is happily being the wheel rather than a rusty old spoke
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I've seen that ad before and really thought I'd never see it again.
I looked through all of our campaigns, including at the networks, and couldn't find it.
If memory serves, that's an animated GIF rather than a Flash ad, so next time it happens, could you hover your mouse over it (without clicking, of course) and tell me what shows up in the Status bar as the destination the ad would take you to and/or right-click it, select Properties, double-click the Address and send that to me?
ADVFN offers Level 2 and it'll be offered directly through iHub and SI, but I don't have an ETA on that yet.
The options data will continue to come from QuoteMedia unless they price it out of reach for us. Pricing hasn't been finalized for it yet.
BTW, check out the Trades tab. I like it as-is quite a bit, but there are changes planned for it.
I've always liked the Financials page, though we're going to improve it as well. It's awfully nice as-is, though, and the thing that stands out the most to me as needing changing is Americanization of the wording/spelling. I actually personally use this page quite a bit because I'm not aware of a superior one out there. And like everything else, it's not quite the way we want it yet. It'll get even better.
Funny you should mention screening software. This is a HUGE thing to me, and a lot of time will get spent on it when more important projects get knocked out.
And one of the great things about working with ADVFN is that in addition to my official title(s), I've also got an unofficial title of "User One" (in my mind, this is a title Matt and I share since he and I live in different investing universes and want to cover both of them), which means I'm in a very enviable position. I can say "You know, such and such would be really useful to me" and all the resources of the company who rose to dominance in this area in the UK get deployed to make it so.
On the Finance tools, an underlying driver is to make them what Matt and I will use instead of the other things we've been using. And our new Quotes page has largely replaced my alternatives now.
Well, we're nowhere near done with the Quotes page and it'll be best-in-class (my opinion) when we've finished with it and all the ancillary stuff that goes with it (like charts), but it finally reached a point of "done-ness" that it was time to get away from the very expensive product we were using.
The changes/improvements should start coming along at a pretty rapid clip now that the show-stopper that was holding us up for so long has finally been fixed.
On the Chart multi-click thing, does the fact that the charts shown with the quotes are themselves clickable to get to the more fun/complicated charts help?
with a name like YODA, can't you make things happen , you know, all powerful , all knowing ,
No, but I can give you some sage words of wisdom: "PATIENCE & TOLERANCE brings PEACE & SERENITY "
Matt , can we have our old quote boxes back
In a word, no.
There are a number of reasons for this:
1. Our parent company is in the business of providing this kind of data and information and it's a huge part of why we agreed to be acquired by them.
2. These cost us nothing. The QuoteMedia equivalent was getting very expensive.
3. Though you obviously disagree, in my opinion this is a superior product.
4. Very soon we're going to have seamless integration of realtime capability. Actually, that capability exists right now, whereby you can buy the ADVFN Silver US package and have the new Quotes page and the Mini-Quotes that show up in boards become realtime, but we haven't incoporated the upgrade path into the site yet. That's coming very soon.
I know there's going to be a lot of backlash and people complaining that this is simply the worst thing that we've ever done, but a lot of that is just the human-nature resistance to change.
But the new quotes page is a keeper and we'll be making similar changes to other finance-specific content.
I just spent quite a while surfing the site not logged in and didn't see that ad, but was annoyed enough with the inside-messages Google ads and especially their performance that I asked Meaty to rid of us them, which he's done.
If someone gets this ad could they please do a screen shot of it and email it to me at bobz@investorshub.com?
The days of those kinds of ads should be long gone and once I can see the ad, I'll try to find out where it's coming from and stop it at the source.
BTW, I like how you're using this board as a blog/message-board hybrid. Have really been wanting to do the same myself but generally don't have the time. I do love to write (though I'm often the quiet one in a room), and I think and have been told that some of my anecdotes are entertaining reads.
I mean, how can one resist a story about, for example, how I buried the backhoe in the lake so deeply I nearly was entombed in it.
In fact, I may just go start such a board on SI right now.
Can I get a pass on the new rule?
My excuse: I'm old and dyslexic and as I'm getting older, I'm getting worse. One of those things of the mind being the second thing to go and I don't remember the first.
