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ScottRSullivan Special user 874 Posts |
It's been asked before, yes, but nothing has appeared.
My question is when will the Café step into the 21st century and add RSS feeds like the more modern sites? |
TheAmbitiousCard Eternal Order Northern California 13425 Posts |
What does that actually do for us Scott? I don't fully understand that techology.
www.theambitiouscard.com Hand Crafted Magic
Trophy Husband, Father of the Year Candidate, Chippendale's Dancer applicant, Unofficial World Record Holder. |
ScottRSullivan Special user 874 Posts |
Allows us to keep upon various threads easier. Also allows us to "subscribe" to threads and be instantly notified of new posts/threads.
It's an old tech (maybe ten or so years old?) that is a standard. In fact most blogs, forums, and news sites have them built in by default. |
Marshall Thornside Inner circle chicago 2016 Posts |
YES!
I keep up the genii much easier thru my netvibes with thier RSS feeds. I think I've brought it up here once before
you will remember my name
World's Youngest Illusionista 7th greatest pianist in the world Go Red For Women and Stroke Ambassador www.mai-ling.net |
ScottRSullivan Special user 874 Posts |
It gets brought up often, but I've always been given the "oh it's too hard" line from Steve.
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Dave V Inner circle Las Vegas, NV 4824 Posts |
Steve wrote about it once before. Maybe you can find his original response here somewhere.
Once you understand how the Café was built you may know why it's hard to change. Think of it as a "historic" building that can't be gutted and rebuilt to bring it up to current building code. It is what it is, and short of destroying it and starting over, new features will be few and far between. If I recall, Gene was one of the original programmers for phpBB but he didn't stop there. Basically this site started with that core system, and since then has had virtually every section of it rewritten by our resident expert Gene. Because of that, code modifications that are commonplace on other sites don't behave the same on this one. Sure, newer scripted sites have different features, but they're difficult bordering on impossible to get new "tweaks" to work with the existing code structure here. If they had a full time staff of programmers, maybe but they only have the one and I think he's done a great job holding this place together.
No trees were killed in the making of this message, but a large number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.
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Marshall Thornside Inner circle chicago 2016 Posts |
I thought in most cases when you upgrade or change
over your can build the original CVS into the new one. or was this forum built from scratch?
you will remember my name
World's Youngest Illusionista 7th greatest pianist in the world Go Red For Women and Stroke Ambassador www.mai-ling.net |
Dave V Inner circle Las Vegas, NV 4824 Posts |
Very nearly scratch from what I've heard.
No trees were killed in the making of this message, but a large number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.
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Gene Café Forum Developer Howard City, MI 276 Posts |
As far as RSS feeds are concerned, I'm doing some research on that, as well as other things (topic subscriptions, etc.). However, my time here is pretty limited, so it's not going to happen right away.
As for the forums here, 98% of it was written by yours truly. There are many custom-built features here (some that can't be seen by the general membership) that just don't exist - at least by default - in other forum software packages, and this one has been optimized to use the least amount of database queries and server overhead per page request. (Don't even get me started on the search engine - that's been a nightmare due to member demands.) There is still much to do code-wise to further lessen server load, but time just doesn't allow it unfortunately. We once took the database used here and converted it over for use with phpBB V2, and the results weren't very good. We used the same database this site uses and tested it with the main site running on the same database so we could get a real-world look at it. In our comparitive side-by-side tests, page generation times were up to four times as long with phpBB V2, and database queries doubled. At the time the entire database was about 1.5GB in size, it's almost 4GB now. (Wow!) Please don't get me wrong, I like phpBB and was a moderator on their forums and one of the more noted "hackers" prior to V2's release. I have a lot of repect for them, but the needs here just didn't allow us to use their current software. If we had the resources to use more than one server we could use other ready-made software and spread out the load (i.e., apache on one server, database on another, search functions on a third), but we just don't have it. With only one server and a site as large as this - especially with all the added features and full search functions plus the topic-style PM system - everything has to be optimized to within an inch of its life or this place will simply not function at all. My priority for the last 5+ years has been keeping this board up and running. Many of the "old-timers" here can probably recall some of the difficulties we've had in the past, including numerous search engine rewrites, moving servers, and even a full server crash. I'm not a magician, but nevertheless this place has been an adventure for me for almost ten years now.
