What you did to me was unbelievable, Connor. But then I got stuck in a hell dimension by my girlfriend one time for a hundred years, so three months under the ocean actually gave me perspective. Kind of a M.C. Escher perspective, but I did get time to think.

Angel ,'Conviction (1)'


Buffistas Building a Better Board  

Do you have problems, concerns or recommendations about the technical side of the Phoenix? Air them here. Compliments also welcome.

To-do list


§ ita § - Jan 02, 2003 2:27:43 pm PST #2562 of 10000
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.

Is it possible that there's no lower limit to the randomization?

Thing is, I think there's only been two different amounts of quotes. Of course, we can't pinpoint the date of stickiness, but I lean towards maybe a MySQL upgrade that changed an algorithm that's peeing in our ointment.


Rob - Jan 02, 2003 2:31:38 pm PST #2563 of 10000

One approach that would help work around the problem is to keep a list of all the quote numbers, and when serving up a random one, remove it. When the list is empty, refill it from original list. That way, each quote only gets served up once per cycle.

A similar approach might be to create a table of the quote indexes repeated one thousand times and just march through it. That will look random to any single viewer.

Or, you know, live with it as it is.


Rebecca Lizard - Jan 02, 2003 2:48:14 pm PST #2564 of 10000
You sip / say it's your crazy / straw say it's you're crazy / as you bicycle your soul / with beauty in your basket

Would it be possible to, when a post has been bookmarked, where it says MARKED, have a little link right there that would allow you to un-mark it without going to your "view bookmarks" page?


jengod - Jan 02, 2003 6:25:32 pm PST #2565 of 10000

Someone I know is looking for the name of a good webhost. We use HostRocket? We like HostRocket?

~j


DXMachina - Jan 02, 2003 6:33:40 pm PST #2566 of 10000
You always do this. We get tipsy, and you take advantage of my love of the scientific method.

We use HostRocket. We've had far less downtime than WX, or TT, for that matter.


Jon B. - Jan 02, 2003 8:58:56 pm PST #2567 of 10000
A turkey in every toilet -- only in America!

I've made another change to his ID in the database -- I don't have the code to hand, but it should make a difference and log him out.

So what happened earlier when we weren't able to stop Michael from posting? I'm really uncomfortable with the idea that only ita can "instantly" deactivate someone. 'Cause, what if she's not around? Can we put a high priority on fixing the problem?

And these questions are really directed at ita, because she coded it, so I probably shouldn't refer to her in the third person...

t edit Would it work to have a button on the edituser page that logged out a specific user?


John H - Jan 02, 2003 9:03:11 pm PST #2568 of 10000

We use HostRocket. We've had far less downtime than WX, or TT, for that matter.

Just to note, the "downtime" on WX and TT were failures of the software and/or database back end of the sites.

That has never happened here, except for, literally a second or two during which ita was uploading a new version of an essential file.

What we have had here, although it hasn't been for a while, touch wood, is communication outages, in which our server was not connected to the internet for some reason.

That, conversely, never happened on WX/TT to my knowledge.

I can't remember if we had those outages explained -- were they Hostrocket's fault or was there some backbone/pipe/major issue?


§ ita § - Jan 02, 2003 9:21:59 pm PST #2569 of 10000
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.

Jon, I can't instantly deactivate a poster. The tweak I tried didn't work.

That's going to have to be a modification.

John -- I know I've been unable to get to pre-Phoenix Buffistas at least once because of a connectivity issue on their end. Which I was sure of because it turned out another discussion board I frequented was hosted by the same people.

To be honest, I haven't paid much attention.

For personal use, I'd say Hostrocket is just fine. For an application like this which gets almost 24/7 use, you want to do what you consider reasonable in the way of increasing redundant hardware and connectivity, which takes you out of most standard hosting packages.


Jon B. - Jan 02, 2003 9:28:20 pm PST #2570 of 10000
A turkey in every toilet -- only in America!

That's going to have to be a modification.

Does my idea of having a "logout" button on the edituser page make sense?


§ ita § - Jan 02, 2003 9:29:17 pm PST #2571 of 10000
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.

It should be unnecessary. Deactivating should log out the user. I just have to work out how to end someone else's session from the server side.