I have to re-read my posts several times because I'll leave a word out or use the wrong (but perfectly spelled) word. What's frustrating is that when I do this, the word I use isn't even similar in meaning or spelling to the one I intended.
It's compounded by the fact that, as Churak loves pointing out, I have a tendency to use a thousand words to do the work of ten, so my wordiness gives me more exposure to that kind of typing mistake in much the same way accidents went up when we had a 55 mph speed limit because we spent more time on highways and exposed to potential accidents.
Two from ads I've seen on the site:
1. A currently running one says something about "Dos and Don'ts". As, ummmm, uptight as I am about grammar, this one bugs me because though that would've been correct about 30 years ago, it isn't anymore. The rule, as I remember it from the Gregg Reference Manual (and will double-check) is that if the plural of a word can be confused for another word, use an apostrophe. There are plenty of us old enough to remember MS-DOS, or "DOS" for short. And that's what my internal reading voice says when it sees "Dos".
2. There were some Google ads running that used text-speak, which I also find particularly annoying. I've got no problem with "LOL", "BTW", "FWIW", and the like since I use them, but it used "U" for "you" and "UR" for "you're". I can forgive it when typed on a phone, though I don't do it myself, but it drives me crazy when done with a full-sized keyboard and space for correct spelling, FFS.
Cool board. Have added it to my Favorites and will contribute when I find worthy contributions. In reading it, I assume the etiquette here dictates that the original speaker isn't identified, which I think is a good idea.
Here's a non-ad contribution I bet Janice will remember: "others of my elk".
I use TD Ameritrade so let me see if I can duplicate what you're seeing.
I need to know the following info so I can emulate your setup as much as possible.
1. Browser.
2. If you're using a multi-tab browser, do you open TD Ameritrade in a new browser window, or do you use a tab in the same browser as iHub?
3. Which TD Ameritrade trading console do you use? (I use Command Center).
I've also noticed that the popunder is happening on the homepage whether you're logged in or not. It shouldn't be getting delivered to Subscribers if they're logged in. Or at least that's how I remember the agreement to be since the absence of ads is a major Subscription motivator. Also, there seems to be no frequency cap. I get it every time I go back to the homepage. I have let Meatloaf know about it and will speak directly with the ad folks on Monday. Meatloaf can take care of the part where it doesn't show up for subscribers, but he has no control over the frequency.
That particular discussion was a very heated one months ago. I suggested that if anyone wants to keep track of those ratios on their own for their own purposes, they feel free to do so but that we won't implement a display of that ratio because though situations can be found in which a correlation between ratio and credibility can be argued, so can situations in which it can't.
The "Hide Quotes" functionality has been there since, like, forever. hehe
Everyone, in the very near future, as in the next few days, Meatloaf is going to make the new version of the site publicly available for wide beta testing.
Keep in mind that this is a work in progress and it's mostly a switch to the more efficient and feature-rich .NET platform, but it's nowhere near done site-wide. In fact, what'll be rolled out first won't even be everything that's currently done since we need to tightly manage and monitor issues like server workload, the number of potential bugs, and any glaring look/feel issues before rolling out more changed code.
What he's been focusing on first is Favorites and all of its subsets like Board and Read_Msg. Favorites is done, it looks to me like Read_Msg is done, and I think most of what's left to do is some work on Board before it's opened up for testing.
He'll announce here when it's available and when he does I'd appreciate it if as many people as possible would try it out so we can get a handle on how it performs under a decent load and get some look/feel feedback and all bugs found/squashed before replacing existing code with it.
Though I'm likely to be proven wrong, it's really hard to imagine how the new Favorites won't be a big hit. I look at it and think "What's not to like? Looks nearly identical but makes more sense, is tons faster, and lots of cool additional functionality."
Meatloaf and I both will be posting about it in more detail once it's ready for wide beta.
Huge jump in our Alexa ranking.
I noticed that suddenly we're at 2854 when last week we were in the 3700's.
Went to Alexa to see why, and the nutshell version is that it's reached out beyond just people who use the Alexa toolbar. The ranking gets data from a variety of sources, so now it should be a much more accurate number since it's a bit more global.
