The biggest WTF is the WTF software!!!
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I've lurked here for over a year, and I've even posted once in a while.
Now, posting of other boards is a straight-forward, painless procedure.
Not so at TDWTF. It is so ironic that a board only dealing with the
worst fuck-ups in software development has the most fucked up software
of all time that it must be bloody intentional. So I thought we could
band together and enumerate our peeves, grieviences and hates. I expect
it to be quite some list...
I'll start:
* It can't evaluate quote blocks
correctly! I press the quote button on a post, append my additions and
click post, and what happens? "Something didn't quite match up",
"Invalid quote blocks in post". WFT!
- Moving the cursor with the arrows is a random affair.
You never know where it will go or what parts lines the cursor refuse
to go through. WFT!
- The "Post"-button in fact STARTS A NEW THREAD. Unlike every other board software in existance. WTF!
- Moving the cursor with the arrows is a random affair.
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@Mikademus said:
Valid complaints
I also enjoy when the forum software decides that quote-blocks should be converted to huge, incomprehensible blocks of HTML.
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@Athas said:
@Mikademus said:
Valid complaints
I also enjoy when the forum software decides that quote-blocks should
be converted to huge, incomprehensible blocks of HTML.
I wish to add that the utter lack of post-editing capabilities is also rather bothersome, but the forum software won't let me.
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I love the lack of a preview... not that the preview would look the same anyway...
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@Mikademus said:
I've lurked here for over a year, and I've even posted once in a while. Now, posting of other boards is a straight-forward, painless procedure. Not so at TDWTF. It is so ironic that a board only dealing with the worst fuck-ups in software development has the most fucked up software of all time that it must be bloody intentional. So I thought we could band together and enumerate our peeves, grieviences and hates. I expect it to be quite some list...
I'll start:
* It can't evaluate quote blocks correctly! I press the quote button on a post, append my additions and click post, and what happens? "Something didn't quite match up", "Invalid quote blocks in post". WFT!
* Moving the cursor with the arrows is a random affair. You never know where it will go or what parts lines the cursor refuse to go through. WFT!
* The "Post"-button in fact STARTS A NEW THREAD. Unlike every other board software in existance. WTF!1. You joined 10 days ago.
2. Maybe you've lurked for a year and posted 1 or 2 times. Clearly that's enough times to draw a conclusion as to what the problem is: the software or you.
3. This has to be the most tired topic ever. Starting a thread just to hear the same shit everyone says everytime they fuck up USING the software is idiotic. Now if you type "cow" and what appears on the screen is "dog" then you have something. But so far the only thing that happens when I use the software is what's to be expected.
4. If you want to reply to a thread. Then click on REPLY. How do people struggle with this?!?!
5. I know how everyone loves how cute the irony is that this is a WTF forum and people think there's a WTF built in the site, but seriously, get over it.
6. Merry Christmas
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@Mikademus said:
...it must be bloody intentional.
It feels that way sometimes. Have you ever tried clicking on the "Next"
link of a multi-page thread, only to have it return you to the home
page? How about clicking on a numbered page, only to find that you are
returned to the page you were already on? D'oh!
@ItsAllGeekToMe said:Starting a thread just to hear the same shit everyone says everytime they fuck up USING the software is idiotic.
Maybe he/she was hoping to convince the software authors of the need for revisions.
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@ItsAllGeekToMe said:
1. You joined 10 days ago.
2. Maybe you've lurked for a year and posted 1 or 2 times. Clearly that's enough times to draw a conclusion as to what the problem is: the software or you.
3. This has to be the most tired topic ever. Starting a thread just to hear the same shit everyone says everytime they fuck up USING the software is idiotic. Now if you type "cow" and what appears on the screen is "dog" then you have something. But so far the only thing that happens when I use the software is what's to be expected.
4. If you want to reply to a thread. Then click on REPLY. How do people struggle with this?!?!
5. I know how everyone loves how cute the irony is that this is a WTF forum and people think there's a WTF built in the site, but seriously, get over it.
