is happily being the wheel rather than a rusty old spoke
Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
That's good news! So, we're keeping the individual CSS files or is there another way you're doing it?
Wouldn't take any time at all. On the right side (Meaty's left) there's the text "Clear All:" followed by a link that says "PM's" that'll move all of your inbound PM's to archives (where they're still accessible via the "Archives: Inbox" link) and another that says "Replies" that'll flag all public messages to you as having been read.
Two clicks and your Mailbox count becomes zero.
BTW, I'm one of those people who still has ever single email I ever received over the past several years. I delete spam when I encounter it, but the rest is kept and when a particular folder gets too big, I just make an archive folder and empty that folder into it.
Oh, and it might bear mentioning that if your Inbox count gets ridiculously large, iHub DOES slow down for you. It's not a huge job for the database server to determine what that number's supposed to be, but when it's a big number, it's not a walk in the park for it either.
It's not as bad as Filters, though. There used to be people who literally had thousands of people filtered and when they'd read messages, everyone suffered because every read those few people would do would result in a huge spike in database utilization, which meant a backlog in serving other requests, which had a snowball effect.
Paring filter lists to a more reasonable number and limiting the number of filters free members could have immediately improved site performance and server workload.
Opera really caused me a lot of heartache and extra work when I made the menus user-configurable and I see it's still got the same issues. It's not strictly HTML-compliant and their "Fit To Width" is nothing more than a kludge to get past that.
I don't remember which My CSS or My Interface item it was, but one of them exists solely because it was the only way to get Opera to display the menu without scrunching everything together.
In the same way we no longer support WebTV (THAT was a pain), and Netscape 4.x, I'm sure Opera will hit the list too.
IE and Firefox are the overwhelming majority of browsers used. Opera is seen less than half a percent of the time.
Edit: Surprisingly, Firefox is only a little over 19%. I'm told that across the whole of the internet, it's more like 30%. It tends to be the more tech-savvy that uses Firefox, and I think iHub users tend to be more tech-savvy than most large groups. 27% of SI's users use Firefox.
A little piece of trivia: There are 85 different browsers used to view iHub.
That actually would be a huge usability issue for a lot of men. If I remember the figures correctly, 30% of us have at least a minor degree of color-blindness (it's very rare in women) and something like 3% of us (myself included) are more severely color-blind.
If a site uses black text and puts something in red or green to catch my attention, it fails to do so because if I just glance at the screen, all the text is black. Someone has to show me where the red or green is and then if I focus on it long enough, I can at least agree that it's not black but still not know if it's red, green, or brown, which is the case for me with the number after Mailbox.
But like I said earlier, the color of the number is completely irrelevant to me. Though I can understand it being relevant to others since to most people a color difference is more easily detected than a difference in which characters/digits are displayed.
Exactly! And thank you for the graphic that so perfectly illustrated the point.
When all is said and done, there won't be any FFFFFF backgrounds in any large areas here except the message-composition box, and even that may change.
This is a high-usage (per person) website and stark white is too hard on eyes to allow for high usage. Look at SI for an example. A kind of egg-shell off-white background everywhere. Very little eye-strain.
Uh, you're changing it already! I thought initially you were saying you just don't want stark white (neither do I). But it looks like you're modifying it to be whatever color you personally want. I've asked Meatloaf to make that the case if it's do-able.
We're definitely going to lose the granularity of CSS control we've had. The way I was doing it was fine when we didn't have a lot of people using it. Now it's become a bit of an albatross. But hopefully we can keep a few elements of it. We'll see and it's Meaty's call. The two biggies on my list are to be able to control the page color and the "typo" color since the red that's used by default doesn't stand out for me. Actually neither does the green (?) of the Mailbox count, but since that's always a 3-digit number for me, I don't care what color it is.
I don't think changing the menu bar colors is even possible now as the gradient effect is achieved by using graphics, not any html text-based background effects. I don't know everything about html, but am pretty sure there isn't an html way to do the gradient without resorting to graphics. And the gradient does give it a bit of 3D feel and orders of magnitude more class than the previous default.
It's looking identical to him because in certain situations (I'm not sure of all the details but know it applies to me as well), if I go to www.advfn.com while I'm logged in to iHub, it takes me to iHub.
