DeeperBlue.net Forums Being Upgraded

[Stephan Whelan]

Hi Everyone,

Just a quick note to say that we are going through a relatively major upgrade of the Forums. Please keep track of any problems by posting in this thread and i'll attempt to fix them as quickly as possible.

Many Thanks!

 

[Adrian]

Another herculean effort of yours, no doubt! When you have time, let us know what the new icons at the bottom left of the posts mean: Digg this post, add to del.icio.us, bookmark post in ...and furl this post.

thanks,
Adrian

 

[oferdegi]

Hi Papa Smurf,

seems like the journals are unaccessible right now, their link on the menu is gone too. Hope they reappear soon!

Keeping my fingers crossed for the upgrade - good luck!

Ofer

 

[naiad]

Hi Stephan, thanks for the upgrade!

Just one thing - I'm not too happy about the age of members being displayed at the top of every post. I think it is good to have the age on everyone's public profile, but not on every post.

Lucia

 

[jimdoe2you]

Stephan,

The age should not be shown in the upper right. I feel it works againts your creating an open minded, cohesive online community of divers. :naughty

Jim "Yes the Prime Minister suite will be fine" Doe

 

[Stephan Whelan]

Another herculean effort of yours, no doubt! When you have time, let us know what the new icons at the bottom left of the posts mean: Digg this post, add to del.icio.us, bookmark post in ...and furl this post.

Adrian,

I'll be posting some details of what each of the new options does in due course - but those icons are for something called "[ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bookmarking"]Social Bookmarking[/ame]". They are the 4 mains sites for social bookmarking and are one of the new additions to the site. More to come!

seems like the journals are unaccessible right now, their link on the menu is gone too. Hope they reappear soon!

Journals are currently down due to technical difficulties. It looks like the author of the journals software has stopped supporting it so I don't have an ETA on when we can get them back. I may look into alternatives that are better supported but i'll keep you in the loop.

Just one thing - I'm not too happy about the age of members being displayed at the top of every post. I think it is good to have the age on everyone's public profile, but not on every post.

Lucia - i've removed age. It's interesting that you don't mind it in the profile but do on the post. Essentially (in the web world) if it's displayed in one place people can find the info easily so it doesn't necessarily make it any more "private" having it on just your profile.

 

[trux]

Adrian,

I'll be posting some details of what each of the new options does in due course - but those icons are for something called "Social Bookmarking".

Just to add more information to these services - the websites allow you to build personal bookmark list that are then available online. They are of a special interest if you are a frequent traveler, and/or working often on computers you do not own.

Social Bookmarking means that you can share links with the community of similarly oriented people, and that you can see what others tell about the pages you bookmark. Personally I think that this feature is of just very little interest for the forum, because we already are in a community, and I doubt you can find a bigger freediving community anywhere on the Social Bookmarking websites or elsewhere on the web.

Furl offers a much more interesting feature - not only you can store your bookmarks online, but you can archive the pages or entire websites, so that you can access the original content even if the page expires or changes, or the server goes offline. Although also not too interesting for this forum (AFAIK, posts are being kept in the archive indefinitely), it may be very useful otherwise - websites pop up and die often faster than one expect, so keeping a personal copy of interesting information may prove priceless. It happened to me more than once that I bookmarked a website but when needed it, it was gone. Although there is always the possibility to dig the old content at www.archive.org I have the feeling that their servers become saturated and slow, and that they often miss just the pages you are looking for.

 

[naiad]

Lucia - i've removed age. It's interesting that you don't mind it in the profile but do on the post. Essentially (in the web world) if it's displayed in one place people can find the info easily so it doesn't necessarily make it any more "private" having it on just your profile.

Thanks. I think it is good to know each other's ages, but putting it on every post just gives it too much importance.

 

[Stephan Whelan]

Just to add more information to these services - the websites allow you to build personal bookmark list that are then available online. They are of a special interest if you are a frequent traveler, and/or working often on computers you do not own.

Social Bookmarking means that you can share links with the community of similarly oriented people, and that you can see what others tell about the pages you bookmark. Personally I think that this feature is of just very little interest for the forum, because we already are in a community, and I doubt you can find a bigger freediving community anywhere on the Social Bookmarking websites or elsewhere on the web.

Furl offers a much more interesting feature - not only you can store your bookmarks online, but you can archive the pages or entire websites, so that you can access the original content even if the page expires or changes, or the server goes offline. Although also not too interesting for this forum (AFAIK, posts are being kept in the archive indefinitely), it may be very useful otherwise - websites pop up and die often faster than one expect, so keeping a personal copy of interesting information may prove priceless. It happened to me more than once that I bookmarked a website but when needed it, it was gone. Although there is always the possibility to dig the old content at www.archive.org I have the feeling that their servers become saturated and slow, and that they often miss just the pages you are looking for.

trux,

Interestingly we can also track incoming links to forum posts and threads now and even in the day the software has been installed we've had 12 links created to Forum posts/threads. I'm certainly going to be encouraging people to use social bookmarking as it's a good way of promoting the sport outside our little community. DB may seem like the biggest community out there but we're a fraction of the size of some of the larger players - social bookmarking will help us promote the message of interesting threads, news items and articles (the last two coming later today) in the bigger blogosphere (as it's called).

