Preserved Topic: Oops. (Page 1 of 2)

OK, for those of you who may have noticed, and for those of you have not, the Asylum was down for ... ahem, unscheduled maintainance for about 4 hours today. I made a simple, silly little change to the primary CGI that runs this thing, and then my FTP connection to dreamhost froze, in the middle of uploading it. It took a couple of hours for things to get back to normal, FTP-wise, but by that time I'd already attempted to upload the file about 50 times, and managed to "fix" it some more, thinking one of my changes changed something else. The last hour was spent figuring out that once I deleted the bad file and re-uploaded, I need to make the darn thing executable again! D'oh! OK, fixed now. Wired, jazzed on adrenalin I am. Spent $250 for the upgrade to UBB6 which I don't really need right now. Life is back on a normal track for me! So, how're *you* doing, eh? =)

Your pal, -doc-

Just fine, thanks Doc! I didn't even notice the downage!

Saw Rush Hour 2 tonight, pretty good flick. There is a new actress (I know she's not new, just new to me) named Roselyn Sanchez in it, oh my lord this woman is amazing.

Anyway, thanks for all the work you put into this place Doc!

ah.... ahhhhh.... it feels so good.....

I was afraid the gremlins got out again and started playing with your server...

happy am i! to see all is well.

PHEWW!!! i'm so glad its back, the thought of a whole night without the asylum *shudder*

good work doc!

edit: *cough* um doc? could we not upgrade to UBB 6 ? it kinda sucks



[This message has been edited by Maruman (edited 08-16-2001).]

Hey krets, you should check out the latest issue of Stuff magazine. Has a nice article on Sanchez.

I am doing well now, thanks Doc.
But dood you can't do that to me I love this place to much, haha.
-YoYoFREAK

Yah Maruman, I kind of agree about UBB6, it's got the creeping featuritus, too much stuff, I'd be working for hours stripping it all out of there! YoYo, the sig is *perfect*, that was just kind of what I was imagining you'd do with it, looks good. My frigging god, it's 5:30am, and we have guests coming this afternoon, I need to go sleep! Take care all, back soon, glad we survived this all!

Your pal, -doc-

Well that worked out perfectly for me, I slept for about 4 1/2 hours last night and before I went to sleep the asylum was still up.

I haven't really looked into ubb6...can it really be worth $250?

Thanks as always Doc...

Whew. I was worried that the Asylum was down because I was playing with the server. Glad to hear I wasn't the cause this time.

Jay

Christ it scared me. I was editing my .htaccess file, and it was throwing error 500 at me. Then I try to respond to a post here, about the same topic and I get an error 500. It scared the shit out of me, I thought I did it to the asylum by messing with my files...

Course I know better, but damn freaky none the less.

Doc thanks a ton for getting the site back online!

sounds like you munching on too many of those magical mushroom warmage :P

This is a good week for this to happen since I can only get to a internet capable computer for a couple hours in the evenings. Thanks again Doc for keeping this place as cool as it is

Sleep tight Doc!

Thanx for getting us back online

Doc, you really shouldn't have spent all that money on shitty UBB, heh... vBulletin is much cheaper than that ($160 for "Owned License" type), and not to mention free WBB that will very soon evolve to WBulletin and kick the crap out of other forums.

I'm sure what he meant to say was...

"Thanks Doc for all the money and time you put into this wonderful site."

Max's English isn't so good sometimes.

Krets, that goes without saying. Doc is the best, without his support there would be no Asylum...

BTW1 Didn't you notice the slimey in my previous post?

BTW2 I was trying to save Doc some money...



[This message has been edited by mr.maX (edited 08-16-2001).]

I heard that UBB costs $199 right now, its a special offer or something...

Oh.. I didn't notice that. I was sleeping.. I got a pain on my back.. but that sure will go very soon..

Thanks for the upgrade Doc.





R I . C . K

Well, what I felt I was buying Infopop was not the scripts for UBB6, but instead the lifetime licence to keep using *this* set of scripts! When I first built this place, all that was available was the 1 year licence deal, but now thye offer the lifetime gig, so now I'm legal again. (The last licence appears to have expired, perhaps sometime around our 1 year birthday? ) Ah well, it's up and running, we're legal, I just wish I didn't have *such* a headache!

