JonathanSadowski said:

Nice, but is there a way for the person submitting the issue to set the type? (Defect, feature request, etc), or the priority?

I just used another gmail account to see what you guys see, and apparently there isn't. I think it's possible for us to add your gmail username into the project members area, at which point you might be able to assign those things.

Theoretically Brian and I are supposed to review the bugs, accept them, categorize them, etc.

spinlock said:

Is this still the preferred method of suggesting features or reporting bugs?

Pougan said:

I have not added any suggestions.

I suggest that Pougan be shot.

white_wizard_ said:

PD: I'm still looking for the forum's [search] button

There is no search button. It hasn't been written yet. Right now using google to search the site is the only thing we have.

As for being notified by mail, thats probably easy to do normally, but its a little hard to know when someone "directly" replies to any posts on this forum. Since they may be responding to anyone in the entire thread. The best you can probably do without a huge headache is be notified when a particular thread gets a new post. This doesn't really fit with the nature of AJAX though, its supose to be dynamic and real-time. E-Mail is old-school snail speed - if you want to be notified of changes keep the browser open and it'll let you know.

Perhaps a little popup window when new posts are made to particular threads could do the same thing as notification of updated particular threads. Though when I hear the magical music I know I don't care what was posted, I just wana see it :)

error404 said:

As for being notified by mail, thats probably easy to do normally, but its a little hard to know when someone "directly" replies to any posts on this forum. Since they may be responding to anyone in the entire thread. The best you can probably do without a huge headache is be notified when a particular thread gets a new post. This doesn't really fit with the nature of AJAX though, its supose to be dynamic and real-time. E-Mail is old-school snail speed - if you want to be notified of changes keep the browser open and it'll let you know.

Not agree, email surely is too old compared with shiny new Ajax, but I ceirtainly wouldn't want to keep a window open all the time to see if the thread get new posts. It wastes space in my tab bar an lot of of memory sience all client heavy javascript code have to be loaded on RAM.

I'm just thinking, a nice, unbtrusive, cool Web2.0 way to say something new is posted would be a RSS feed for the thread. How could I missed that? :-p

white_wizard_ said:

Not agree, email surely is too old compared with shiny new Ajax, but I ceirtainly wouldn't want to keep a window open all the time to see if the thread get new posts. It wastes space in my tab bar an lot of of memory sience all client heavy javascript code have to be loaded on RAM.

I can guarentee you that keeping this page open in a tab wasts far, far, far less memory than any email program you keep open. Email is slower, requires additional bandwidth, can cause all kinds of configuration problems for some peoples installations depending on how the web server is setup. Then if you pick a thread thats updated a lot you may get 50 emails in your box in a few minutes-time. Some ISPs and others might think its a spamming system, then it gets added to blacklists. Then no one can get email from the system, even just for account password resets. Then the admin has to figure out what blacklist its on and try to get it removed... its a big big mess. This forum is designed to move fast, email is not. This form is to email what email is to snail mail. Its closest cousin would be instant messanging.

I keep at least 30 tabs open at all times on my system, it uses about as much RAM total as my email client. The only reason I leave that open is because it sorts my mail and delivers important ones to my cell phone automatically. If I didn't have to leave it open I wouldn't. Since firefox is always open on my machine anyways, leaving a tab open that consumes, maybe 1MB MAX is far more efficient.

error404 said:

I can guarentee you that keeping this page open in a tab wasts far, far, far less memory than any email program you keep open. Email is slower, requires additional bandwidth, can cause all kinds of configuration problems for some peoples installations depending on how the web server is setup. Then if you pick a thread thats updated a lot you may get 50 emails in your box in a few minutes-time. Some ISPs and others might think its a spamming system, then it gets added to blacklists. Then no one can get email from the system, even just for account password resets. Then the admin has to figure out what blacklist its on and try to get it removed... its a big big mess. This forum is designed to move fast, email is not. This form is to email what email is to snail mail. Its closest cousin would be instant messanging.

