I see sub-$1 happening very easily. When the new convertible holders get done with the shorting I expect they're doing, I'll consider picking up some trading shares of it.
Hmmmm.... QTRN up 7% today. Not bad at all.
Agree with you. At face value, just from reading the thread here, it seems a good concept. But so many great concepts just don't come to fruition for any number of side reasons that're often difficult or impossible to find out about. That's why I'm so enamored of boards like this one -- people picking these things apart and hopefully finding things, good or bad, that the unwashed masses (non-iHubbers) don't know about and everyone benefitting from that shared knowledge.
Keep up the good work.
Peace, Out.
Bob Z.
Just some guy hanging around iHub. <g>
Ummmm.... Is all this posting activity for the purpose of manipulating this board's placement in the Top Boards list?
You're kinda messing with some pretty important stats I surreptitiously watch on the side.
Shouldn't be rolling marbles into the universe of the guy who can, with a single misplaced keystroke, do all kinds of nasty things like, say, change one character in your password. <g>
No, I meant to post it publicly. I'm genuinely curious about the activity in that stock. Figured anyone who has an answer might weigh in.
Bet you're kinda wondering what I'm doing around these parts, eh? <g> I mean, us being such good buds and all, and having spoken so little to each other (at least publicly) in so terribly long.
Anyway, I see WTAI is currently 0.05 x 0.065 with a high today of 0.07. Up nearly 200% in just a coupla days? Whassup with that? Especially with volume that's about 1/3rd of a percent of the OS? Market cap tacked on about $2,000,000 in two days on about $30,000 worth of trades. I can't find any news.
Would you buy at this level? I see the 52-week high as about 8 times the current price, though I'm not finding that when I pull up a chart.
Usually when I see this kind of non-news movement in a stock, I think "hype", but I haven't seen it. Is it on RB?
Basically I'm wondering if you think it's a good purchase here, and if you have any idea why it's up so much now and whether you think there's more to be had.
Your Friend,
Bob Z.
Was noticing some pretty severe performance problems on the site tonight. There's enough horsepower that it likely wasn't real visible from the browser side of things, but a lot of queries, especially one I've converted to a stored proc, were showing durations well in excess of 1000 milliseconds. Tried tweaking the query and even rewrote it to use a View as a kind of subquery, then it finally occurred to me what the problem was.
I added a particular multi-field index, and voila! Queries that were taking over 1000 milliseconds and doing 600,000 reads and more were suddenly taking more like 0 milliseconds and doing just a few hundred reads.
Just what the doctor ordered.
I don't know if it'll be noticeable from that end, but it sure is from this end. I'm beating on the servers something fierce and they refuse to even flinch now.
Too funny! Just can't resist the spamming, eh?
My attention was drawn to board 277 because it was showing up VERY often while I was trying to figure out why certain queries were running slow. Surprised me that it was coming up so frequently when there're a total of 24 public messages in it, only 12 of which haven't been deleted (hmmmm....).
Finally noticed that what was happening was that you were frequently editing the iBox for it. No biggie. But when I saw that, I made a mental bet with myself that you'd be hyping it soon.
And lo and behold, you managed to post 4 surreptitious spam messages about it tonight. Last I looked. I'll give you credit for having figured out not only how to evade a spambot, but also how to evade all but the closest admin scrutiny. But don't worry. I'm not the admin here. And I won't tell Matt what you're doing. I'm curious how long you can keep it up. :)
I'm kinda glad this time that you're making ready your hype campaign, only because your doing so steered me directly to a major database problem I'm having that I finally might just about have fixed.
Thanks,
Bob Z
I just got home to find that a stored procedure has been taking far longer than usual to run. Recompiled it. But it's still doing it.
Since it's pretty late and the traffic is relatively low on the site right now, I'm gonna try to tweak a few things. If it acts like it can't connect, it might be because I've shut down SQL Server temporarily or am rebooting one or both machines. No outage should last more than about 30 seconds.
Those lists don't work the way the SI ones do. The lists here don't take today's activity into account very much. Instead, it's the activity for the last 30 days, and the total boardmarks or peoplemarks.