What I found interesting is that in the FAQ part of the explanation, they appeared to be on the defensive, as if they were getting more complaints than praise.
Which isn't too surprising. If we moved up about 900 points, it's likely that at least 900 sites moved down.
We're really no longer ranked in the long tail (bell curve that starts at zero, goes up, comes down, then approaches but never reaches zero for a nearly infinite length), so our ranking should remain relatively stable and gains harder to come by.
But I'm still hopeful that someday our ranking will be 999 or better. The fact that we haven't yet gotten there is one of the reasons (there are others and they're biggies) that I haven't yet retired. I want to see it happen before I put myself out to pasture. Well, the pasture-sized workshop. :)
I've seen Dave's reply, but will reply as if I haven't seen it.
You're preaching to the choir when it comes to the fact that people sometimes do try to use multiple screen names either to seemingly increase the number of people who like a stock, to get past per-day posting limits, or to skirt suspensions, bans, or other sanctions.
They're not terribly successful here. And become less successful over time. Multiple accounts is considered a BIG no-no here because of the way it can be used manipulatively. Because of this, Dave has written and continues to develop an impressive array of utilities to help the Admins identify when this is happening and not only does membership of the site point out when they suspect it's happening (syntax similarities, etc), the system spits out some reports of its own when it gets suspicious.
That kinda humanizes the "system", but the utilities Dave writes for sniffing out the site's cardinal sin really does border on AI.
That addressed, I'm curious. Haven't looked at your profile because there's not a link to do so on the compose message page (I thought there was and I find it useful), but you mentioned the UK, making me wonder if you hail from there or any of its colonies and, if so, whether I just learned two spelling differences between the US and the UK.
I'm pretty familiar with the differences and also believe that the stereotype that the average Englishman is far more literate than the average American has a strong basis in reality.
"hypothisis" and "occurances"? Is that the UK spelling of those words? Here it's "hypothesis" and "occurrences", respectively.
I just put in AMEX:BTK and it looks good.
Hide/Show Quotes is going to become a global option per user rather than per board, defaulting to Show. The business reason is that the new mini-quotes gives exposure to our new Quotes page, which is a high-value page in addition to our wanting to position ourselves as being a LOT more than message boards.
Though message boards will always be the heart of what we are.
Individuals can still turn off the Quotes via the "Hide Quotes" link, but only for now.
Is there a Biotech index quote that'd be suitable for your board?
That and the motorhome can't pull a gooseneck trailer. And powerful as it is (400 horses, 850 ftlbs torque), even hauling one car on a flatbed can seriously be felt. Used it for track duty a couple of times and decided not to anymore not only because it can only (barely) haul one car with none of the track-specific amenities of the big trailer, but as comfy as it is for paddock digs, I don't care to get the dirt and grease in it.
Still trying to decide between an older 7.3l Powerstroke 1-ton which will cover me for trailer-hauling and general pickup purposes, or getting a semi for the trailer and to open up my trailer options (like a low-boy for the tonka toys) along with a cheapie half-ton.
The current/past notification could be configured to work either on messages to you, whether public or private, or any new messages in Favorite boards.
But it'd be just as easy to make it work only with PM's. It'd just have to be a user-config item since not everyone would want it the same way, and it's a future-development project since all enhancements to existing code has ceased so we can get the new version (gradually) rolled out as soon as possible.
Traded that POS in on my motorhome.
It wasn't such a bad truck. Extremely comfortable. But it got horrible fuel economy and couldn't pull the trailer anywhere near as well as the old Ford did. So I'm looking for an old 7.3l Powerstroke Ford.
Insinuating multiple offenses? I measure my words carefully. Do you take half the same care when reading them?
And since you're jumping to the conclusion that they owe us money, how about jumping to the same conclusion that if they did, we'd have made plenty of phone calls to that effect. I can't imagine any business who wouldn't.
No, it doesn't necessarily have to include public messages. Though that would become yet another user-config item.
Right now it'd definitely be a sizable diversion from the far more important things on the meaty one's plate(s). Especially since it would be revising "dead code" or programs he's working at moving away from into new programs.
You said "too". Do they have a history of stiffing companies to which they owe money?