While I agree... are any of us pretending we don't keep our email open anyway? Thats the first thing I open in the morning and the last thing I close at night.

briantech said:

While I agree... are any of us pretending we don't keep our email open anyway? Thats the first thing I open in the morning and the last thing I close at night.

Like I said, its only open on the desktop. Despite how geeky it may sound, I have at least 4 desktop machines that I use constantly, and a laptop. I am hardly ever at the desktop with the email client on it. It sorts and de-spams my email, and important people are dumpped into another email account that the cell phone checks every 15 minutes. If your important enough to make it to my cell phone I will read your email right away and reply if needed. If you arn't then I will check my mail maybe at the end of the day. Sometimes every couple days.

So if it wasn't for the need to organize 12 email accounts down to 1 to search for important people, I wouldn't keep it open at all. I just don't find email all that useful anymore. I can bust out the cell phone or instant messanger if its time-critical. Otherwise I treat email more like snail mail now.

briantech said:

OoOoOo ... beat you to it, we actually already have that :) Its developed, just haven't put it in the releases yet cause we're still testing to make sure its got all the permissions right :)

Hey Brian ?! What's the hell ??? RSS is ready and not yet published !? lol sub-way.fr need that man ;)

JonathanSadowski said:

Control mechanism? Who said you can't make one. How about the RSS file being an actual file, instead of being generated on the fly. The script to generate it, RSS.php could simply read that file and output that, and only refresh the file if it's over 5 minutes old, for instance.

Its not processing load thats actually too high. Lets assume it was anyways, then having any PHP processing at all is still going to cause the same problem. That can only be eliminated by having them only request a direct rss feed file and have a cron job or something else that periodically refreshes that file. But thats not what the problem is, the problem is the retards that set RSS to poll every -1 seconds hoping to get the latest info. Because with RSS whatever you return is whats displayed then returning no data is interpreted 90% of the time as an actual value.

Thus what now happens is you either deal with the bandwidth of what is like someone sitting there hitting F5 over and over and having to send actual data, 24/7 regardless of if a user is there or not, its a massive waste. RSS was best designed for news feeds for example, update a couple times a day and gg your done. What I meant by control was a way to send a response code (hell one of the unused HTTP codes) to any reader that says: hey buddy, too frequent updating. Then you could easily just prevent clients from updating more than 15 minutes or so. It would help for cases like this, where RSS is effectivly useless.

guilamu said:

Just an idea : I though that the rss feed would only gave the new thread titles (and, maybe refresh the number of reply). After, the man should come on the website to see the whole thread. Refresh made every 5 mins, it would only makes a few bytes to download.

The processing to find only new threads is where the problem lies. Like I said - limit it to the 25 most recent postings and its good for its intended purpose. 5 minute refresh is what I said as an absolute minimum, but in reality it shouldn't be that often. RSS was designed for maybe an hour refresh, 15 minutes is starting to be overkill on the server.

guilamu said:

In fact, I've always though that rss was not a way to give the whole content to the user but just to give a small peice of the thing so he comes to the source and see the whole stuff.

That is a potential use for it, but not in the way you want it to be used. It isn't for users to look at forums, its for news source aggregration more or less. Grab the story, and only the story, minus all the extra page data and you have saved bandwidth over all. Have the user refresh every 30 seconds and you loose much more bandwidth overall.

Another thing to keep in mind is RSS contains a whole bunch of additional formatting and bloat. So while all you send is the thread titles, its probably still several kilobytes of overhead just for formatting.