It's no secret within the company and is ascribed to cultural differences (not that it matters why -- we still run the site) that to our eyes the mother ship's homepage is worse than hideous. And I really do think it's a cultural difference. I'm sure most of that page's users are Londoners and what's comfortable and useful to them is chaotic and useless to us, and what's comfortable to us is too simple and even "pre-school" to them.
I really came to appreciate that difference on my most recent visit there, which lasted two months. Londoners (and likely all Brits) are accustomed to a pace and quantity of inputs that I find overwhelming and uncomfortable.
And this site is designed for North Americans. It'd be stupid of us to change that.
And the cultural differences and the rules those differences impose on how sites should work and look and feel are being applied to more than the message boards. Nothing that's accessible in the top row of the menu will go untouched as we go through all of the offerings and "Americanize" the versions used here. Starting with Quotes.
Right now, the nearly-done version of Quotes is accessible here only by using the "Super Quote" section of the homepage (it's used site-wide on SI) but after a few more tweaks, it'll replace all quotes on the site. I already consider it a huge improvement, but there's more to come. Keeping it simple but adding really useful stuff.
You've got it wrong, Susie.
When it comes to the workings of iHub and SI, the buck stops squarely on my desk. Matt and I still jointly decide what the site will and won't do and be. Nobody in London has any control over how the site will work and they don't want to. They know that our group has done a good job and that we know what's best.
The conversion to .NET was a huge item on the project list before we ever talked to anyone from London. It hit the list in 2003 when I rolled out the .NET version of SI.
Not that I did a particularly good job of it. I took advantage of how much gentler it is to a database server (and not even completely) but didn't take advantage of the great interface tools we'll be taking full advantage of on iHub.
And it's really unfair to act like the opinions of our members doesn't matter. We know that without people using the site, we've got no reason to even HAVE a site.
Granted, if that opinion is simply "Don't change a thing!", it's a wish that won't be fulfilled. But I know that Meatloaf has already implemented many changes recently on user requests and has always done so.
We're all resistant to change. Even me and I'm a pretty darned flexible guy for the most part.
I've occasionally said that we could mail a $100 bill to everyone and we'd get some really loud complaints about it because for 7 years we've never mailed $100 bills to anyone. It'd be a change.
But painful as it might be for some (even many), the site must change. Not only in the name of progress but in the name of survival and thriving. It's not in any imminent danger by a long ways, but long-term it'll be a footnote if we stubbornly keep things the way they are. Especially now when there's so much available to us not only in terms of what kind of message-board site we can become, but in terms of the kinds of valuable content we can get courtesy of our parent company.
To use but one example, though our new Quotes page isn't quite ready for site-wide deployment yet (but will be early next week), it'll be "among the best in class" and there are changes in the works for it already that should make it the best you can get anywhere when it comes to a delayed (or realtime at a price that is much less than comparable realtime elsewhere) snapshot of what's going on.
Change is inevitable. And so are complaints about it. But we're not going to change anything simply for the sake of changing things. We're changing for good reasons and always to improve things.
To anyone:
Didn't this company used to trade as INFR? Or am I thinking of a different one?
Can anyone summarize for me what happened or point me to a post? I'm specifically curious about whether a reverse split happened and if so, the ratio and date. And if this is the same company I'm thinking it is, wasn't bankruptcy imminent at one point? Was it averted or what?
I suspect they're not crawling the site very aggressively. A search on "IH Yoda" yielded zero results.
The iHub logo will always remain. Not all traffic that comes to the site does so via the homepage, so we have to keep the brand visible on all pages.
That and the fact that there are message-board aggregators out there who embed our content into their pages, so when people are using those sites we want them to know whose content they're actually seeing.
We might end up breaking your heart on that one. And mine. The Meaty one and I are actively discussing specifically that item right now. Personally, I've gotten used to the new menu straps even though I had them vastly different in the previous version (they were all big buttons and the color scheme was shades of gray), but I'm especially attached to my customized page background color.
The new version is currently using white for the background color, which I find pretty tiring on the eyes, and have always considered just plain wrong, but it also happens to be the default on the current version and what the vast majority (probably 99+%) are using.