Your pal, -doc-

I'll have to agree on the 'not upgrading' bit.

and for the record, thanks Doc
was down before I went to bed, and I was afraid I'd come down this morning and it still would be

I am pretty lost here...What is wrong with UBB6? Is it too much to administrate or just a big waste of functionality? I went over to the infopop site and got this list of new features:

Private messaging
Email Options - output HTML or text
Member ratings
Customizable registration tool
Member-only access
Customized style template tool
Wordlets? - easy language translation
New caching system reduces server load

What sucks about that? Am I missing something? What the hell is a Wordlet?

Pretty good deal with the lifetime license I would say, but I am sure they will find something else to charge for.

Yeah, I am with Prospero, whats the problem, ah well atleast this board is legal for a 'lifetime' Its better than nothing, right!?


[This message has been edited by CryoniX (edited 08-16-2001).]

yeah but who needs that shit, it just makes the forum run slower with all these features no one ever uses.

-Private messaging (thats what ICQ and AIM are for)
-Email Options - output HTML or text(outlook express or what ever email client your running)
-Member ratings (leads to more conflict between members)
-Customizable registration tool (umm pointless)
-Member-only access (why? )
-Customized style template tool (who needs it)
-Wordlets? - easy language translation( bah!)
-New caching system reduces server load ( ok maybe this is good if it works)


just my opinion lol!

Asylum???
heeeeeeeemmmmm
Which Asylum?
Ahhhh!!!
The asylum!!!!

Ok, i didn't noticed!!


Edit:> Doc, we should make a world wide bank account, so we all pay the Asylum needs! as we all use it!!
;p

[This message has been edited by Wakkos (edited 08-16-2001).]

I'm not sure how well this suggestion will go down but given the talent available here I've always thought it was a bit odd that the message boards didn't run on an inmate-developed board (PHP/mySQL). That way we could avoid such feature laden upgrades (after a while there can't be many extra bells and whistles that can be added which aid functionality) and introduce things like threaded discussions (such things seemed to have disappeared with the explosion of UBB-clone boards). It shouldn't be too much trouble to rip up an already exisitng one (neoboard [at: neoboard.org or net] is one of the few offering threaded dicussions for example) and introduce some inmate-friendly padded walls, remove the door knobs from the insides of the doors, automate pill dispensing, sort out the room numbering etc.

Just a thought.

Emps

Prospero, the main reason that I have against UBB is that it still uses flat files to store data!? Accessing flat files (especially if they are large) is extremely slow, and therefore searching takes ages. It would be much better if it used SQL backend. Also, the coding style of UBB developers is extremely ugly (not to mention that it doesn't even follow PERL strict guidelines). And last, but not least running PERL scripts is slow (since PERL interpreter has to be called each time), and mod_perl should be used to speed thing up, but UBB doesn't use it.

Emperor, IMO the best forum software that has support for threaded messages is mwForum, and I use it. But, I've noticed that most people don't really understand threading concept and post replies everywhere...

ZZZzzzzzzzzzz

I for one do not like threaded forums.

The ones I've been visiting has demanded a bunch of clicks to let me read the complete discussion.

I prefer the UBB-style of presentation. Sure, a topic may take a while to load, but then you have all the relevant info, without having to click through threads and loading snippets of information.

I just use my brain to sort out the discussions if they stray off topic (glad that never happens here )

I my HW-pals ever get my new DNS and account up, I'll start fiddling with a BB of my own (dont know which yet). But you can bet it's going to be non-threaded

Mr Max: I am suprised that you've found people don't seem to understand threads although looking at the mwforum it could get a little tricky with multiple sub-threads.

Here's the direct link to the website anyway:
http://www.neoqst.com/public/neoboard/neoboard.html

I don't like the look too much (a few style sheets should sort that out) but break out of the frames and view the demo at:
http://www.neoqst.com/public/neoboard/neoboard_demo.html

I think that threading is handled well here and it has a good balance of features.

Anyway it was just an idea - I suspect the simplest thing with using a well respected notice board is so we don't spend forever arguing over all whether we want threds or not or if we want fireworks on our birthdays.