6. Merry Christmas
Here's my $0.02:
1. I'm reasonably certain I joined more than 10 days ago.
2. There are serious issues with this software. There *was* a preview function -- but like so many other forums, it didn't work correctly -- the preview page rarely, if ever, showed your post the way it appeared when you actually submitted it. If you add 'code' blocks to, well, mark something as code (which normally means 'display this stuff in a fixed-width font'), it comes out like this:
[code]
int foo(int bar) {
if (bar < 0)
return bar + 1;
else if (bar > 0)
return bar - 1;
return rand();
}
[/code]
3. Maybe that's because some people can immediately look at how this forum software behaves and say WTF? No, if I type C O W it shows up 'cow' in here, but if I were experimenting with this interface and clicked on the 'HTML' button below this text area, then clicked back to 'Design', I would immediately regret it as all of my quoting and newlines would immediately become fubared. Of course the form does what you expect *now* -- after 64 posts, I sure as hell hope you've gotten a feel for how the forum software works. It does what *I* expect, too. But knowing how it behaves (and therefore what to expect) does not mean that it's behaving correctly.
4. Reply? If I read through a thread to the very bottom of the page, there is no 'Reply' button. There is a 'post' button. If I'm reading a thread and I want to post to it, what do you think I'm going to do? Why the hell is there a button at the very bottom of every thread that posts a new thread to the forum? On every other forum I can think of, that button belongs on the page that lists all the open threads.
This forum software is one of the most brain-dead things I've ever seen. I've seen evidence that other people agree, time and again. I see patterns of the following in forums:
1. New threads on the side-bar that were intended to be replies to an existing thread.
This indicates to me that the 'Post' button at the bottom of thread pages should be replaced with a 'Reply' button. In fact, I'm reasonably confident that the only reason we don't see that crap on the main forum is because only Alex can add threads to the main forum.
2. Posts that are wholly or partially raw HTML.
I'm not sure which 'feature' of this forum causes this, but it's extremely broken.
3. Series of posts that are attempts to get the same post to display correctly.
This comes from several things: First, a lack of a preview (which itself comes from the fact that the preview doesn't work). Second, a lot of the 're-posts' I see are because the original reply didn't quote the post. Why the hell do we even have both a 'quote' and 'reply' button? Why can't the Reply button automatically quote for us? My keyboard has a delete key, if I don't want to quote somethingsomeone said, I know how to get rid of it. Third, we can't edit our posts after we've submitted them. I can understand doing that for anonymous posters, but I've registered.
I think that the source code for this forum software is available somewhere -- I'm pretty sure someone posted a Sidebar WTF about it once. I'm reasonably confident that 90% of the people registered for this forum could fix these problems if given the opportunity.
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I chose CommunityServer to power this website because it had stellar reviews from a lot of people. These people obviously never actually used the software.
I'm not willing to change platforms because that would take way too much time to migrate everything and I doubt I'd be able to get the user accounts to stay. So, we're stuck on CS.
But we all know the software sucks. It was poorly designed, poorly coded, and poorly tested. I doubt they had any formal requirements and it seems like they just pieced together pits and pieces of a forum based on what they've seen other software (phpBB) do. And don't even get me started on their failure of a data model.
I will consider upgrading to their "2.0" release. They don't seem to believe in things like "scope" or "requirements" (this was initially their "1.2" quality fix release) so it's hard to say when and how good this will be.
Anyone have any better ideas? I think this CS software is a good demonstration of why most open source things are a failure. Everyone wants to take time to complain about it, but no one wants to fix it. The team developing it is immature and has no idea how to develop good software.
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<font size="2">The biggest WTF is the frequent misspelling of WTF as WFT. But the forum software runs a close second.
Hey, if it's open source, why doesn't someone post bits of it
here? At least then we'd have something concrete to bitch
about. And it might actually convince some people to work on
fixing it (unless the code is really in that bad shape).