5 minute refresh of 400 people 24 hours a day at 1k per transfer is:

24 hours * 60 minute = 1440 minutes a day
1440 minutes / 5 minutes per refresh = 288 refreshes per day
288 refreshes per day * 400 people = 115200 transfers per day
115200 transfers * 1K per transfer = 115200 K per day
115200 K = 112.5 MB per day
112.5 MB * 30 days per month = 3375 MB/month = 3.3GB/month wasted bandwidth for what was probably 90% useless data to most of those 400 people.
86400 seconds a day * 30 days a month = 2592000 seconds a month.
3375MB / 2592000 seconds = 1.333 K/s constant bandwidth if it gets spread over the whole month.

Make it 10K and 800 people and your in for some serious numbers: 66GB/month and 26.666K/s constant bandwidth if its spread over the whole month, thats taking away from the total avaliable bandwidth at any given moment. Its usually in burst so its not that bad, but still it brings the numbers more into focus to see how even spreading the load out that much is still a big number.

Also note its 115200 database queries per day for 400 users at 5 minute refresh. There are 86400 seconds in a day, therefor at that load the database is expected to process 1.3333 queries per second, forever. Apache is likewise expected to be running at least 1.333 clients per second. At 800 people this goes to 2.666.

RSS can be good. RSS can also be very very bad when done wrong. Think before you leap :)

briantech said:

That is actually how we do it. I still don't get why people would want to read a forum through an RSS reader.

briantech said:

If that was the best way to do it, forums/blogs wouldn't need any interfaces besides their rss feed.

It's not exactly people wanting to read the content thru an RSS reader -- at least not in my case. It's knowing if there is content to read, and then clicking the link, and reading the content on the actual page.

For forums, it might not make sense, I mean it's something that updated so frequently that you pretty much have to goto the site to see if there have been updates anyways, but for blogs, it makes perfect sense. Ideally, a blog's RSS feed doesn't contain the entire story, only a summary. RSS feeds are kinda like advertisement "we updated this, here's a summary, come see", and that's how they should behave properly engineered (with some exceptions for TRUE syndication of content).

error404 said:

So email is too easy to abuse and is too slow also why would you keep email open if its not something your "working on at a particular moment"? How could that be less obtrusive than a tab in FF?

Various email notification systems stands quietly on my system tray and let me know when some mail has arrived to my inbox. Those systems are already tested, and there are lots to choose from. Besides, mail filters could be aplied too if that would be the tool.
On the other hand, a paid system could be an option, pheraps like a *premium feature*. But I think we could come up with a better idea for that split point without involving PayPal this early, don't u think? :-)
briantech said:

Personally though, I think: RSS is a bad idea, or at least, its not a good enough idea to warrant putting it in, considering the possible drawbags. Email notification is a good idea, but just make it so it only emails you once when there's new activity, instead of on every post. Or, email you when people quote you, the first time. Something like that could work well.

That's what I meant with the [event] that triggers the notification (email, rss or whatever). If there are few people on a thread, you could notify them all. If traffic incrases, you (as admin) could apply some rules to trim down the flow of outgoing data. So you don't have to mail 2500 people every five minutes.

That way, and this is just a thought, you could increase people interest when a thread is just starting, wich is ussually slow. And when the subject is picking up speed with more participants and opinions, there will be no need to send that much of alerts because people will be willing to check the forum themselves more often sience is a hot subject. IMHO :-l

PD: isn't there around a spell checker? My dear God, my english sucks sometimes <:-p

guilamu said:
I mean if you post a mesage in a sticky thread nothing happens in realtime for anyone who is on the main page. You need to press F5 to see that there is a new message.

yes, i know.

when someone says "what you say!" they aren't actually asking a question.

somebody set up us the bomb, etc

Pougan said:
Hooray! It works with IE7 again!

Not that its terribly important that anything on the web work in IE. If every web developer simultaneously dropped all support for IE I bet everyone would switch to something else. And all would be good in the world of the web.

Pougan said:
I just submitted an IE 7 bug!

I've submitted at least 10.

The first major one I submitted was: "Load a web page, any web page. Notice carefully on the page where the CSS rules are. THEY DONT WORK RIGHT!"