Perhaps that's the problem. The only KKD's available out here are at convenience stores and the like.
Actually, the plain glazed ones turned out to be alright. And my daughter thought the bug guts (jelly-filled) was alright.
I'll have to see if there's an actual KKD shop around town and give them one last try. Doubt I'll be that impressed, though. *Any* glazed donut is good when it fresh. The krullers are just plain *wrong*, though.
"I hate you, Kenny." -- E. Cartman
Just got home from a night of snowpushing. Got the famiily some Krispy Kreme donuts on the way. First time I've had them save for the occasional kruller.
Now that I've finally gotten to really sample some of their wares, and while they're certain to be pretty fresh, I can finally offer an opinion on them.
And it goes thusly: "They suck!!!"
Too bad there's not a Dunkin Donuts where I do my snowplowing. At least they know how to make a kruller. KKD makes them like a real heavy donut (say, an "Old-fasioned") and they're just *shaped* like krullers.
Awful. I don't know what you see in them, Matt. And I think less of you for liking them. <g>
Yours. You likely had a temporary inability to get to all or part of the 'net.
Very nice indeed, on a day that looked really dismal for the market overall.
I don't watch the market anymore (I'm too busy), but nothing I own went up today.
Knew you would, Mark. Ummm.... I mean "Mr. X".
I won't be able to get to it until this afternoon or this evening.
Why don't you guys just type perfectly instead? Lik I do!
<g>
I could force your browser to do a reload there, but hate to. Personally, I like having that quick way of getting back to messages without waiting for stuff to come over the wires.
If you click Favorites instead of hitting Back, it should refresh just fine.
Not sure what you mean about the Favorites page reloading when you return to it. It doesn't now? Are you hitting your "Back" button to get to it, or are you clicking the Favorites link?
I don't see the spellchecker either. Matt, did you zap it or did I (inadvertently)?
Netscape is quite a bit pickier. It requires that I do things *right* on this end. Internet Explorer is more forgiving.
Once I'm done switching us to CSS, it should be a lot easier to get the site looking the same no matter which browser is being used.
I've been a die-hard Netscape devotee until very recently. When I got myself a new machine, with XP installed (which I love!), I didn't get around to downloading Netscape right away and ended up getting used to IE and it's what I use exclusively now unless I'm testing wierdness seen here in Netscape.
Kinda like how I stayed with DesqView, then DesqView/X all the way through Windoze 3.11 until 95 came out. If I needed to use a Windoze app, I'd fire up Windoze in a DV window. And when Windoze or the app would inevitably crash, no biggie. I'd just close that DV window and get on with my life.
DV/X was especially sweet. Incredible stuff built right into it. For example, I set up a 16-line (WildCat) BBS for a company, running 4 lines per computer (along with Procomm Aspect scripts running at each satellite office -- if I remember right, the extension on those was "ASP", as well), and had each computer displaying 4 complete WildCat windows on it. Those machines lived in the climate-controlled computer room, and because they (and my machine) were running DV/X, if a satellite office called because they were having problems communicating with the BBS, I could stay at my desk and "shadow" whichever BBS box they were on. I mean use it like I was sitting there. And during times of low BBS activity, if I had a big job to crunch through (compiling anything took a long time in those days), I'd just shadow a BBS box and fire off the job and get back to using my computer for other things.
And it wasn't like Terminal Services that we use now (which is basically the Citrix I used a long time ago). You weren't using another "session" on the shadowed box. You were in control of the only session running. Well, shared control.
My IT manager got such a kick out of DV/X we installed it throughout the office and if we got bored we'd go shadow a data entry person's machine and mess with their heads by doing things like backspacing through typos and fixing them. For quite some time, we had the users convinced our program (back in the early 90's) had artificial intelligence.
One of the coolest things (of so many!) about DesqView/X still isn't incorporated into any version of Windoze: infinitely scalable fonts in DOS windows. You can change fonts for a DOS window these days, but they don't automatically scale to whatever's necessary to fit 80x25 into whatever size window you decide to use. It ate up processor time, but was a terribly handy feature.
So, I guess what I'm trying to say is I don't have anything against Netscape. <g>
I was just mentioning that in a PM to you. LOL
I think today was a record for hits, too, but I'm not tracking that in enough detail yet.