</font>
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While I can submit to the fact that I may have yet needed to do certain things that will always misbehave in a very constant manner, I still stand by my comment that everyone needs to stop giggling about the WTF software being a WTF. The whole ironic play-on-words is mind-numbing at this point.
I think I'll go google Google, then mail a letter to the post office, then drive to driver's education, then kill myself until I die from it.
p.s. bonus points to anyone who knows what movie "kill you until you die from it" comes from.
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An idea would be to fix it. ; ) Here is a bunch of developers, and I'm sure some QA analyst, who could do a good job at finding and fixing the bugs, since it's an open source project no?
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@Eolianne said:
An idea would be to fix it. ; ) Here is a
bunch of developers, and I'm sure some QA analyst, who could do a good
job at finding and fixing the bugs, since it's an open source
project no?
This link:
http://docs.communityserver.org/default.aspx/CS.WelcomeToCommunityServer seems to have the source available for download, at least of the 1.1 final version. The 2.0 version is only available in binary form. The link provided is a Wiki, which claims to have developers actively monitoring the site.The download form for getting the source indicates these parts of the source license:
3. That you are not allowed to combine or distribute the Software with other software that is licensed under terms that seek to require that the Software (or any intellectual property in it) be provided in source code form, licensed to others to allow the creation or distribution of derivative works, or distributed without charge.
4. You may not distribute the Software in source code form, and if you distribute the Software in object form you only do so under a license that complies with this license.
So there might be some limits as to what Alex could allow the WTF community to do.
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You know, it's a real shame, too, because .Text was a decent blog
application. Granted, it didn't have all of the features that
other pieces of software had, but if you needed a .NET blog
application, it was pretty much all there was.
This Community Server thing, though... I tried dismantling the source
once--I was working on a content managment system and wanted to see how
they assembled CS because I too had heard it was excellent. Some
parts of it are heavily over-engineered. Unfortunately, they
over-engineered the wrong parts.
I don't know that a change would be neccesary... it seems to work okay
for what it's used for--it's not so difficult to reply to your own post
to note your spelling errors, is it? Moving to a different forum
software would probably involve an inordinate amount of work...
J.
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I used .Text before and that had to have one of the worst data models ever. Posts, Comments, Articles -- all stored in the same table with Bitmask Integers differntiating between types (IsArticle=4, IsPost=8, IsPublished=16). But it wasn't too bad. How bad can you mess up blog software though?
As far as CS clueless over-engineering .. this version used to cache posts for every user, including anonyumous ones. So, anytime you browsed a thread, the entire post was cached in your session. WTF is wrong with these people?
I'd like to move to new software -- but I'm not willing to risk that it's any better. For all I know, it could be worse.
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@Alex Papadimoulis said:
I'm not willing to change platforms because that would take way too much time to migrate everything and I doubt I'd be able to get the user accounts to stay. So, we're stuck on CS.
I suggest (to everyone) an alternative to bitching about CS, fixing or not fixing CS, and the hell of migrating away from it: How about a prominently displayed FAQ or How-To manual with heading such as "Things that will cause you to irrevocably screw up your post."
I'm sure we're all familiar with the phenomenon of having shitty software installed for internal use in some organization, and no choice to change or avoid using it. Eventually, the users come to terms with it and have a shared set of tips and tricks that allow them to use it and go about their business.
If anyone's interested having a doc like that for this site, I could tell you where to email me suggestions and maybe we can put something together.
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@Alex Papadimoulis said:
I chose CommunityServer to power this website because it had stellar reviews from a lot of people. These people obviously never actually used the software.
I'm not willing to change platforms because that would take way too much time to migrate everything and I doubt I'd be able to get the user accounts to stay. So, we're stuck on CS.
