Illyria: We cling to what is gone. Is there anything in this life but grief? Wesley: There's love. There's hope...for some. There's hope that you'll find something worthy...that your life will lead you to some joy...that after everything...you can still be surprised. Illyria: Is that enough? Is that enough to live on?

'Shells'


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


John H - Mar 02, 2003 1:59:20 pm PST #3314 of 10000

Did CVS get crossed out because it's set up?

Am I listed as a wannabe Developer? Is there a mailing list?


§ ita § - Mar 02, 2003 2:08:27 pm PST #3315 of 10000
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.

Dare you to touch me ...

John, there is a mailing list, you are on it, it's inactive.

We're waiting for Karl to have enough free time for a CVS setup. But really, we don't need to. The top of the list is here: Am-Chau Yarkona "Buffistas Building a Better Board" Jan 31, 2003 10:59:28 am EST

Am-Chau, can you post the whole thing when you come by?

Some of these we need to hash out specs for -- my thinking, for example is that the search function should:

  • show no more than 20/page
  • show the thread name if invoked from a thread page
  • default to the smallest scope
  • allow sorting by date or by thread
  • list the thread from which each result comes

MARCIE also needs to be specced.


John H - Mar 02, 2003 2:17:28 pm PST #3316 of 10000

About the search, how does it work exactly -- not in detail, but when you feed it a search query, how does it rank the answers? If I search for "porn", in other words, how does it assign a value of greater or lesser "porn"-iness to each record found?

I must admit, I'm still a little confused about what exactly went wrong to get the board taken offline last time.

We were over bandwidth limits, and we were over storage limits? And which one does the search impact on?


John H - Mar 02, 2003 2:17:57 pm PST #3317 of 10000

there is a mailing list, you are on it, it's inactive

Forgot to say, thanks.


§ ita § - Mar 02, 2003 2:22:55 pm PST #3318 of 10000
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.

We were over bandwidth limits, and we were over storage limits? And which one does the search impact on?

No, and yes, but neither is why the site got shut down. It was server load -- full text searches were being done, the posts database is HUGE, and the server restarted. This corrupted the posts table, and subsequent attempts to fix it crashed the server again. So I had to download it, fix it locally, and get them to upload it back.

So search has to be pared down, and the posts database needs to be pruned (which should be added to the list).


John H - Mar 02, 2003 2:28:27 pm PST #3319 of 10000

From the thing ita linked to:

For every row in the table, MATCH() returns a relevance value, that is, a similarity measure between the search string and the text in that row in the columns named in the MATCH() list.

which neatly answers my question.

So essentially the problem is that when you have a very large database with FULLTEXT turned on, then searches of it make the db server unstable? Scary. Also very annoying.

But we did upgrade our storage though, right? We moved to a different hosting plan?


§ ita § - Mar 02, 2003 2:31:15 pm PST #3320 of 10000
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.

is that when you have a very large database with FULLTEXT turned on, then searches of it make the db server unstable?

My suspicion is that the servers are badly sized, but I don't suspect much within our price range will be much better. Because the table isn't that large when you consider discussion boards, and MySQL is a decent application.

We have upgraded our storage, yes.

And if we don't go fulltext, LIKE searches will bring the servers further to its knees. Fulltext maintains a separate specialised index, so it's space intensive, but easier on the CPU.


Connie Neil - Mar 02, 2003 3:18:30 pm PST #3321 of 10000
brillig

Where does "label bookmarks" come on the list of things we'd really like to do?


Karl - Mar 02, 2003 4:02:05 pm PST #3322 of 10000
I adore all you motherfuckers so much -- PMM.

We're waiting for Karl to have enough free time for a CVS setup.

Aw, crap. I've been waiting for the list of developers. I hate it when this happens.

ita, hit me. Profile addy's good.


John H - Mar 02, 2003 4:03:25 pm PST #3323 of 10000

And, did my suggestion that the

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section get TITLE attributes added get noted somewhere?