Somebody kick me off the computer, will ya?
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Marshall Thornside Inner circle chicago 2016 Posts |
Gene you may not be a magician but your a genii since
you've built 98.999999% of this forum. to bad you can't xml current topics to a feed. I'm not sure how to do it from code but if anyone can I'm sure you can. :thumbsup:
you will remember my name
World's Youngest Illusionista 7th greatest pianist in the world Go Red For Women and Stroke Ambassador www.mai-ling.net |
hoodrat Veteran user Southern California 388 Posts |
Quote:
On 2010-04-21 12:29, Gene wrote: Hey, Gene! I'm surprised that you haven't ever gotten the least bit interested in magic by having to deal with this massive website on a continual basis. Keep up the good work, though, with the Café! |
ScottRSullivan Special user 874 Posts |
Why not do any caching to create static pages for posts that have been inactive for more than 24 hours or something similar? That will kill a ton of queries.
Heck, even breaking the database into two would help. One archive of 2009 and earlier and one for just this year. This new, smaller one would be much leaner and return queries faster. The larger one for the archive would run a tad bit slower but would be called on much less. And this would benefit the majority of readers who are just reading posts from the last few days. Gene, I'm a coder myself (Objective-C now and even FORTRAN back in the day) and I respect what you've done, my hat is well tipped to you. However, look at what Apple was able to do by ditching backwards compatibility and writing a new OS from scratch. Perhaps it might be time to trade in the Model T for a Prius and get much better mileage for the buck. My bet is it would be a rough transition, but more cost-effective in the long run. This, of course being said unknowing what you do have under the hood. Just my educated guess in making something run more efficient. Again, my hats off to you for maintaining this 4 gig monster. |
Gene Café Forum Developer Howard City, MI 276 Posts |
I appreciate that Scott. We already know that overhead with other software isn't good, and we're even running a quad-processor server with 4GB ram. Writing a new board with the same kind of stingy coding is something I'd love to do, I just don't have the time at present. Let's just say I'm devoting my time more to "not free" stuff, and that's not going all that well either. I really wish I could just take a year off and do nothing but code, you know? Something like this is extremely involved and would take a great deal of time to completely rewrite. Not that I'm trying to re-invent the wheel or anything, but unless things change drastically - and permanently - as far as resources go, we can only do what we're doing now. It kinda stinks, but we only have ace high. A full house would be wonderful!
EDIT: We did break up the forum into smaller pieces (archives) before, but it wasn't well received by the membership. Rather the opposite. We had complaints because people couldn't search all the posts at the same time, etc. It was ugly, to say the least. We've tried a lot of things - some worked and some didn't. The ones that worked are still here. The ones that didn't, well, they're now just part of Café lore - and my memory.
Somebody kick me off the computer, will ya?
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DWRackley Inner circle Chattanooga, TN 1909 Posts |
Hey, Gene. Just a pat on the back for the job you’re doing here. I started coding in 1973 with ForTran, COBOL, and Assembler, and I remember when tight code was appreciated (actually it was mandatory), so I recognize that you’re in the minority. It’s not so easy as just throwing in extra memory to run already glutted programs.
Having access to the timeless jewels stored here is far more important than any largely superfluous bells and whistles. Keep up the good work!
...what if I could read your mind?
Chattanooga's Premier Mentalist Donatelli and Company at ChattanoogaPerformers.com also on FaceBook |
TheAmbitiousCard Eternal Order Northern California 13425 Posts |
How exactly do you "follow" an RSS feed?
www.theambitiouscard.com Hand Crafted Magic
Trophy Husband, Father of the Year Candidate, Chippendale's Dancer applicant, Unofficial World Record Holder. |
ScottRSullivan Special user 874 Posts |
You can do it right in a browser, but there are a ton of both free and paid-for apps that allow you to follow feeds.
A popular free one is Google Reader. |
Doctor Xombie Regular user FL (formerly Planet X) 109 Posts |
Special thanx to Gene for your very informative posts and letting us know the technical reasons behind the current state of the forum.
It' good to know things have at least been worked on and tested. |
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