But we all know the software sucks. It was poorly designed, poorly coded, and poorly tested. I doubt they had any formal requirements and it seems like they just pieced together pits and pieces of a forum based on what they've seen other software (phpBB) do. And don't even get me started on their failure of a data model.
I will consider upgrading to their "2.0" release. They don't seem to believe in things like "scope" or "requirements" (this was initially their "1.2" quality fix release) so it's hard to say when and how good this will be.
Anyone have any better ideas? I think this CS software is a good demonstration of why most open source things are a failure. Everyone wants to take time to complain about it, but no one wants to fix it. The team developing it is immature and has no idea how to develop good software.
Backup everything before you upgrade, please. ;_;
Everyone else, consider this a warning: No matter what you hear, set up a test server first before settling on your choice and going live. :p
Honestly, as a user I think the site is awesome, since VBB fixed most of its most egregious holes I hardly ever get to see forum minefields, but this forum always looks like Lorraine after WW1.
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@Brendan Kidwell said:
@Alex Papadimoulis said:
I'm not willing to change platforms because that would take way too much time to migrate everything and I doubt I'd be able to get the user accounts to stay. So, we're stuck on CS.
I suggest (to everyone) an alternative to bitching about CS, fixing or not fixing CS, and the hell of migrating away from it: How about a prominently displayed FAQ or How-To manual with heading such as "Things that will cause you to irrevocably screw up your post."
I'm sure we're all familiar with the phenomenon of having shitty software installed for internal use in some organization, and no choice to change or avoid using it. Eventually, the users come to terms with it and have a shared set of tips and tricks that allow them to use it and go about their business.
If anyone's interested having a doc like that for this site, I could tell you where to email me suggestions and maybe we can put something together.A "How not to FAQ up your post" FAQ. Good idea.
I haven't had any problems with the software (having written that, watch me screw this post up) but if it helps others, then I'm for it. (Damn, I'm such a giver!)
I'd also be willing to lend a hand with a migration ...
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/me finds something interesting in the code...
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Nope, guess not. Carry on, then.
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Apparently, Liv's mom didn't think so. At least, not at the time of conception.
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@Alex Papadimoulis said:
I chose CommunityServer to power this website because it had stellar reviews from a lot of people. These people obviously never actually used the software.
There is also, of course, the possibility that these reviewers were simply shills.
I'm not willing to change platforms because that would take way too much time to migrate everything and I doubt I'd be able to get the user accounts to stay. So, we're stuck on CS.
Something can be said in this thread about the whole captcha mess. That you have about a minute to post before you'll be told the captcha failed is one for the FAQ, should such a FAQ be found by unregistered users. That the captcha image disappeared entirely for a while is another one for the books.
At least I haven't seen any pizza posted in this thread. I hope we can keep it that way, but that seems a bit much to hope for. (And how long does it take people to figure out just how to embed their preferred emoticon.)
Two questions (without daring to resort to any HTML lists): (1) if one were to choose new forum software today, what would one choose (with any applicable reasons, experiences, etc); (2) While I support Alex in not migrating history to any new platform, I wonder (okay, it's only loosely a question) what support there might be for allowing him a "clean break: re-registering under a new forum environment, closing off this environment, and perhaps linking this old world under a static link to a historic site of some sort.
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@Coughptcha said:
Two questions (without daring to resort to any HTML lists): (1) if one were to choose new forum software today, what would one choose (with any applicable reasons, experiences, etc); (2) While I support Alex in not migrating history to any new platform, I wonder (okay, it's only loosely a question) what support there might be for allowing him a "clean break: re-registering under a new forum environment, closing off this environment, and perhaps linking this old world under a static link to a historic site of some sort.
(1) - really couldn't say. My experiences as a user suggest vBulletin or phpBB. Both are php based, easily managed and quite powerful. As far as I can tell, vBulletin has the most features of the two.
(2) Full support from me.
And it's great to see some response from Alex on the forum issue. I've personally been looking forward to that.
