Survey posted 2000-07-23 19:25 by root.

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Need to test that this works!

You know what? I think I was the one who suggested this split comment board thing! But maybe you never took my advice and just added it of your own accord. Or maybe you did take my suggestion. Or maybe not. Maybe I'll never know =-0

amicek

We listen to all suggestions. This has been suggested by many people (including myself) over quite a long time. I can't remember who suggested it first, or who has suggested it the most :-)

Yea. I remember suggesting an option to return to the board after posting something, and sure enough, its been added :)

The biggest cause of the load time problem is the tables.

We can download faster than we can read... but the computer can't render it untill it is all there.

if you use your multiple page work, (ability to chop the long table into small tables) and put those smaller tables onto one page, I would be able to read the messages while others are loading... then I wouldn't have to click on another hyperlink.

you could form blocks of 10 messages, put all the blocks on the same page.

I would like that.
thanks

What about an option to turn them off??? I know there are people who want the old way (based on the poll so far). Or even better, how about an option to select the number of comments per page?? I know that sounds like a pain in the ass to program, but hey, it'll make you everyone's personal savior (sorta)

Tim Dorr
tim@timdorr.com
http://www.timdorr.com/

Yes, the general consensus of the entire giant list of comments on this page is that you should be able to choose how many comments you want to see in your preferences. (At least 10 different people have suggested it independently!) I kinda doubt that it's possible, though, because if it was possible, they'd have done it already (it's been suggested before too). Or maybe it's just really hard to implement.

Actually, assuming they're using a mySQL database to store the comments (I'm assuming here, remember) then it would be trivial to implement it. Want some help with that perl script Magnus ;-)

Tim Dorr
tim@timdorr.com
http://www.timdorr.com/

We are using PostgreSQL to store the data, not MySQL.

That said, I will look into making it an option to at least turn it off. Having the option of chosing size will be a bit more difficult, but you never know...

If you mean making N comments on a page, it shouldn't be hard to do. Just use the limit clause (I'm sure this is available for PG_SQL too). Works something like this:

SELECT messages FROM comments WHERE newsid=$newsid LIMIT $start, $amount;

The variables next to LIMIT might have to be switched around, but I'm pretty sure that's the correct way. Then just have the variable $start increment by $amount, which is the preference of the user.... but maybe you should have it do N discussions at a time; that is, a whole thread. This way you dont chop off the discussion, which would look kinda chinsey =\

As you mention, we can't just cut at <n> comments - doing that would be easy. We need to cut at the level of a top-level comment.
Also, our pages are not generated from a CGI on the fly - that would mean a very unnecessary load on our ssytem. Instead, we pre-generate HTML files which are served up to the browsers. This makes it a bit harder to consider user preferences. We have only XSSI to revert to.

That said, I'm working on the option of turning on/off the full page.

The ability to disable this will be much appreciated. However, I have noticed that on most long pages (ex: Anarchy Trial, Random Numbar Generator) a majority of the comments come from a handful of threads, so perhaps the feature of number of threads per page could be added. It would be easier on the server, but probably much more difficult to program.

Simple. You generate the custom content for each user, I am assuming, by generating an SHTML page, that includes the right pregenerated content. Unless XSSI is sort of a scripting language for SSI (never needed SSI...everything I do is fully dynamic in PHP). Just generate both types of pages, and include whichever the user prefers.

This is probably not the spot to start this discussion, but I am curious, why do you run PostgreSQL instead of MySQL? Just what you started with and never felt like switching? I have worked a lot with both databases, and prefer MySQL over PostgreSQL for web development, based on the fact that it is an order of magnitude faster than PostgreSQL and because it natively supports BLOB and large TEXT types, meaning you can use them with the standard API, and because you don't have to figure out how to implement them as user defined types. And the best part about MySQL is that now it is GPL :)

There are a lot of reasons why we use PostgreSQL instead of MySQL. It is not unkind or untrue to say that PostgreSQL is a full featured RDBMS and MySQL is a lightening fast DBM :). Seriously speaking, in databases, performance is not necessarily the most important quality. Data integrity is far more important, and that is where PostgreSQL wins hands down. Transaction support in PostgreSQL is full-featured and very heavily used by our site. Additionally, foreign keys in PostgreSQL 7 allow us to maintain referential integrity (also cascading deletes make this very easy). Lastly, the advanced subselect features of PostgreSQL make queries that are very unintuitive (or not possible) with joins to be written with ease in PostgreSQL.

Performance wise, studies have shown that PostgreSQL can handle more simultaneous queries than MySQL. At a certain point MySQL just keels over and dies, while PostgreSQL keeps plugging away.

In any case, we are using PostgreSQL, and even with how much traffic we get, we still have a low load on our meager Pentium 200. A lot of the places where people run into trouble with dynamic web pages is using totally dynamic architecture when they don't need it. Much of our site is statically generated pages by regular cron jobs. This is much more efficient, and you do still get the same feel for us as a dynamic site. On the downside, this is why it isn't as simple as conjectured by many to offer arbitrary comment display.