 

[trux]

Interestingly we can also track incoming links to forum posts and threads now and even in the day the software has been installed we've had 12 links created to Forum posts/threads. I'm certainly going to be encouraging people to use social bookmarking as it's a good way of promoting the sport outside our little community.

Yes, sure, I do not doubt it is profitable for promoting the website, I am just telling that this specific feature is probably of little direct interest for most of Deeper Blue members who already are in the DB community. Otherwise the online bookmarking and archiving certainly have positive aspects that can be used also by DB members.

 

[sanso]

Go to first new post

Hi Stephan,

The link 'Go to first new post' On the left of a thread containing unread posts doesn't point me to the first new post. It points to a well-readable url, though. I do like that

P.S.: good luck and strong nerves for the update

 

[trux]

Hmm, unfortunately it does not look like the upgrade helped with blocking out spammers, which was in fact the only feature I really missed.

 

[Pastor]

No upgrade can truly block spammers. They are just people like you and me who sign up and post crap You can block ranges of ip addresses or email domains but that is too easy to get around. The only effective way is to moderate each post submitted to the forums and I doubt any of the mods will want to take that on!

 

[trux]

No upgrade can truly block spammers. They are just people like you and me who sign up and post crap

No, the spamming does not come from people like you and me. First of all I do not consider spammers being people like me or you (unless you belong to that category of low creatures, what I strongly doubt), but mainly it is well known that the spamming of vBulletin boards is automated. It is well documented on the web, and was discussed also here on DB in another thread. Spammers are really low creatures, but they wouldn't go as low as actually working - placing their spam manually. They have enough money to pay a smart developer able of cracking the protective mechanism used in vBulletin.

 

[Stephan Whelan]

The link 'Go to first new post' On the left of a thread containing unread posts doesn't point me to the first new post. It points to a well-readable url, though. I do like that

I can't replicate this problem. Is it still happening? Does it happen on every thread?

No, the spamming does not come from people like you and me. First of all I do not consider spammers being people like me or you (unless you belong to that category of low creatures, what I strongly doubt), but mainly it is well known that the spamming of vBulletin boards is automated. It is well documented on the web, and was discussed also here on DB in another thread. Spammers are really low creatures, but they wouldn't go as low as actually working - placing their spam manually. They have enough money to pay a smart developer able of cracking the protective mechanism used in vBulletin.

Forum and Blog Spam is regularly a problem for us and many other forums. Spammers use a combination of real people and smart programming to get round forum defences. There isn't a whole lot we can do apart from keep the software updated and jump on spam as soon as we can. There is no magic bullet to cure the forum spam and all I can say is if you spot spam please report the post so we can deal with it!

 

[sanso]

I can't replicate this problem. Is it still happening? Does it happen on every thread?
Yes and Yes.
One example would be the link below. It says it points to the first new post in the 10k-users thread, but leaves me with an empty page:

http://forums.deeperblue.net/deeper...ums-hit-historic-10-000-members-new-post.html

HTH,

Sanso

P.S.: Am willing to do more de-bugging, can read http

 

[Stephan Whelan]

Sanso,


I've clicked on that link you gave and it works fine from my end but that doesn't mean there isn't a problem

Can you post screen shots, as well as details of what web browser and o/s you are using. Finally keep an eye on the browser url bar and let me know if anything happens.

 

[sanso]

Okay, first, here's a windoshot attached. I stretched it a bit, so the whole url is shown. I just hope this is still readable - doesn't the forum scale down to 1024 px ?

I tried this on a debian/sarge workstation and a win2k-box at work (both behind a firewall) and my home-lappy running ubuntu edgy (no firewall there). On both GNU/linux machines, firefox is my default browser on the wintendo-box I'm forced to use IE (version 6.0.2800.1106CO).

The addressbar doesn't do anything but show me the url I entered. The browser tells me it's 'done' immediately (AFAICT)

HTH,

Sanso

 

[trux]

Sanso, the "go-to-1st-unread-post" links are in fact HTTP 301 (Moved Permanently) redirects to the real URL, that is then generated for each user individually (depending on his/her last visit of that thread). In this case it points to the following URL (the last number after the # would differ at each user):

http://forums.deeperblue.net/deeper...s-hit-historic-10-000-members.html#post624612

If it does not work, it means your browser does not follow HTTP 30* redirects - most likely you have used high security settings in your browser. Just look through the settings, you will surely find it.

As for the forum software, Stephan, I'd recommend adding a clickable link into the body of the HTTP redirect. The body is currently empty, which is common at 301 redirects, but as you can see it can be useful in case user's browser does not continue to the new redirected location automatically. Not sure though if you can edit the template of that page. If not, I'd suggest contacting the developers of vBulletin and proposing the solution to them (feel free to give the credits to me for reporting it ) - it is certainly a serious problems and not only for Sanso.

 

[Stephan Whelan]

We actually utilise two products here - vBulletin and vbSEO. vBulletin provides the base functionality whilst vbSEO provides another product layer on top to aid us in making the forums as widely available via search engines, other forums, blogs and social bookmarking sites.

It does seem that the native redirection in the vBulletin software uses 301 redirects as well as extensive usage in the vbSEO product. Unfortunately i'm not sure that either vendor is likely to change their product behaviour at this present time. I can present to them the potential change but as with all software companies features and bugs are addressed based on customer requirements and how many customers require it.

If this is an issue reported by a larger percentage of DB forum users i'll consider taking it up with the vendors.