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@Coughptcha said:
Two questions (without daring to resort to any HTML lists): (1) if one were to choose new forum software today, what would one choose (with any applicable reasons, experiences, etc); (2) While I support Alex in not migrating history to any new platform, I wonder (okay, it's only loosely a question) what support there might be for allowing him a "clean break: re-registering under a new forum environment, closing off this environment, and perhaps linking this old world under a static link to a historic site of some sort.
1. I've been in forums that use phpBB, VBulletin and Yabby. None of these have given me any trouble [i]at all[/i] in using. I have no experience in installing or adminstering these, though.
2. I'm for it. Move from something that is obvious crap to something that only small minorities say is crap. The Grand Archive can be closed off and linked, and doesn't need to be migrated per se. Yay for clean slates!
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@stinch said:
@Alex Papadimoulis said:
Anyone have any
better ideas? I think this CS software is a good demonstration of why
most open source things are a failure. Everyone wants to take time to
complain about it, but no one wants to fix it. The team developing it
is immature and has no idea how to develop good software.No doubt there is plenty of crap open source software out there, the low barrier of entry pretty much assures that.
If CS is open source or not really depends on your definition of open source. Sure you can get access to the source code but under a pretty restrictive license. The license is going to put off practically all contributors. There are thousands of open source projects out there, why would I bother contributing one that doesn't even let people redistribute the source.
No, the question of if something is open source is controlled by the Open Source Initiative, who coined the term after a careful search to make sure that nobody else was using it. They then trademarked the term. They have every right to decide if your project can be called open source or not. They have specifically decided that having the source available is not enough to call yourself open source, it must be redistributable. http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php
Community server does not meet their qualifications for open source, nor do they claim to be open source (as far as I can tell anyway). They are fully in their rights to not make their code open source, and I support them fully in that decision.
However, because they are not open source, every programmer should think carefully before having anything to do with the source code without being paid for their efforts. That isn't to say you shouldn't give them the fruits of your labor for free, but you must understand that the rules are not fair, and not in your favor. Contributing to an open source project gives you the assurance that giving your code away will be done under fair rules.
Open source does not ensure that a program will be high quality. Like everything it varies.
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You're right -- CS is no longer open source. I thought it was though, but looks like it isn't.
The CAPTCHA -- that was all me -- I jst copy/pasted code from some MSDN article and dumped it in there. If you're curious why it didn't work before, it's because when I moved to a new server, I didn't have the font it was looking for installed. Whoops. I also
addedhacked in the main RSS feed and the Troll button (which will not be seen in the next version of the site software, since it isn't used too much).I'll entertain switching to new software. I can handle all data migration, so there wouldn't be a static archive sitting around. The one difficulty is passwords. They have some hashing/salting scheme going on, which means there is no way for me to bring it to a new system without code modifcations to the new system. Or, everyone loses their password. On that note, WTF is with complicating this software with hash/salt passwords? Do any of you guys trust sites like this with the same password you use for your email/bank/eBay/etc? Sheesh ...
To the new software, I still would prefer to avoid PHP. I have a Windows server and have bad heard things about the Windows PHP with some software (SquirrellMail) not working so well. Can anyone confirm/deny this? No less, if PHP is the only place that good enough and well-maintained software exists, I may bite the bullet.
I feel a bit more strongly against MySQL; I'd much prefer to have SQL Server running, or in "internal" instance (hidden from my view) of MySQL. Either way I need the ability to do daily backups for onsite and offsite storage.
Some requirements ...
- inexpensive (I'm not dropping a grand on this ;-))
- source avaiable and licenced for modifcation
- threaded post view (too many replies at this point not to have it)
- reasonable data model
- base software is maintained / supported (either by a company or community)
- database images/pictures storage support (or, fairly easy to add this in)I'd be interested to hear what other features you guys think are good. I could really use without these emoticons, too ...