Have faith in the Meaty one. The Meaty one is wise and clever. He may yet find a solution or may decide our current method (everyone who wants one has their own CSS file), though cumbersome because of how busy the site is now, is worth keeping. At least some elements of it.
Yes, 1024x768 is the standard resolution for all new site development now and 93% of our traffic is already at that resolution or higher.
When I first came onboard we were aiming at whatever resolution WebTV was at, as we had quite a few WebTV users, then bumped it to 640x480, then 800x600, and now 1024x768.
Looks like someone already fixed the sort order problem. Good catch and I'm surprised it wasn't noticed earlier.
Pages like that are built on SQL Server "Views". This version has a feature (I strongly consider it a bug) that it ignores "ORDER BY" in Views, so we have to insert that in the ASP making the call and though we were pretty busy adding these throughout the site when we changed to this version a couple years ago, that one slipped through.
The bolding is because there was a bold tag in the subject line of someone's post but not a closing bold tag. Don't know if that's fixed yet or not but should be considered a bug and formatting tags should be stripped out of subjects when messages are posted. I know the Meaty one will see this and make it happen.
Nice catch, Mattie, whether it was previously noticed or not. I miss it too now that I'm aware it's not there.
Everyone, iHub is going through a very much- and long-needed revamping in look and feel and especially in the technology being used and how it works. A lot of progress has been made in rewriting the system in .NET, though none of it has been rolled out yet.
We'll be rolling it out in separate, distinct stages encompassing specific areas of functionality. First (and soon) will be the Homepage, Favorites, Board, and message-reading.
We're working to roll a few smaller marbles into our collective universe rather than one or two huge ones. That way we can get the feedback, both positive and negative, adjust what's been deployed accordingly and take it into account for the new stuff yet to come.
iHub has long been known for being a feature-rich site. Unfortunately, what we invented was pretty easy to cut and paste to build similarly equipped sites, so we're going to dramatically up the ante when it comes to features.
You'll see what I mean as soon as you see the first stage of the .NET rollout. I have to say that even I am stunned at what suddenly became available to us.
I don't want to discuss too much of what'll be available in the new versions of pages that'll be rolled out. I want it to be as nice a surprise for you as it's been for me. And I'm a Missourian anyway.
But we're going through a lot of changes, and they'll soon start getting rolled out at quite a clip. While keeping things as simple as we can. Extra functionality always brings extra complexity, but we're going to limit that and also keep things as familiar as possible. The menu straps really are going to be about the most "unfamiliar" large item we're introducing.
One thing I'm particularly excited about, though, is the new Favorites page. Nearly identical in look and feel, but the functionality of it has increased dramatically. Really looking forward to seeing it rolled out.
Ask him about the effect it had on me.
Never again.
Well, okay. Maybe. At a serious sushi place. The next day's "issues" may be worth the cost.
Well, I wouldn't go so far as to say that. I think it's an automated thing that has very serious bugs and at least comparing what it's reporting to what I know to be reality, is of zero value or credibility.
I don't think it's malicious. Simply very seriously flawed.
Matt and I made up over dinner and drinks. Can we have our jobs back?
I declined the offered kiss.
BTW, I had to fill in for you at the company meeting. Had I given it more thought and not spent so much time in my own part of it, I'd have had a lot more fun by emulating you. In a flattering way, of course. :)
Weird.
Not only is the UV count off by decimal places (we might do that many UV's in a minute) as Dave pointed out, of all the places cited as preferred places to do trading, only one of the 4 is actually a brokerage.
Very true and it's one of the biggest reasons that Admins comprise the largest population on our payroll. And that population will likely increase even further this year. I've actually been holding back on some personnel who'd make my life easier so I can afford more Admins.
Geez, I'm am SO done with this thread of discussion after this one....
This isn't so much about "rights" as it is about the manipulation of public opinion.
You're the one who made it about "rights" to begin with. "USA"? "Free Speech"? Any of that ringing a bell? Please don't answer as it's a rhetorical question and I leave any further communication on the topic in Dave's capable hands.
Good Luck on surviving with that credo.
If you count Silicon Investor, on whose rules iHub's are modeled, that's 13 years of survival. Take into account all my personal history operating message boards, and we're talking 21 years. The summed history of everyone involved goes beyond a century.
