BYYB Forums

It must be me, an old geezer! I'm not able to see the flow of conversation that we could see on the last site. What am I missing? I have to search by word just to find where I wrote last. Warren

Greetings Warren,

I have a browser bookmark that gets me here ... http://byyb.org/forum/index.php?action=unread ... which shows me just the new portions of the threads that I have not read yet.

You can also get there by going to http://www.byyb.org/, then click on the [Forums] tab of the menu bar, and then click on the "Show unread posts since last visit" link, which is located right under the "Hello warren parcel" and just to the right of you avatar pictograph.

Is this the behavior you were used to?



The other thing I do sometimes is to look for threads that have been modified in the last 10 days or so using the advanced search feature ... http://byyb.org/forum/index.php?action=s...ed;search=, which you can get to by clicking on the (Search) button on any of the forum screens while leaving the text window empty, which gives you this screen ...


... which includes the Advanced search link, which gets you here ...


You would think that entering an asterisk for the Search for: [ * ] field just like the by user: [ * ] field would return all posts, but alas this does not work, which is yet another case of our current crop of idiot programmers who know nothing about consistent user interfaces. Instead you have to actually enter some text that appears in the posts you are looking for. Fortunately, every reply to every post contains the characters "Re:" in the beginning, so entering Search for: [ Re: ] returns all of the posts that fit the Message age: fields that have at least one reply. It's not perfect, but close.



Cheers,
Tom

P.S.

The one thing I do find annoying is that there are no buttons or links in the Forums and Gallery subsystems with the blue backgrounds to get you back to the http://www.byyb.org/ home page with the cream colored background. The [Home] menu buttons in the Forums and Gallery subsystems only get you back to the first page in each subsystem respectively. It might be helpful to change the BYYB.ORG title field on the top of these pages to be an actual http:// link that leads you back to the http://www.byyb.org/ url.

System overload!!! However Tom the "Showunread posts since last visit" is what I need. Many thanks for putting me on the right track. Warren (not a football coach) Percell (smiles)

Quote:current crop of idiot programmers

hey Tom I'm one of those idiot programmers (well a Sr Software Engineer at any rate)  and we work hard at making things as difficult for users as possible    ;D

I've always wondered does the Sr in the title refer to my age, i may be an old fart but come-on    do you have to tell every one

Yea it would be nice to do wild-card searches

We are still working to recover from the virus and get thinks backk tonormal.  Please bare with us...

Greetings Jim,

I used to program for a living. I did some interesting work early on writing assemblers and hardware emulators, moved on to compilers and syntax translators, applied proper numerical methods for pricing and figuring municipal bond yields, wrote a ton of real-time process control software for factory automation and warehouse logistics, and constructed a disaster tolerant wide area cluster for real-time currency trading. Through out it all I was constantly amazed at (1) how many of my coworkers could not program their way out of a wet paper bag, and (2) that these same programmers still managed to keep their jobs. Eventually, I figured out that universities were no longer teaching critical thinking and that employers were giving anybody with a pulse a chance to code. I eventually gave it up as it was just too depressing to continue. Lately I have been building super computers with upwards of a thousand processing cores for structural chemistry scientist scientists to do studies in computational quantum electro-chromodynamics with input from X-ray crystallography and nuclear magnetic resonance, which they then use to do 3D electron field mapping on sample molecules to determine electrostatic finger prints to find chemical analogs to known compounds with known properties. Hey, whatever pays the bills ...

Cheers,
Tom

I hope to get back to working on the interface again this weekend.

In the case of this site, we use open source software to reduce costs for the organization, and I donate the web hosting space. The only cost to the BYYB is the cost of the domain name each year ... $9.95 (On messing-about.com, I upgraded to IP.Board software, but the cost is $150 plus $50 per year; not sure its worth it).

The front end is Wordpress, the most popular software for new websites. We have tried several others, but the problem is always how hard they are to update.  A survey last year showed that Wordpress was much more likely to be kept updated than the alternatives we used to use. To upgrade it, you click a link in the Admin section. Other software requires you to download the software, unzip it locally, then FTP it to the server making sure not to overwrite the configuration files. Then you have to re-apply any changes you made to insert links to the forums, etc. It can take hours.

The forums are SMF v. 1.1.15. That's the latest version of the 1. series, but 2.0 is out now. It is a major upgrade, and the interface is a bit different. I have found most forum members like what they are used to, so I have kept the 1. series in place for now. When they stop supporting it, we will have to upgrade (it can take a few hours, and then no one knows how to navigate the software at first.)

The gallery ... I hate the gallery software, Coppermine. But I think you guys like it. There aren't very many other free alternatives. It does integrate with SMF, using the same member log in and password. But each time I upgrade it, I have to rebuild the integration bridge. That, again, can take hours.

I did put a quick "Home Page" and "Go to Gallery" link in the menu bar. Its a bit harder on the Gallery to do it, so I'll tackle that later.