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In all honesty, vBulletin is a great piece of forum software. A
ton of sites use it (including very big sites like WebHostingTalk), so
it's a good bet that it doesn't have many annoying
problems. It has the threaded post view that you want. It's
very well supported with new releases fairly frequently. I know
that it's somewhat easy to modify--they've done some modifications at
halo2forum.com to include some new features... I'm not sure if
the whole thing is open source.
It's $160...
I only used phpBB once, a few years ago, so I don't know if it's still
any good. It was pretty good back then, though, and from what I
recall it probably had a nice database...
They both use mySQL (unfortunately--I much prefer MSSQL)... but that seems to be the way PHP seems to lean...
It's unfortunate that there really aren't any excellent ASP.NET forum applications... (or even ColdFusion, for that matter...)
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phpBB last time I installed it supported more than one database engine from my faulty memory. The trick is to set up PHP to use the storage engine you want. php on windows can talk to sql server. I have used php on windows in production environments under IIS and it seemed pretty ok. As always, configure to your tastes.
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I'd recommend vBulletin. It has been used w/o any frustration for a
long time for some larger (~5000 -- 10000 users) boards I moderate.
phpBB is ok for smaller boards but is difficult to patch and apparently
a hassle (lots of manual effort) to manage user access rights.
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What you want is called "Scoop." The data model was a bit iffy
last I checked, but it may have improved since then. It meets all
your other requirements. It has nearly every feature known to
man. It is a bit less a "board" system than a content management
system, but think content management like Slashdot, only much
better. (In this case, the cm system is like a board system with
extras.) I've run it; it is easy to manage. No PHP.
Lots of sites use it, and it is under active development. The
original site is kuro5hin, but there are tons of others these days; I
think there's a link to the dev site (which runs scoop itself,) from
kuro5hin, but if not, I'm sure someone there could tell you where to
find it if Google won't (I'd ask rusty.) Oh, and no
emoticons. Whee.
And if you have any real concerns about the data model, look at the
sheer scale of kuro5hin. Freaking huge. It's got its own
weather system!
Now that I've worked in a cheesy movie reference, I'm done.
Nobody You'd Know
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I have used many forums before (10+), and it seems that the majority of them are using vBulletin. I'd recommend switching to vBulletin. It's a very common and flexible forum softwares.
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If you don't mind using ASP 3.0 then http://www.webwizguide.info/bbs/default.asp is a great platform
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I have no experience running real web bb software, but my vote goes to anything with an NNTP server. :^) I really like being able to use my own client to read and post. (And yes, I know I'm in a minority here.)
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Hello Alex!
I think proper forum software would definitely be worth the trouble of data migration, if you can find the time to do it. I've been running a relatively busy forum for a while, but the software is the php-based XMB.
I've been looking for a replacement myself, but as far as php-based bulletin boards goes, there really aren't that many viable options.
* XMB, which I've been using, has a messy codebase, and the normal features you'd expect (boards, threaded view, private messages, password protected boards, image attachments.) The data model is pretty straight forward, you rarely if ever have to look at the coresponding php code as the table and column names are mostly self explanatory and mostly wtf-free.
* phpBB -- had a ton of security bugs when I looked at it. Didn't like it as much as XMB, even though it is probably the board software with the most features. If you want user group ACL's, I'm not sure there's an alternative.
* 'commercial' software is good, but expensive -- vBulletin and another one I can't think of right now.
* punBB I really liked. Neat and clean, should be easy to hack if needed. Barely any features (no private messaging, last I checked.). http://forums.punbb.org/
* UNB. It's very pretty to look at, no idea how it works behind the scenes. I think as far as features goes it's mostly like punBB. http://newsboard.unclassified.de/forum
* Phorum, if I remember correctly, has a really messy dev process so I stayed away from it since it didn't look very stable. http://phorum.org/phorum5/index.php
I think all the other open source projects were mostly unusable. Like I said, I didn't consider non-php options, but lately I've looked around for ruby-based boards without much luck. I think there are one or two projects, but they are quite featureless still.
