is happily being the wheel rather than a rusty old spoke
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It gets worse.
When I can't log in, I'm not taken to the login failure page. I'm taken to the Subscribe page! Definitely not what we want.
And I just got a PM from someone else saying they also can't log in.
Edit: And all the state-side hosted graphics are broken.
Has something changed in the Matrix over on SI? I'm completely unable to log in. Was there a change made to the login process itself that perhaps it doesn't like the fact that there's a space in my login name?
Brilliant!
or
I AGREE LOL!!!!!
Today's the first full day I've spent programming in ages. Perhaps a handful of years, actually. And I'm making mistakes left and right. Stupid ones. Fortunately I'm steering clear of where I can do much harm, for the most part.
My bad and it looks like it's likely the case with all PM's written in the past few hours. I was trying to stop the inclusion of old-style signatures in them but apparently zigged when I should've zagged.
Looks fixed now. Let me know if otherwise.
Edit: Those PM's during that timeframe will still be blank. Sorry. They never got saved to the database.
I like it. Helps spread the workload and expedite responses.
Dave, John? Thoughts on the nuts and bolts of it?
Your explanation is absolutely correct.
To repeat:
1. We get paid for sending the emails. Whether you read or click on the ads in them has no direct impact on how much we get paid for that mailing, but if the clickthrough rate (CTR) remains high (so far, so good), it's easier to get more and better advertisers on-board at higher cost per thousand (CPM).
2. Nobody ever gets posession of the email addresses. London is provided with the email contents and sends them themselves. We have a very firm policy that our member email addresses stay in-house.
Thanks, but we don't mind MF advertising here. We're only indirect competitors and have a friendly relationship with them.
Of course it depends on how prolific the participants are, but in my experience, more than about 20-30 people makes a chat room useless to me. I can't keep up. Even if it's all signal and no noise.
On the other hand, I used to lurk in #day-traders on IRC and there'd often be well over 100 people, but only about 20 actively talking, which made it not too difficult to keep up.
In our implementation, we won't set any limits on the number of people in a room.
There are a lot of aspects of it to work out, once we just find software that can be tweaked to meet our specific needs.
That's always been a real challenge for us. There is zero doubt in my mind that realtime chat cannibalizes message boards.
So we've revised an idea I had years ago. When we had realtime chat and I wanted to parse the chat logs into posts on the site to mitigate the cannibilization somewhat, it was met with a huge outcry. So, to prevent the cannibalization from continuing, I removed realtime chat.
We're revisiting that idea and are currently evaluating different chat platforms, but I'm finding them to be lacking so far.
While realtime chat will always cannibalize message-posting (our bread and butter), it's something we know our customers want, so we want to provide it. And by making separate threads that're logs of conversations, not only will there be more posts to read, but they might spark additional conversation, taking back a portion of what chat takes away.
And also would solve a major problem I see with chat. Its ethereal nature. I love searchable histories. Whether Zeev said he was loading up on XYZZ in a message or a chat room, I'd like to be able to find that information.
Once a solution has been found, tweaked, and implemented, I'm sure we'll do a blurb across the top of the screen.
A request:
Since I'm a lot more actively involved in the technology side of things again, please use http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/board.asp?board_id=5 for posting any feature requests and suggestions.
There are so many other kinds of posts on the Q&A board that I can't keep up in the very limited time I have for reading.
And in the other board, please limit it to technology items. The Q&A board is more appropriate for "How do I...." questions and opinions and suggestions about site operational philosophies.
Posting a message here so the system won't thumb its nose at me when I ask it to let me be the Moderator.
Sure sounds do-able to me.
Could end up with the stored proc from Hell, but it already is.
VIDEO: Are You Smarter Than a Code Monkey?
Few are, though with the really sharp ones, like Meatloaf, there's a bit of idiot-savant to them.
I know he knows the example I'm going to cite.
He thought "Bohemian Rhapsody" was done by ELO.
The downside of that is that nearly half of the people who work for this company work from home, nowhere near Boogerville, MO. None of the Admins work here.
And of those based out of the Metro Boogerville Office, most of us work some or most days from home for now, taking advantage of the fact that our comparatively small size lets us do that. Not only the ability to work from home but the ability to have the whole office to ourselves occasionally.
Thanks, MS2. Yes, I think Shelly has been amazing, and I'm very optimistic about Dan.
A problem with Admins (and it's part of what makes them the right people) is I have to beat a "Dude! I'm swamped!" out of them, and usually have to read between the lines. Been there. It's the kind of job that you not only love and hate, but also kinda love that you hate. Great line of work for masochists. And insomniacs.
I've noticed that many of you Mod-Squadders share this illness, and it's sincerely appreciated!
To-date, it's not a job anyone can "get". We decide amongst ourselves who to approach, then go from there.
I'm considering in the future making it not only an open-application process, but submitting all candidates to community vote. The vote likely wouldn't make the decision but would be influential. Especially the Yes/No ratio of each candidate. I would want people to simply tell whether they'd object to each person; not vote Yes for their favorite and No on the rest.
Assuming we need any more Admins. I think we're going to need 2 more in the coming 6 months, but wouldn't mind being proven wrong. Once there are enough Admins to really stay on top of the workload, the workload, by definition, should start going down in some respects. I hope.
One of the biggest challenges in online communication is that it's a lot harder to tell when/if someone's yanking mightily on one of your legs.
Chu approves? WOW!
It's only taken several years, but I finally did something right in Chu's eyes. Maybe I won't need to recite my self-affirmation speech in the mirror every morning anymore. <g>
If you're gonna transcribe my morning self-affirmation speech, please get the spelling right!
It was a coin-toss between you, Susie, and Dan.
The coin didn't land on the edge. Sorry.
We've hired a new Admin.
