stet/keith question or whoever is in charge of code these days

The 'numbers written as words' thing is making me feel like Laura Linney's co-worker in You Can Count On Me post-Broderick.

Let's poll this amirite

stet, is there any programming magic you can do to fix all these shit opinions?

Marge Simpson: Look at this place. The house number is spelled out with letters.

Max Power: Get used to it, honey. From now on we'll be spelling everything with letters.

I love server restarts because it means blog view will work for at least a few days before wandering off again.

I pointed out the flaw in Keith and stet allowing posting functionality many years ago in a classic post in a classic suggest ban thread

Yeah, I've always found the presence of that stupid 'Submit Post' button bothersome.

why would anyone prefer words to numbers in this case? it's horrible imo. "27" can be digested much quicker than "twenty-seven"

whoa, YouTube videos are embedded now! (even if images are turned off!) took me by surprise

i think i like it, actually

My god the digestion

I like the words, but think it probably should be a style option.

Youtube embeds on images off is definitely a mistake (why would you be okay w/ youtubes if you're not okay with images?) but I see stet is aware of the issue.

The numbers as words thing just means that the message signature is even more often longer than the message, especially when reading on my phone because it's narrow.

The message 3 above this one is one line of text, 3 lines of metadata

can any value above forty be expressed in scores, please?

have we ever discussed moving the board over to discourse.org

i kid i kid

Is this update available in the US? to all? Is it an artifact of the maintenance?

I is on 3.0.

But I see nothing I know nothing.

You mean the Zing update? That is still waiting on Apple

I put this in another thread, but stet/keith or whoever is in charge of code these days is more likely to notice it here:

After yesterday's maintenance I find I must log in to ILX every time I start my browser afresh. I allow cookies from ilxor.com and I check the Remember Me box each time I log in. Doesn't seem to make any difference. (I'm using IE11 on Win7. All upgrades installed afaik.)

wassup wit dat?

Are the cookies definitely being saved? Not sure how you view them on IE, sorry

If the cookie format was not changed, I'm not sure why my previously stored cookies from before the maintenance would not have been recognized afterward. It might help if I could wipe all ilxor.com cookies and let the system start over with them, but I do not know that particular trick. Also, my login email address (& domain) no longer exist, and I don't know if System wants to see a valid address or not.

Worst case: I guess I could switch to Firefox or something.

Oh yes, nuked. I'll see if I can rehabilitate it if you use it a lot.

― stet, Thursday, August 25, 2016 6:41 AM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Actually, I probably won't. Google are punishing us for not having a mobile-friendly main site, so fixing that is probably the best solution of all

― stet, Thursday, August 25, 2016 6:42 AM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Fair enough. I've been using it since 2009 or something though, but I've never seen any indication that other people access the site in this way. It's also been my secret fix to view images when logged in as a mod on my pc though.

Lol. Of 18 posts mentioning Mobile Device Interface since keith rolled it out in 2008, 13 of them were by me.

also i just noticed: i have images off; this used to mean youtube embeds were also turned into links, but this no longer seems to be the case

― esempiu (crüt), Wednesday, August 24, 2016 9:41 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, I messed up the filter for those; will fix that but not tonight

― stet, Wednesday, August 24, 2016 9:42 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Just noticed this, glad it's on the radar

should be fixed, let me know if not

is it just me or are the open circles not working anymore?

wait nvm maybe they're there

They'll have been reset with lsat night's deploy, that might have confused things

ah yes thanks

Please remind what open circle means again

the bullet point next to thread titles is "open" if there are new answers since you read the thread last

is search slow/malfunctioning sometimes for anyone else

I can't get bookmark to work on the latest presidential election thread. May or may not be a bad thing.

What happens when you try?

Search: aha! Were you running a search just about the time you posted that? I got some alarms firing on the server at that time; need to check that out more.

I see Message Bookmarked, but the thread doesn't apear in my bookmarks list or at the top of the page when it has new messages. Bookmarks on other threads work fine.

I got some alarms firing on the server at that time; need to check that out more.

Imagining you in a bunker with red flashing bulbs.

is search slow/malfunctioning sometimes for anyone else

Yes, but only certain searches. I think post searches have been markedly quicker than thread searches (which sometimes take like a full minute to run).

What happens when you try?

Search: aha! Were you running a search just about the time you posted that? I got some alarms firing on the server at that time; need to check that out more.

― stet, Wednesday, September 14, 2016 5:44 AM (five hours ago)

i was! it's been going on since the reboot, though. as old lunch says, the search seems to have a mind of its own about when it will work and when it won't

Can you remember exactly what you were searching for? Email me if you like - stet @ ilxor

Odd - thread searches should be markedly quicker than post searches!

If it's a problem, we might need to just rebuild the search index from scratch.

i get slow searches sometimes too

i mentioned it to stet the first time

it happens every so often but i'll post when it does

Can you remember exactly what you were searching for? Email me if you like - stet @ ilxor

― stet, Wednesday, September 14, 2016 1:21 PM (twenty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i was searching for the 2015 end of year tracks poll. I think I searched "ilm 2015", "ilm 2015 tracks", "ilm tracks" etc and selected "most recent first" -- each time the search would come up but as I clicked through and approached the matching threads from january clicking "next" wouldn't work. for some of the searches this was on the third page, for another it was the fourth, another the second...it was bizarre, almost like the search knew what thread I wanted to find and didn't want me to see it

I keep searching for "; drop table users;" and it doesn't work!!

ha

sorry, I really tried not to type that

it was quicker than trying to roll together a joke about apache commons problems with deserialization

Haha (injection thing).

(Yes, they're not going to work)

It's possible that what's happening is a function of how it works and housekeeping...

The way it works is that I run a big job at the beginning that scans all the threads and posts and creates two index files for the search: one for threads, one for posts. The threads one is miles smaller; hence, why it should be faster. With hindsight, I wouldn't even have bothered with the threads one, as subsequent to developing the search, I decided it was useful to just hold the whole list of threads in memory at all times anyway for fast access.

Anyway, that's cool for startup, but the way it keeps the index up-to-date with changes since the initial build is that a batch job runs every five minutes, scans the database for new or changes to threads and posts and updates the index.

I'd have thought that ultimately, this would fragment the index file and make it slow and I for one certainly haven't recreated the index file for at least five years, which would be half a million updates to the index files at least! So guessing somewhat here, but if Stet hasn't recreated the index file since I last did, which I might doubt, as I don't think we ever talked about what that thing did before, then it's possible that's what's going on and all we need to do is stop the site, recreate the index file and start it again.