As for the logins, if you can't plug the the "hash" function into the new board, I'd keep the old login script around and have it direct people to a password change script that updates their account on the new board using the new hash method.
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@Coughptcha said:
At least I haven't seen any pizza posted in
this thread. I hope we can keep it that way, but that seems a bit
much to hope for. (And how long does it take people to figure out
just how to embed their preferred emoticon.)
I still haven't been able to figure that out, nor how to embed
arbitrary images. I've found that as long as I follow the
sequence "hit 'reply' or 'quote', enter text, hit 'post'", then the
software is quite predictable. Any deviation from that sequence
is guaranteed to cause grief. I don't even know why Alex leaves
the "HTML" button available, since it causes even more grief than the
"Preview" button did.
Of course if you have more than about 11 levels of quoting, the
software completely fails to handle it; and then there's the whole
captcha thing, and the edit window is pretty dubious about handling
formatting enhancements such as italics or anything. Other than all that, the forum software is great!
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@Mikademus said:
* It can't evaluate quote blocks
correctly! I press the quote button on a post, append my additions and
click post, and what happens? "Something didn't quite match up",
"Invalid quote blocks in post". WFT!
- Moving the cursor with the arrows is a random affair.
You never know where it will go or what parts lines the cursor refuse
to go through. WFT!
I doubt you could do much better. What kind of idiot can't even type WTF correctly?!
- Moving the cursor with the arrows is a random affair.
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btw, I use CS on many sites I haven't ever encountered any of these problems, i'm pretty sure all of the "Issues" with this forum are caused by the mods that Alex made.
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@hash said:
btw, I use CS on many sites I haven't ever encountered any of these problems, i'm pretty sure all of the "Issues" with this forum are caused by the mods that Alex made.
I've made minor layout tweaks (HTML only), added a TrollVote button, and added an ordering to a drop down list. If those mods (made by an experienced, professional .NET programmer) cause a failed UI (POST button next to the reply button, etc), a poor RTE, 50-100k daily Exceptions to be thrown, a delete-function that takes 15 seconds to run, etc, then I really question the software.
From a design standpoint, this software is poorly designed; it's almost as if they invented their architecture as they went along. The code quality isn't too bad, but the authors would do very well to read Code Complete. From a user perspective (MSDN blogs), I'm surprised at how many errors I get through normal clicking and usage.
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@ItsAllGeekToMe said:
This has to be the most tired topic
ever. Starting a thread just to hear the same shit everyone says
everytime they fuck up USING the software is idiotic.
@FredSaw said:Maybe he/she was hoping to convince the software authors of the need for revisions.
@Alex Papadimoulis said:I will consider upgrading
Let's hope ItsAllGeekToMe has learned something from this.
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@Alex Papadimoulis said:
...The code quality isn't too bad, but
the authors would do very well to read Code Complete.
Even if the code quality was excellent, that's a book worth reading, cover to cover, at least twice.
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Database choice
I have no opinions on the language of choice (I think PHP as it exists
sucks), but if you want a good RDBMS, why not try PostgreSQL? There is
a native Windows port, pretty much spec compliant (proper date
handling, stored procedures, views, triggers, roles...) and the price
is right,
If someone can come up with a list of features that we need/want, it might be easier to find alternatives.
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@Alex Papadimoulis said:
To the new software, I still would
prefer to avoid PHP. I have a Windows server and have bad heard things
about the Windows PHP with some software
I've used PHP quite a bit on Windows - mainly because the same scripts
had to work on Linux servers - and while there are, shall we say,
"nuances" in the set-up compared to C#, PHP is certainly
reliable/robust.
@Alex Papadimoulis said:
I feel a bit more strongly against MySQL; I'd much prefer to have SQL Server
I strongly agree. MySQL is an excellent free database, but if you're willing to pay, then MSSQL simply blows it away.
PhpBB supports both.