We try, when possible, to hire Admins from the ranks of our own membership because it's our members who can be the most focused on seeing to it that we remain a quality site.
We are pleased that this time we have been able to hire a new Admin from within the ranks of our own. You've known him previously as "99Dan", but now he's "IH Admin [Dan]".
Please go easy on him while he learns the ropes, whips, and chains.
Bob Z.
PS. Here he is: http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/profile.asp?user=115041
The area on the right side (scroll down a bit) that shows market gainers, losers, etc.
Check out the new implementation of Toplists on the Homepage.
I think it rocks!
I thought I sent this in the morning but just ran across this window still open.
Being the upstanding Ihubber that I am, (LOL) would it be possible to have my posts increased from 10 to the max a freebie can have on SI?
Have you not been paying attention here lately? You're breaking protocol!
You're supposed to verbally abuse me, badmouth the site, and threaten to commit one of the most egregious of the TOU violations possible (multi-accounts).
Well, actually, you're supposed to verbally abuse Matt, but since you were writing to me...
All of that sounds absolutely excellent!
Think when you get some time you can get started on it? <g>
Seriously, could you put it in the queue assigned to me in that detail and with anything else you want to add?
The problem with free-style is that people will want to put in partial usernames. Like "Zeev" instead of "Zeev Hed", which means using LIKE, which is horrible, since 'LIKE %Zeev%' won't use an index. Or the comparably difficult-to-type "IH Yoda [Bob]".
I really do hate to ever use any kind of input that requires exactness from the user. But I can also see a case for "Well, if they want to use it, they'll have to be exact and the few who will use it won't mind so much that exactness is required."
Alias is actually indexed but I think the only time we use it is for sorted lists.
Verisign, not Verizon.
Don't remember when it was. Maybe a year ago.
It's the product we use for processing credit cards at Verisign.
Since the merger of PayPal and Verisign, it's really gotten tough dealing with either company.
Okay, I know why I'm awake at this ungodly hour. One of the dogs was ripping a screen to shreds while barking frantically.
Your excuse?
I'm actually planning to finish this cup of coffee, go adjust the new "angel eyes" headlights I installed on the Bimmer yesterday, then head to the office to try to knock out some work.
We changed to recurring subscriptions recently. And to do so, had to change from PayFlow Link to PayFlow Pro at Verisign.
PayPal's equivalent product is broken and still in Beta. I don't know if the Verisign change also affects PayPal, as it's really hard to tell where the lines are between those two companies now.
But I've PM'd Meaty asking if he could put PayPal back in as non-recurring until they've got their recurring product available.
How about a compromise? A dropdown that lets you select a member from your membermarks and if one is selected, it shows all of their posts if you don't enter search text, or shows just matching posts if you select search text.
Combining a free-style member name input with that search would make it horribly expensive (computing resource cost) and slow.
Or, a compromise that might suit you better and *might* be easier on the system (would have to test it), have the member name dropdown show the 100 people who posted most recently to that board?
Or.... Better yet since it'd be Dave's job instead of mine, wait until Dave does up profiles here the way he's done on SI?
http://siliconinvestor.advfn.com/MemberPostsSubject.aspx?userid=9086592&subjectid=54574
I got one more for ya. Would you guys consider putting back up the paypal method of payment?
Meaty's working on it, but it could be a while. PayPal themselves are the holdup.
15% chance of that.
Kept your message to Meaty as a reminder to look into it.
Now if someone who doesn't just love to bust my chops all the time asks for it, maybe I'll do more than look into it. <g>
Edit: Betcha if we do it, it'll only be a week or two before it starts getting manipulated.
#1 Can we please add the "Recommend this Post" button to iHub? On SI it is very, very useful now that the # of "recs" is included in the message list.
That's up to Dave. And depends on if he's found a low-cost (in terms of computing power) way to do it.
#2 Have we considered some kind of pricing that would include subscriptions to both iHub and SI? I think that most investors favor one, and dabble in the other, and so do not want to pay for both. Heck, you might even find that you could sell more yearly subscriptions if you made them a package deal.
ETA on that is "near future". It's been discussed and decided that we'd do it, once we figure out how to get around the challenge of tying the accounts together.
Better now, but not ideal. Will revisit it later.
Well, thought I'd be able to do it using an anchor tag, but QuoteMedia appears to be ignoring parameters in their "targetURL" field. Will keep poking around to see what I can come up with.
I was noticing this yesterday and no solution seemed possible.
Lemme try something, though.....
I vaguely remember that quite a bit of discussion went into the decision of whether or not to even show the number of personmarks in profiles. I don't remember all the pros and cons we came up with, but do know that the decision to include them wasn't a slam-dunk.
To not have "ratings" like RB was a slam-dunk, though. It's pretty obvious how that system can be abused to give the appearance of credibility where it's not deserved.
My own opinion regarding my personmarks is that I don't care if I have a thousand of them or zero.
And in putting personmarks on individuals, I really don't do that very often. I have very few of them. Instead I maintain a kinda loose mental list of my own, usually people with whom I've exchanged PM's, so if I want to read their posts, I can just go to their profile from a PM and read on.
I know it's awfully handy, though. I'm sure I'm far from alone in having Zeev personmarked and like being able to just click a link on the Favorites page and read all of his posts in succession, no matter where they are.
So, having personmarks is a real good thing. I don't think caring about how many we have is, though, as it can be a major distraction when our focus here is talking about stocks; not gauging our own "popularity". And has been pointed out, we don't always person-mark someone because we like them or what they say.
Ultimately, this is Matt's call. I'm the business guy and one of the geeks. He's the User Interface and Communities guy.
Matt, got an opinion, pumpkin?
Thanks. Still waiting for Chu to bust my chops for using more than 5 words, though. <g>