Slow, steady growth. Perfect. I don't want a huge influx yet as I'm not convinced the feel of the site will remain "snappy" if it gets more than about double the current traffic. I'll get started on optimization soon, as the things above it on the list are getting done one by one. Although I still enjoy working on tweaking when I get bored with other things I'm doing. Like that post-limiting thing. Geez, that involved a lot of code in a lot of places!
I haven't seen anyone report SI's numbers in a while, and I haven't run the scripts to do that for a while (and likely won't), but it looks like we're running roughly 25% of their volume. And growing at a faster clip than RB was when they were at this stage and I was tracking them.
Should look a lot better in Netscape now but not completely correct. Still, much better. It's an arial font, but at least not bold. You'll also see that the text in the buttons shouldn't be bold anymore.
One of the BIG projects I'm planning is changing everything to use CSS, which should get rid of a lot of the differences in the ways browsers display different things here. However, I won't even get *started* on that one for quite a while.
Replying with Netscape now.
Wow! You're right! Lemme see if it's an easy fix.
No, you tap your Insert key.
The Insert key is a toggle, meaning it changes a state from on to off or off to on each time it's hit. Just like Caps Lock or Num Lock do.
It's easy to hit it accidentally when hitting the delete key. Especially when you've got big backhoe-operating fingers like I do. <g>
Next time it happens, just tap your Insert key and see if it stops.
Better yet. Next time you're typing something, put your cursor in the middle of a word, tap your Insert once and type a few characters. It should do what you're talking about. Replacing existing characters with the new ones. Tap Insert once again, and it's back to moving the text over.
Quite a bit of posting activity here lately.
If any of you are Free members, you'll find we implemented a limit tonight on the maximum number of posts you can make per day. Specifically, 5. Of course, no limits on subscribers.
If you're affected by the limit, the system will tell you so when you post. It'll show you how many posts you've made that day and how many you have remaining.
I wanted to give you guys a heads-up because we're not married to this 5-post limit thing. We want to have *some* kind of volume limitation on non-subscribers (we like being paid), but if you're affected by this limit and find that it's too low, let me or Matt know and we'll consider bumping it up a bit.
You might want to go to some of those boards and let them know what's up and that we're flexible on this. I don't want to quash quality posting.
The letters don't move over, they just become eaten by other letters.
A friend of mine told me he was having that problem a little while ago. My solution? "Take a look at your 'Delete' key. See the little key right above it? Put on your glasses and try again, gramps. See it? Yeah, the one that says 'Insert'. Tap that once and the letters will start moving over again."
I won't name names, as it would likely embarass him as much as it'd embarass me. <vbg>
--- Hoping very sincerely that you were kidding in your post.
Can anyone else confirm this? Looks the same to me, and I'm not sure it's something I could've accidentally changed.
While I'm typing a message, I'm getting something like TimesRoman, about 12cpi (monospace).
Here're tonight's changes:
1. Added a set of Submit/Cancel buttons to the top of the reply box on either "Reply" or "Post New Message". Don't remember which one. Whichever one only had the buttons on the bottom.
2. Implemented a daily-post counting mechanism.
3. Implemented limitations on daily posting levels of members who aren't grandfathered in or paid subscribers. If you can only post to "Free" boards, this means you. Current limit set at 5 posts per day. It resets each day.
4. Now when a new person signs up, they can log in and use the site immediately. Previously, they had to wait for Matt to approve the account before they could even log in. Now everything that a "normal" Free Member has available is available to new members immediately, expect they're limited to 3 posts per day. The limits I put in are subject to change.
5. Did some forced handling of locks in some of the most expensive queries to try to speed them up and reduce deadlocks. Specifically, told SQL not to use any kind of locking at all for certain kinds of reads.
6. Here's the one I love and some of you will hate. When you reply to a PM, your choices are now "Submit/Arc", "Submit/Keep", and "Cancel Msg". Submit/Arc moves the message to which you're replying to your Archives. Think of it as handling PM's the way SI does. Submit/Keep works the way the plain ol' Submit button used to.