I wouldn't recommend our model as a proper form of real government. But I wouldn't recommend anyone waste any money or time on creating a message board that deviates from that model. Unless such creator chooses to accept chaos.
Consider that free business advice the value of which you likely can't fathom.
Oh, Lordy. Dave's gonna have a field day with that one!
But I can't help but chime in with my tuppence.
As Dave already pointed out, the "Right To Free Speech" applies to governments and nobody else. If you want to cite any part of the Constitution, please read and understand the words. The fact that our servers resides in the US of A has no more meaning than their being located on Mars might.
Does that make you feel warm and fuzzy about the site? Of course not. But that's reality. Deal with it. It's not a government entity, so the Constitution doesn't apply here. If you must compare it to any form of government to come up with an analogy that you can understand, think "Benign Dictatorship". All message boards use either "(Benign) Dictatorship" or "Chaos" as their model. We choose the former. There are no other viable models.
I'm seeing two screens instead of three.
On my laptop.
Was. I'm completely shober now.
I'm outta here, too, hoser! I've handed the keys over to Churak.
Oh, it's still in business and we'll do a lot better without him.
Soooo.....
This is a stock discussion site or something like that, right? I need to come back up to speed since I'm going to have to take over the 1% of the work I wasn't already doing.
Hmmm....
I only staggered in here late because I ransacked the flat looking for my hash, which I still think YOU stole. You should smoke some of it and take the edge off!
Your account's terminated and I've already gotten into the accounting system and yanked your exhorbitant salary for the month, so as they say down south, "Adios, MF!"
And you want to go toe to toe with the big boys in this business? Game on, indeed!
What have I told you before about people like Mirarchi? "Don't trust people with Italian last names living in Canada or anyone living in the Caymans."
I find it hard to believe the site's income is highly dependent on companies whose float I could take out with the coins on my dresser. Not that I would. They'd just change tickers, do a 1^10:1 reverse split and issue themselves the newly freed up authorization so my holdings would be worth a fraction of a cent.
Technology made the site what it is, and it's some pretty good shiznit, though it's going to get lots better. If you'll stay the feck outta the way and let us get it done without your constant whingeing about wanting a few RGB units more yellow added to the background colour of some obscure link.
WTF is "VWAP"?
And, while I'm thinking about it, what flavour of Canuck are you anyway? The kind who thinks he lives in France, a Newfie, or the kind who's always "Soorry, eh."?
Oh, as soon as I'm able to walk in a straight line, I think I could take you myself, sugar-lips. If you land a lucky one, my Mr. Miagi could finish you off in 3 seconds.
You're just ticked because you got everyone confused on your last visit with your talk of grey sheets, pink sheets, purple sheets, blue moons, and green clovers. Lissen up. In cheapie-land you've got OTCBB and you've got Other, which includes your green clovers and what have you. If we didn't have to deal with a data layer that's all screwed up by your misinformed "direction" on your previous visit, we'd have knocked this out in days. I've spent about a month of my stay dealing with the damage you caused in a week!
And how much accuracy do you want when something trades in millionths of a cent, anyway. We had to invent a new data type just to deal with your favorite stocks.
Do you think it's an accident I didn't have you sign a new contract when the old one expired?
We went to the Counting House? Is that the one they kicked us out of because we were so loud around closing time?
That quart of vodka is still here on my desk and it's almost half full so I know I didn't have very much. And as I explained last night, that mystery smoke was Blonde Lebanese Hash. You should've had some. Would've taken the edge off. In fact, I can't find the rest of it. I know I didn't smoke 20 grams myself. Did you take my stash? Heck, you're probably smoking it now is why you're coming up with such assinine assertions.
My team can redesign the quotes page with broke crayons if it'd make you happy, but then, like the few pages of the site that aren't aware of personalized CSS, it'd make me puke every time I encounter it.
I think you're just upset because you know my team can kick your team's collective arse. In anything. Especially a throwdown. As soon as Clint saw you he said "Oh, yeah. I could take that one down in 5 seconds." When I get in, I'm gonna bet him he can't. I'll be at the office after I shower and have some hair of the dog, and we can discuss this in person.
Microencephalytic twit!
To change the topic just a bit, don't think I forgot about our "discussion" last night about the design of the new quotes page.