No comment yet until our lawyer makes sure all the t's were crossed and i's dotted where they needed to be from a legal standpoint.
Well, I'm glad to know it's the same company and that they didn't go into bankruptcy or become a different entity.
Nothing to chew on. I'm not considering this company as an investment either long or short as it doesn't meet any of my criteria.
I just thought the name of it looked really familiar (though not the ticker) and will ask Matt separately if it's the same company I'm thinking of before saying anything about the company itself. If it's the one I think it is.
Therefore it must be a great company and investment, huh?
Bet they're a real upstanding bunch and the proof of it is that I noticed and pointed out that their IR firm not only uses stock message boards (such as iHub, I'm sure) for promotion, but also has grammar problems on their homepage.
Kindly refrain from aiming that rah-rah stuff at me, as I was asking just a few questions (the answers to which are appreciated) and my most egregious "bashing" of the company (thus far) was pointing out a typo on the IR company's homepage. Not a big deal.
"We can help you out with various finance packages tailored for your companies needs."
Possessive form is "company's".
Well, in my case it's the howl of tortured AWD tires in the turns and the smell and taste of brake dust. I think that's on the schedule the next two weekends. Just picked up on 08 Subaru STi and am trying to hurry up and get it broken in just in time to go to the track. Will probably drive it to the track instead of hauling it so I can finish the break-in miles on the way.
Need to find another truck to haul the trailer anyway. And before I sell the 07, time both cars on the track so I can see which one's really faster and do a writeup of the differences between them. I can already tell just from slightly spirited street driving that the 08 feels more inclined to rotate where the 07 was only happy if you over-rotated it through an insane amount of trail-braking.
From their promoter's website: "We achieve a solid shareholder base through a combination of double opt in e-mails, multiple stock websites and the top stock investor forums,"
Pardon me while I shudder.
Also noticed that the promotional company has the same spelling and grammar issues as Ifinix. Right on the homepage, "companies" where it should've been "company's".
Not opining. Observing.
Thanks.
Matt, if you're seeing this, is this the company I'm thinking of?
I should mention that PM's never go away, even if you make them "go away" from your Mailbox.
If you do a Clear All on them, they're just as accessible in your "Archives: Inbox" as they are in your Mailbox. All of them. You simply use a different link to reach them.
You do realize, don't you, that the current version of the site has always had a variation of this functionality, though I don't know if it's still intact as I was using session variables, which we no longer use.
It was (is?) possible to have the site play a sound (like a doorbell or any of a number of different ones) anytime you got a new message and, optionally, bring the iHub browser to the foreground if it wasn't already there.
It was (is?) doing it anytime you go to Favorites and the number has changed since the last time you were on Favorites. Seems to me it'd be more useful to do it (or simply change the color) if you're on ANY page and the number is different than it was the last time you went to your Mailbox. Though even that has complications. It wouldn't reset to the normal color until you went to Mailbox. Which you might not want or need to do if your new messages are public. But perhaps the solution there is to keep hold of the old number and if you've read all of the public messages to you, it goes back to the default color.
Green/red color change doesn't work for me, though, and there are a lot of males it wouldn't work for. Yellow as a "new messages" color works for me because I can see it. If I've got no new messages and it displays the number in green, then changes it to red if I've got new messages since my last Mailbox visit, that's of no use to me because I simply won't see the color difference. Taking red/green colorblindness into account is as WEB101 as using dark text on a light background rather than vice-versa for the meat of the page.
It was a good idea when I implemented it years ago keying on the Favorites page and Mailbox count. I think it's an even better idea keying on Mailbox visits, and it'll happen, though I'm not sure when.
Well, currently most of the Finance Channel pages are using copies of exactly the same pages the UK uses. But in a separate directory for the US and we're going through them one at a time to Americanize them not only in spelling and word usage, but in look, feel, and functionality that is more useful not only to American eyes, but usage patterns.
For example, day-trading is a much bigger deal here than it is there. As is stock ownership in general. In the US, people from all walks of life and with widely varying levels of experience and expertise are "playing the market".
