Eplanation on why the change

A lot of you are asking why the change.

Yes it was broke (at least cracking anfd failing in many places) and it had to be fixed.

Well the previous bulletin board was a flat text file database using perl language. Using major server resources. Page errors were happening up to 70 times a day. Extremely slow also because we are supplying about 800,000 page views per month.
We had gone past the capabilities of the program (x 10).

I had to find a new system. SQL2000 databases are too expensive and we decided to go for mySQL and php as the language.

I found that we had two options
1. Close the existing board and start a new board with no posts (easy) or...
2. migrate the flatfile text across to mySQL database and continue with the current threads (difficult) and upgrade hardware (expensive)

I chose option 2.
I had to weigh up the differences too.
We have to get more memory yet on the server to run mySQL better than it is now. (should get more on Monday)

It is fully configurable and has losts of options which I am trying to turn off (but having difficulty). eg Avatars

If you do not like the colours then remember I am colour blind, at least you can see the colours
You could help by telling what colours you would prefer.

You can visit the old boards here and check your PMs and read all your old posts.
You can even still send and receive new PMs.

Sadly the change over has had far too many hiccups which will take me some time to solve.

Hope you now have atleast some understanding from this side of the data cable.

Yet to set up the moderator settings. Stay tuned Pele and Charles.

I have learnt what can go wrong generally will. But I know I can sort it out in time

Kindest regards

Malcolm

I have extended name length and signature length to previous boards.
Change to same colours and fonts.
Same old post icons
still more changes to do thanks for all the feed back

thanks malcolm! you deserved kudos for all your hard work. can you answer the question on whether our old intro threads are coming back? (please say yes, please say yes)

Thanks, Malcolm. I feel better now. Really. (Just bring back member statuses when you get a chance, hm? No rush. Just sayin'. )

Thanks Malcolm. I think that explaining things is very important when so many people are so emotionally attached through this place. We all know you are doing the best you can as fast as you can, but don't kill yourself doing it.

One final question...is the fireperformers.com section going to be returned?

Thanks again for the explaination!
Hugs
P~

Man i may get a lot of heat for this but I think it would be better if the avatar option would only be given to those with a higher member status. Say 500... It's only my opinion..

After starting to get used to the changes, I find that I like the facelift for the most part.

there is one thing I severly miss though - the active topics page. The "view posts in the last 24 hours" option we have now is not nearly so satisfying since you can't read the first hundred characters or so of the post before going to it. That was the primary way I skimmed through threads and watched who was replying to things I said while I was still online. I don't like having to open a thread before knowing if anything worthwhile has been said recently. I also liked that the old active topics listed each thread only once. It is very hard to sort through threads now with some of them listed a hundred times (often being the ones were people are just chatting and not saying much of interest to someone outside the conversation) and others only once.

Otherwise I think I will rather like many of the new options once my nostalgia for the old HoP fades away...

I especially love the auto-preview and convenient edit box for your posts - nice! I will use this feature a lot!

don't know what people mean by saying the changes make HoP slower. From where I sit, it seems to be significantly faster now. Is this my imagination?

thanks for the effort you give all of us Malcolm!

I agree about the avatar option only being available to senior HoPpers having more than 500 posts or so - but probably because I have more than 500 myself!

i like, nay i love the new look, cheers mal, its well nice, a more homie feel.....

in terms if the avartars, its like a goal to get one!hell it keeps me cummin back!

K! mal,. cheers for all the work, and hard effort, were can i send my love and money!

ps ordered i thin k12 electic-glow sticks today, ow the joys of having a credit card again!

LALALALALALA

I love it.

really...a HUGE thank you from me..

Well done!

cheers for your explanation, makes sense to me. I wasn't aware it was running off a txt file before, i feel dirty when writting programs a tenth of the size of this that don't use sql! Perl is pretty neat, but when you discover PHP and MySQL for websites there's really no going back. SQL2000 sucks, and ram is cheap. The server that runs HoP chat has 1.1gb of PC133 ram bought for about 60 uk pounds, has an average of 3.2 queries a second and seldom uses more than 2% of a 1ghz cpu. MySQL has been known to crash and be quite erratic on several occasions over the past few years, so be sure to take a backup once in a while.

If you have an niggiling PHP/MySQL questions then let me know

I have a question..

what does erratic mean?

is like lingerie and leather and all that cos if it is then im not allowed to talk about it...mum says so.

erratic

\Er*rat"ic\, a. [L. erraticus, fr. errare to wander: cf. F. erratique. See Err.] 1. Having no certain course; roving about without a fixed destination; wandering; moving; -- hence, applied to the planets as distinguished from the fixed stars.

aha....
from the latin...
i see.


T H A N K Y O U !

Brilliant Change.

Now in a years time we can drop "I remember the old boards..In my day...." into posts! Great!

As for Avatars - let us keep them - otherwise I accidentally read other peoples posts, instead of just mine

Quote:

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SQL2000 sucks

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mebbe if you dunno what yer doin..