We need a new quotes page provided FREE to us by our parent company so we can get away from the big cost of our current one. And the new one is beyootiful. It updates market-cap dynamiclyand soon will do the same with divi yeild. And it's easy on the eyes. Unlike so much of the default layout of this site that looks like it was "designed" by a kid with a box of broken Crayolas. Oh, that's right. It was.
You, sir, are a microinc... microenefa.... microencyp.... pin-headed twit!
And, no, I'm not still drunk. I only had 7 pints last night / this morning and just now woke up on the floor 4 hours after I stumbled in so I know I'm sobre now.
We don't recommend stocks and don't send out emails via a gmail address. Only from our own, which would be advfn.com, investorshub.com, siliconinvestor.com, or techstocks.com
We did recently send out an emailed advertisement for a stock (not this one) but I've had discussions with those involved and if we sell stock-promotional emailings in the future, they will be clearly marked as advertisements and will include a disclaimer to the effect that the statements and opinions offered are those of a paying 3rd party; not us.
Of course, any time I mention our advertising emails, I feel it important to mention that they'll always come from the site itself (investorshub.com in this case -- but beware that "From:" fields can be spoofed), always contain opt-out links (hover the mouse over the link and your email software should show that the link goes to advfn.com, which means it's safe as in not a phishing email), and, most importantly, that we NEVER sell, rent, or otherwise let anyone else come into possession of our email addresses. Ad copy is submitted to us and mailed from in-house.
On a personal level, I stay opted in not only so I can see what emails are going out, but because I've found some of them (even the advertsements) to be ones I'm interested in.
Back in my day-trading days, and when I actually would touch a penny stock with a 10-foot pole occasionally (these days I buy a good dividend payer like ACAS when I can get it at, say, $31, enjoy the resulting ~13% dividend along with the capital gain potential, and get on with my life), I used to jump on ones in emails if I thought I was acting before most recipients could act, then sell to them when they did.
That no longer works. It's been my experience for years now that spamming either of these two sites or using ad space to promote a stock isn't effective. Probably because a lot of the recipients are in a position I wish I were: able to short it. The price action so far of the one most recently advertised indicates that effect is still intact.
Anyway, the quoted email did not come from us. The easiest give-away is that an organization the size of ours would have our own email address domain and servers and wouldn't use gmail, hotmail, or yahoo.
I've had the good fortune of speaking with Ze'ev a couple of times on the telephone and the brilliance and unabashed giving of himself always shown here were but a shadow of the closer reality of him I got to experience. And I'm sure what I experienced was a wisp of what he truly was in person.
He told me of a large number of his inventions, many of which I knew at the time to be things I take for granted on a daily basis, none of which I currently remember. What struck me about the way he conveyed it was that there was no bragging about it. He just was giving me information he knew I was very curious to hear. And it was also evidence of how his mind worked. Novel things were so intuitive to him that it was more like they were revealed to him than that he'd created them. Like what many say about the music of Mozart.
I'll acknowledge (and we do as a company/community/family) his passing, but for the first time with anyone, I really think I'll be able to abide by the advice so often given in eulogies. I'll celebrate his having been shared with us rather than mourn his passing.
What a gift he was!
Bob Z.
Words really do escape me right now.
The only silver lining I can possibly see is the possibility that he was out like a light without even realizing it was happening.
The missing "Discussion Board" and "Full-Text Search" links should be in production now or shortly. But we're going to discuss and address other issues found.
advfn ...(say that fast three times!)
Heck, I have trouble even TYPING it once!
I'm not expecting a solution here, because I understand I'm what is called legacy hardware and old tech. I'm just going crazy with this and just want some closure.
The way you're describing it, it would be very reasonable to expect that it's something on our end, perhaps something very esoteric and unintended, but I can't imagine what.
I used to have code in that would introduce "do-nothing" delays here and there on every page for free users so the bulk of our computing horsepower and bandwidth could be reserved for premium members, but am almost certain none of that is in place anymore and wouldn't cause what you're describing.
Our aim in the past and that I'm working very hard (not everyone shares this view) to maintain is "Make it fast on dialup and it'll scream on broadband and be easier on the machines and bandwidth" so I can assure you we're doing nothing intentional to impede the dialup experience. Quite the contrary. Not just dialup but satellite with its huge per-packet latency.