I added this one because I was just getting tired of having to remember to hit Remove on messages all the time. Most of the time when I reply to a PM, I don't need the original in my MailBox anymore. On the flip side of the coin, there are many messages on SI I haven't replied to (instead, I compose a new PM to them) because I want them to stay in my Inbox for easier future reference (say, a more considered reply).
Best of both worlds. I hope.
As always, let me know if you see any weirdness. And I'd bet money you will. I changed a lot of code today, and despite my testing it, I'm bound to have missed something.
The areas I'd watch most closely would be how the system acts when you:
1. Go to different boards
2. Post more than 5 messages (an earlier version of the post-counter, running on my machine, of course, was adding to *everyone's* counts anytime *anyone* posted)
3. Post new messages
4. Post public replies
5. Post private replies to public posts
6. Post private replies to private messages.
Geez, what a day it's been! Coding out the wazoo. Changes should be implemented in about half an hour. Some you guys won't care about, and at least one you'll love or despise.
Granny's an absolute trip. Wouldn't have been a show without her.
We're pumped because they're doing a Sponge Bob Squarepants marathon on Monday.
I'm thinking "Addams".
Added links on the Favorites page to clear new message counts for both the "Favorite Boards" and "Favorite People" areas. While I was at it, I matched up the formats and alignments of both areas and added "Last Post Date" to the People area.
It seems to be performing okay for now, but please be on the lookout for any weirdness you think might be associated with this change. Especially things like showing zeroes where you know there are new posts.
No. I'm the anti-Scam. <g>
OTC-BB's used to be my main thing and I dabbled in one or two in the past couple of years, but they're not my thing these days. I'm more conservative.
I don't have anything against OTCBB as a whole and think an astute, experienced investor with an aggressively speculative mindset can do quite while in them if he doesn't mind doing real research and can handle getting burned from time to time when even real research doesn't show him a problem. And while a lot of people would likely disagree with me, I've rarely been LTB&H on BB's. To me, they're trading stocks. Heck, most are, to me.
It's kinda like options. Upside can be multiples of your money, downside can be every penny of it. And though a good 40% of the options I ever bought expired worthless, the profits made from the other 60% (often an opposite position) more than offset the losses.
The only "problem" I've ever had with OTCBB is the companies in which shareholders want only to cheer on the randomly-named horse they've bet on and ignore anything that doesn't support their optimism. ("That horse has a broken leg, you fool!" -- "Shut up, basher!" <g>)
In many cases, the companies themselves (directly or indirectly via promoters) are responsible for getting that mindset established, and usually for the purpose of picking pockets.
Heck, I was just gonna cite FTEL as a BB I traded very profitably for a long time, and that later ended up on the Amex (I quit once it got there. No trading opps because it just sat), but I see now that it (FCM) has been halted for 2 months. Lordy!
So, no, I don't hate OTCBB. I hate scams, hype, deaf cheerleaders, and people who call the decisions of others mistakes without saying why. And people on both sides of such discussions who lack the intelligence to attack the viewpoint rather than the person.
And it tends to gravitate toward stocks that are cheap, regardless of the exchange or market they're on, because too many people who don't have the experience or resources necessary for that kind of speculation put all their eggs in the one basket and say a prayer.
Let me know if it messes up or causes problems elsewhere I hadn't anticipated. I hate to put something into production that quickly, but I'd pretty thoroughly hammered it on my system, then again in the development environment here.
You'll note, too, that Favorite People now includes last post date, and the alignment of that table matches that of the Favorite Boards table, which had been driving me nuts for months.
Cool! Holler if you need any help. I think this is a feature I'd call "way cool" and would give it a comparatively high priority level on my list.
Yes, I would. Compared to someone who hasn't posted at all in, say, a year.
"Active", in this context, just means "they're still here". Posting frequently or infrequently, but still here. It's a way of giving a personmark more "validity" if the person who placed the personmark does use the site now and then and discounting personmarks placed by people who are no longer here.
It'd be more accurate if I based it on their last visit date rather than their last post date, since all I care about really is that they've been here. But, alas, I only recently started tracking last post dates and am not yet tracking last visit dates.