Also, I think it only fair to point out that I always qualify my opinion of the ADVFN homepage with "To my American eyes". It really does work in the UK. Take a look at the Alexa ranking. http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/advfn.com
It's the 400th most popular site among UK internet users. For a Finance site, that's HUGE. The stock market is a comparatively small area of special interest to internet users, especially when compared to dating, cars, motorcycles, or even antique tractors.
I've forced myself past my revulsion at the homepage and dug in a little bit, and it's no wonder they're big among internet sites there and enjoy total dominance of the Finance side of things there. Yes, we have no viable competitors there.
I liken it to this huge Snap-On tool cabinet I recently got. Bigger than your average truck and all of my tools are in it now that my farmhand has moved them all.
The analogy stays intact for a little while.
Since he put the tools where he thought it made the most sense, it's always difficult for me to find anything, but when I do it's a "Eureka!" moment.
ADVFN's website is the same way. Dig in and there's some seriously cool chit there! The Time and Sales I mentioned earlier is a good example. I use it all the time because it's superior to even what's available at my online brokerages. And will become even better (for my personal use) when we move on to that page and Americanize it.
Which also means Matt and I are in a pretty cool position. We've got a crew of geeks at our disposal who have written some really cool stuff for monitoring and researching companies. The same crew whose stuff crushed all competitors in the UK makes new versions of the same stuff so it's to our liking. On the Quotes page, we're making sure it has what we need in a snapshot and only what we need, but also some cool stuff few others are doing or in some cases, nobody is doing.
For example, market cap is dynamic rather than based on yesterday's close. One of our competitors is doing this. Something we'll soon be doing that I haven't seen anywhere else is dynamic dividend yield. I mostly buy dividend payers and if one of them has gotten cheaper, I don't want to have to use my calculator to figure out what the dividend yield is now. Soon, our Quotes page will update this info based on the displayed (whether delayed or realtime) price. Much handier for me. And we'll be doing a neat thing with relative volume that I've seen done elsewhere, but we're going to make it more informative and useful.
When I refer to our competitors, I'm no longer referring to Yahoo Finance's message boards. I'm referring to Yahoo Finance, period. We'll make sure we're still the best when it comes to message boards (and simplicity is SO important there), but we're really putting a lot of work into making the Finance Channel stuff palatable to Americans and the best that can be found. Especially for the price.
What was the ratio, when did it happen, and did the company either declare bankruptcy or become a different entity with the ticker change?
So I wasn't imagining that I was populating a table with the same info. Cool!
And by using the table, we don't have to worry about synching the individual CSS files across multiple webservers. Also cool!
Interesting timing on your mentioning that (and it's a small part of the eventual changes on all those pages along with the fact that we "check" boxes here; not "tick" them) as I was just coming here to report a funny thing I noticed on Google AdSense in light of the discussion of the differences between American and English.
1st paragraph (American): "The Google AdSense website is temporarily unavailable. Please try back later.
We apologize for any inconvenience."
11th paragraph (English) "The Google AdSense website is temporarily unavailable. Please try back later.
We apologise for any inconvenience."
Actually surprised they felt the need to use both variations since I thought that subtle difference in the languages was widely known and results in no more confusion on either side of the pond than the difference between "color" and "colour".
We do have a bit of a transatlantic linguistic war going on inside the company, though, and, yes, I'm the one stirring the pot the most.
I fully accept that "math" is wrong and it should be "maths", though it's still difficult for me to say (and I purposely say "math" just to wind people up), but we walk on sidewalks; not pavements, and it's pretty likely aluminum was invented in the US, so that's the pronunciation and spelling that should be used.
Learned a new one last week, though. One of our visitors called his sweater a "jumper", which cracked up all the Yanks. But that's what they call them over there. I love learning these differences.
You've got two choices (will become one choice soon) and I'll give my preferred choice first:
1. Go to the Homepage and type the ticker in the "Super Quotes" box near the middle and hit any button below it. That'll take you to the new Quotes page. From there, hit the "Trades" button. I prefer this one because it shows a lot more trades and also distinguishes between buy and sell orders (to the extent possible) and also displays this info graphically.
2. Type the ticker in any other Quotes input on the site and select "Depth/LII" from the page that takes you to.