I'd pick .NET n SQL 2000 over mySQL/PHP any day(ease of use, performance, features, etc)..Only problem is the price for licensing is wayyy too steep..

whats that you say? point and click interfaces are required to bullsh*t your way through your admin job if you don't know what you are doing? OK, yea i agree

To be fair, all things considered, I'd rather have a nice little Oracle number, but for a website?

*mutter*Don't talk to me about PHP*mutter*.

ObGeek: I still don't know what caused it to completely crap all over its own internal stack, but forgive me for thinking that that kind of thing should be completely impossible. It wasted 4 days of my time. And the debugging features in PHP, if you can call them that, are worse than useless. Give me Perl any day. At least it's a general purpose language and has *some*, semblance of type, even if it's still weakly typed. PHP doesn't seem to have any.

With respect to SQL, I'm inclined to agree, some of the time, but I also think it's easy to rush into SQL, and I've seen some *really* badly designed databases, by people who have no concept of relational databases. SQL is, IMLE, terrible for doing threaded boards, because the data-structures don't exist, so you have to fake it in any number of ways. It also has the massive advantage that it's standard, well, if you can choose which standard you want to adhere to. MySQL doesn't give you ACID (the 4 things that a relational DBMS should do):
Atomicity - doesn't do transactions (I know that you can do transactions on certain types of individual tables, but I'm talking about real transactions across multiple tables).
Consistency - can't enforce consistency relationships
Isolation - fine
Durability - again, afaik, fine.

It's not a real database engine. However, it is fine for most web apps.

The other reason that I don't like PHP is that I think that kind of embedded program is something that rapidly becomes unmaintainable (this is based on nearly 5 years as a web-developer), and I don't like ASP or several of the Perl-based templating solutions for exactly the same reason. Perl can talk to an SQL engine, if anything, better than PHP can (PHP doesn't appear to have any kind of equivalent to Perl's DBI layer), with a nice abstraction layer in between.

And PHP code, has, in general, appeared far too regularly on bugtraq, the interpreter itself having made its own choice appearances for me to want to believe that it has fewer holes than a swiss cheese (see above also about my own stack-smashing problems). Feel free to continue using it, and it won't stop me using the board, but, each to his own, eh?

Just my however many pounds.

As a professional web developer I have to say that I didn't understand any of that and I'm very happy with that situation. For the tenth time today I'm wondering "What am doing in this job?".

Thats sounds like nonsense.
PHP is a crap language lol,
i've seen more come out of the php opensource communities in the past year than any other community on the net.

but if you know how, you can do the same thing from the command line as the point n click interface. isql n system procs can work wonders. I code, don't really do sysadmin unless I have to. Would I rather use a clicky interface instead of typing out:

use [test]
GO

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[newsStory] (
[nID] [int] NOT NULL ,
[nHeadline] [varchar] (50) COLLATE ,
[nStory] [ntext] COLLATE ,
[nDateModified] [datetime] NULL
) ON [PRIMARY] TEXTIMAGE_ON [PRIMARY]
GO

ALTER TABLE [dbo].[newsStory] WITH NOCHECK ADD
CONSTRAINT [PK_newsStory] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED
(
[nID]
) ON [PRIMARY]
GO

yupp, think so..

n yes, even for a website.. been done before eh...

so confused, so much computer talk.

hey flid, how do you get your avatar animated? i mean aside from finding an animated avatar on the web, yours i am assuming is you spinning? hence one of your own files? how do you do that?

eh, Matthews right tho..only thing I dunno what he's on about is the lack of built in data structures? What additional data structures would need to exist for a threaded board? Long as your db is normalized for transaction based app, I wouldn't see any problems handling a threading structure *shrug*

As for PHP, my biggest complaint is the lack of strong types, and interpreted code. Compiled code is so much faster, _and_ you still have all of your objects, classes, etc etc...organization is good..

oh I agree, PHP's syntax for types does suck, and yes if you have 50 million users running off a 386 compiled code is a lot better. But then, on the speed of machines today and a site the size of this, do we notice the difference between compiled and interpriated? The point at which interpriated comes a problem you should be looking at generating html/xml pages as a cronjob anyway and only using a program when absolutely nessecary. PHP does suck for scripts more than a few thousand lines long, and when i've been using something like java for 6 months and come back to it it seems like a really crude excuse for a language, but it does do the job all the same. I've known several perl/c snobs in the past few years who have "seen the light" and started using php for web stuff I use Perl quite a bit for command line based stuff and prototyping network stuff, i'm not dissing it as a language, but for a website of this size? i don't see the point in trading off a bit of extra performance for a clunky language that was never designed for webpages.

What were we talking about again?

my mom i though.... lost topic, can we get it threaded... lol

*watches as UCOF's post count jumps in orders of hundreds*
goin after C@ntus?

Quote:

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But then, on the speed of machines today and a site the size of this, do we notice the difference between compiled and interpriated?

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Depends on what kind of interpreted code you're using, really. Old ASP? yep... PHP? nah, probly not

Quote:

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The point at which interpriated comes a problem you should be looking at generating html/xml pages as a cronjob anyway and only using a program when absolutely nessecary.

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werd, thats the way I'd rather do it, generating includes or strait xml, but it's not always the case..


actually this ain't too far off the subject