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And of course the preview is in Times New Roman, but the actual page is in Arial.
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Hmm...
* After submitting a post one is returned to the FIRST page of a thread rather than the last!
* When requesting the last page the "next page" link actually returns the penultimate page
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It's such a WTF that this forum uses JScript to do these things:
Traversing thread pages.
Needless fiddling with the edit box. (I can't post with JS off!)
Now, being a paranoid person, I usually browse with JScript off. Can someone tell these 'telligent systems' people that A) JS-ing everything in sight is not cool since every kiddie started doing it, and B) They missed a letter in their name.
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@El Foo said:
It's such a WTF that this forum uses JScript to do these things:
Traversing thread pages.
Needless fiddling with the edit box. (I can't post with JS off!)
Now, being a paranoid person, I usually browse with JScript off. Can someone tell these 'telligent systems' people that A) JS-ing everything in sight is not cool since every kiddie started doing it, and B) They missed a letter in their name.
JScript is the server-side language by Mircosoft.
Javascript (ECMA) is what you're referring to.
And there really is no excuse for having it off.
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@dhromed said:
@El Foo said:
It's such a WTF that this forum uses JScript to do these things:
Traversing thread pages.
Needless fiddling with the edit box. (I can't post with JS off!)
Now, being a paranoid person, I usually browse with JScript off. Can someone tell these 'telligent systems' people that A) JS-ing everything in sight is not cool since every kiddie started doing it, and B) They missed a letter in their name.
JScript is the server-side language by Mircosoft.
Javascript (ECMA) is what you're referring to.
And there really is no excuse for having it off.
Funnily enough, JScript is also used by IE, and doesn't exactly conform to the ECMA specifications. Points for style, though. And, also funnily enough, some of us don't like the idea of having a fully-fledged, featureful scripting language on when browsing the big bad Internet; there's bandits in them there websites!
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@rbriem said:
A "How not to FAQ up your post" FAQ. Good idea.
We'd pretty much have to call it the "WTFaq".
:)
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@El Foo said:
It's such a WTF that this forum uses JScript to do these things:
Traversing thread pages.
Needless fiddling with the edit box. (I can't post with JS off!)
Now,
being a paranoid person, I usually browse with JScript off. Can someone
tell these 'telligent systems' people that A) JS-ing everything in
sight is not cool since every kiddie started doing it, and B) They
missed a letter in their name.
Well - 'telligence' must be the opposite of 'intelligence', so the name it probably fitting.
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@El Foo said:
@dhromed said:
@El Foo said:
It's such a WTF that this forum uses JScript to do these things:
Traversing thread pages.
Needless fiddling with the edit box. (I can't post with JS off!)
Now, being a paranoid person, I usually browse with JScript off. Can someone tell these 'telligent systems' people that A) JS-ing everything in sight is not cool since every kiddie started doing it, and B) They missed a letter in their name.
JScript is the server-side language by Mircosoft.
Javascript (ECMA) is what you're referring to.
And there really is no excuse for having it off.
Funnily enough, JScript is also used by IE, and doesn't exactly conform to the ECMA specifications. Points for style, though. And, also funnily enough, some of us don't like the idea of having a fully-fledged, featureful scripting language on when browsing the big bad Internet; there's bandits in them there websites!
Use a different browser if you're not happy with IE. Firefox and Opera both are excellent browsers that don't support activeX. Buy a Mac (the mini is pretty cheap and comes with another excellent activeX-free browser: Safari).
If turning on javascript makes your browsing unsafe, you're visiting some pretty sketchy sites. If you don't like being a victim, stop being around criminals.
There's no point in being afraid of javascript. Your fears are unnecessary. The internet really isn't that big and bad. No more than your average city.
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Strange noone has added this yet:
* New posts are not compared against your last visit date so clicking the "new post" icon takes you to the LAST post in the thread rather than the first post you haven't already seen, unlike all other board systems with self-respect.