Yes, we are well aware of the lack of good BLOB support in PostgreSQL, but that is something that will be available real soon(tm). For the time being, we have found very good ways around the problem.

The licensing issue is not significant to us. PostgreSQL is open source, and despite popular belief, the GPL is not the one and only true open source license.

CONFIRMATION OF MAGNUS HAGANDER'S ELITE TICALC.ORG-RELATED HAXORING ABILITIES IS *GO!*

--BlueCalx

h1zn4x0r1ng sk1z1lls, eh? Hmm, nicely done boys.

PHP is a better buzzword than Perl nowadays.

--me

PHP is more /<-31337, but it is not a buzzword.
PHP is not a paradigm.

--BlueCalx

i like the entire news item loading at once, whether i'm using my dial-up on my laptop or T3, it not only gets it over with, it doesn't adrubtly halt in the middle.

Yeah, it's nice to have the whole page all at once. Maybe you could have a link to a page that contains all of the comments like the old version. That would satisfy everyone!
P.S. It still would be nice if each comment appeared as soon as it was downloaded, instead of waiting for the entire page to be downloaded before being displayed. Is this even remotely possible with HTML?

Yes and no. It is surely possible in another format, and just not in the one on ticalc.org's. Of course there is only one or two small changes that would need to take place for it to work here, which would be

1) Make the surrounding gray a site background color and not it's own table.

2) Each comment is not inside another table, in other words they have no <table> tags around them

That way each table loads on its own. When you have one giant table, all of the stuff inside must be pre-rendered.. which is why all the comments load at once after loading for a few seconds.

I dont know why I spent so much time explaining that, but summer vacation has been *so* boring, 'running around in circles until i drop' just got old :)

Thanks for the explanation, I thought it was something like that. So, can ticalc.org make those changes? Or are there other problems that would prevent this?

It should theoretically be able to be done with style sheets, but I don't know if that would help at all since I'm only halfway through "HTML 4 For Dummies"

Also, could each thread be rendered as a separate table?

Yes, in fact that is what happens. I dont really understand all of the message board stuff, but I can tell you that each comment is in its own table, which is also inside another table (the grey backgroud).

If only the gray background was not a table.... Then each thread could load individually, instead of waiting for the whole page to load, as it is entirely nested tables. That would make each root thread the outermost table for its subordinate threads, so as soon as the last comment in the subordinate threads loaded, it would render that section of the page.

Wow, those posting guidlines are getting longer and longer =(

To answer that, kinda sorta... but mostly no. I'm guessing ticalc has a template file that they use to maintain every page. CSS isn't really capable of this, and it's more used for maintaining styles.. such as type sets and whatnot. You've got the right idea, but CSS *only* can do styles.. not HTML.

So to answer the question 2 posts above, yes it is likely ticalc can update their templates but it would probably look chinsey, or just complicate things more.

Unfortunatly, we cannot rely exclusively on stylesheéts, because not enough browsers support it good enough. (Yes, we checked with our logs)
We have to make the site look at least "Ok", preferrably "nice" without CSS, while trying to maintain "Good" or "Great" with :-)

XML!

Can you teach that to Netscape 3.x?

You basically only use CSS for text effects. If you know J++ quite well you could spruce this site up. My web page uses CSS but you could use HTML code to replace CSS styles. CSS is supported by all the "major" browsers and people mainly use IE anyway. Coming back to the point, J++ could really improve the navagation on this site. I mainly visit the www.32bit.com forums because I can use UBB code to have some effects. I can also "Edit" my reply just in case I made any typos.

If you want a better forum, ticalc.org guys, go check that forum out if you want to improve this one. That's why I stopped coming to this one and help people on computer problems instead of calc, my alias is the same on that forum as it is here. My web page: www.cyberconstrux.com, as I run a design biz I don't have much time to mess with a calc, I'm programmin' HTML and C++ all the time.

With J++ you mean making major parts of the site in Java, I assume?

Over by dead body :-)

Why? Well. We have to maintain a fair browser compatibility. There are lots of browsers out there either without java or with incompatible java implementations. Especially if you use J++, which by default uses many Microsoft extensions to Java (yes, I have used it quite a lot). You can write compatible code in J++, but it is not the default of the wizards etc.
Also, Java makes the site *much* slower.
Java has it places, but a site like ours is not one of them.

That said, I'll definitly take a look at the forums on that site - I've only checked the site news out, and not their forum.

Depends on your browser.

Then which browser(s) can start rendering a table without waiting for the table to finish downloading?

IE will begin to render things as they load, and I am fairly certain Netscape 4 will as well. IE will not render a table until it is completely downloaded (as this is impossible to do acurately), but if a page stops loading, IE will render what it can, whereas Netscape will do nothing.