Emps

I remember doing a lot of worry and thinking about this way back when, threaded, or non-threaded? I grew up with USENET, so threaded boards made sense to me, but I became totally enthralled with the dialog that is possible with this style of board. Too many threaded boards lead me down into a mess of twisty sub-threads and digressions, only to find that that's not where I really wanted to be! Then it's click-click-click or back-back-back (back-back) to get to a point of reference I'm familiar with, repeat as necessary.

I did pay for the new board, probably the main reason I'd stick with a UBB board now is the fact that we have so much content wrapped up in those flat files. I imgine we could create some sort of export tool for dumpingh it all into a database, it's just pipe delimited with a CR at the end of each entry, should translate well, I'd guess. I'm going to take the new UBB6 and run it off of www.DocOzone.com - my home machine (running Apache, PHP and Perl), and if it looks and works good, I'll swap it over. Max, I may as well try another of the threaed boards at the same time, which one would you recommend I start with?

Your pal, -doc-

I prefer a non-threaded board, for just the reasons the Doc mentioned. I hate having to navigate my way through a thread. I'd rather just scroll down the whole thing.

My two cents, nothing more, nothing less...

(Edit: Ah, just wanted to clarify. I like this forum just the way it is.)



[This message has been edited by Wangenstein (edited 08-16-2001).]

Emperor, I've realized that average people are either stupid or don't want to learn.

Doc, I like (and use) mwForum very much.

Yeah, I got you Max. I never thought UBB was as efficient as it could be, but it gets the job done I guess.

At the same time, that sure would be one huge pain in the ass to pump all those text files into a db.

I personally like multi-threaded boards also. The only reason why I would not recommend them in most cases is because of those people that Max just mentioned.

They should make some sort of a *combination* of the two... like, it's linear like UBB, but if you want you can reply to an older post in the thread and sort of split it off at that point into two threads with different topics. And it could all be DHTML driven so you could load the entire thread at once, and whenever it split off, just choose which way you wanted to go and it would quickly appear below what's already displayed.

Wow, that might be pretty cool.

If my two cents are worth much in this topic, I'd like to offer them. I like this style of message navigation rather than the back-and-forth, threaded style. But, the one thing that I'd love to see is some visual clue to which post in the list I last read. It's a little difficult sometimes, especially in long topics, to tell where I left off. Maybe just a dot next to the post like in the forum list.

But, I can imagine that's probably a whole lot more trouble than it's worth.

Just wanted to say Thanks to the Doc and all the rest of the you who do all the work to make this all happen. As a newbie I have been lurking for a while and learning a lot from all of you! It took a while to get the courage to come in and speak up, but now I'm even working on my first sig...Thanks again!

quote:

---

Doc sez:
I may as well try another of the threaed boards at the same time, which one would you recommend I start with?

---

I know the question was directed at Max but I had seen a Vbulletin board awhile back that might add an interesting twist to the Asylum.

I always thought the whole "Black Pills" concept would be great if we could implement it and when I saw a board that awarded members "Karma" under their names I figured it might be something that could be used at the Asylum. I thought that instead of being able to give someone "Karma" it would be cool to be able to give people "Black pills" for their posts. The website I saw it was overgrow.com,(this site contains bad drug related stuff) and an example of their version of "karma" looks like this.

When you mouseover or click on the karma points themselves you get the messages I added along the bottom.

Actually being able to get "black pills" would look cool. Mabye with black pills it could look something like this


I found a link on VBulletin forums where the Webmaster of Overgrow talks about his Karma Hack for Vbulletin.

I think there is a karma hack for UBB too. I noticed a few mentions of a karma hack on http://www.ubbdev.com. With all the programmers that are here at the Asylum mabye some could help Doc hook us up with some black pills.



[This message has been edited by moaiz (edited 08-16-2001).]

Personally, I think that member ratings (or "karma" as some call it) can only lead to conflicts and arguments between members...

Ggotta agree with Max. Although, I think it would be fun if you could add a line there yourself. Like the occupation part of your profile. Fill in "yedi knight" on "wannabe" or something like that...

Aw, come on Max, conflicts and arguments between members? That wouldn't happen around here.

Associate Guru
Gurus Network

~No tree is too big for a small dog to lift its leg on.~

[This message has been edited by briggl (edited 08-17-2001).]