Avatars? What are these avatars you speak of?
Oh, please, no avatars.
Jerry (or anyone out there that knows the answer),
I remember a while ago, folks that were like me, (a returning, non-paying deadbeat) would have Guest changed to Member. Not a big deal, but I’ve noticed that many Charter Member who lost that status now have it back. Will Guest be changed to Member anytime soon, or is it no longer on the table?
If this has already been addressed in the thread, my apologies. I didn’t see it. If anyone else has the answer and can save Jerry the time, feel free to respond.
Thanks,
SFP
I just read the new user agreement, and I found my answer on the first page.
Seems I’ll be a “Guest”.
That’s fine, but not what I remember…
So, as it stands now:
General posters fall into three categories -
-
Charter Members - original members that have paid their membership fees without interruption from the beginning of pay service and continue to pay today to avoid the ads.
-
Members - folks who pay to not see ads
-
Guests - freebie posters
Does that sum it up?
Yes, except for one small point - only Members and Charter Members are allowed to post pictures in their user profiles.
Ed, will guests ever have post count and location fields enabled, or has that not been decided yet?
I understood at some point that you preferred people to see the ads instead of paying to avoid them (making guests more desirable customers than members). Isn’t it then counterintuitive to offer perks to paying members when you prefer them to see the ads instead of paying?
HELLO, this message is for the long-timers. (and i do believe esp. in this thread there are some real long timers that are counting me as a short timer but if you owned a timer
how long has SDMB used the same php? oh my oh me. its easy to think of better designs, not in the box area where i’m typing now, but in the options for views in the “directory” list, where all threads are diveded into 10 categories. I like the catergories the way they are. But why can’t all the threads i am interested in the same view. color could be used. or a mouseover. etc…
well, should we go on? or should we stop now? I DO NOT CODE!!! I guess the inspired dopers will be waiting to see when you are accepting new ideas for the message board.
hope i’m one of them. 
As a general rule, the powers that be, and a large number of the members, enjoy the relatively sparse nature of this message board. Rare are the days when changes are made. What you suggest has been considered, and not adopted.
i know changes are rare, this website is almost exactly the same as it was about 5 years ago. don’t get me wrong, i like how the threads work and messaging box, smilies, etc, and the catergorization is good. but it would be cool to have a cloud view or something “web 2.0” do you imply having the option of a cloud view would change the demographic of the board? i’m sure pretty much the same people will use it, but many might take advantage of a new way to view the threads…
I realize we’ve had a lot of extraneous stuff going on, but there hasn’t been a board update from Jerry since the end of December. Are things still happening, like us potentially getting the Groups feature back?
Just curious.
If the community desires certain features enabled then the day-to-day administrators are the ones to petition. I rarely make decisions about features or at least believe I’m not the decision maker. There may be a misunderstanding going on between the day-to-day admins and myself in that they are waiting for me to say they can turn on features and I’ve been assuming they can turn on any features they want. If a feature causes a performance problem (unlikely for most features) then I’ll tell them why we need to turn it back off.
That said in the past I’ve been a bit gruff in my response to them when I’ve had to turn a feature back off so we’ve probably arrived at an unspoken impasse where I think it’s fine for them to turn on whatever they want and they think they can’t turn anything on. In the first few weeks after the upgrade I also told the day-to-day admins to not mess around with features because I was also doing things and I didn’t want us to bump into each other. So I’ll take responsibility for not going back to them later and saying they could turn on features. I had just assumed that after the performance had stabilized last fall that they could do anything they wanted but it looks like I dropped the ball. Finally, I don’t know exactly why it’s become “common knowledge” that most features can’t be turned on due to performance reasons. From my perspective there are only a small number of features that could cause a performance issue and I think we can turn them on and see what happens anyway. If they don’t work we’ll turn them back off. That doesn’t mean we haven’t had problems with certain features in the past. We have but we’re now in some cases two, three, or even four pieces of hardware and one to two major version levels of vBulletin away from those previous times. Conditions have changed so we can change too.
Now to address your question about the upgrade. Here’s where I believe we stand. It’s basically finished except for issues with search which I’ve been working on the past couple of days. Features however can be turned on or off at will and do not need to wait for some upgrade “complete” moment.
Two things I’ve done recently in the search area are:
- Increase the amount of resources available to search by 400%. From my limited testing this has reduced the “fatal error” search result frequency. That “fatal error” was vBulletin reaching a limit on the resources it was willing to provide for a search. Now it’s much higher. I’ve noted that multiple word searches or single common word searches that in the past were returning the error are now completing successfully. This change has been in place since Saturday.
While it won’t eliminate the possibility that a search can consume so many resources that it returns an error the frequency of those errors should have been lessened with Saturday’s change. There will still be cases where search fails due to resource constraints and we do need such limits. If we don’t have them then those just reading and posting to the message board (instead of searching) are affected by the smaller number of people doing resource intensive searches.
- The message board has been opened up to the Google search index spider. This has been ongoing since Friday. I’m not sure if Google will ever be able to completely index the message board and it will probably be months before it’s even mostly indexed but the process has started. As time goes on I’ll start letting other search engine spiders in as well but right now I’m focusing just on Google.
Yay! You rock!
Thanks, from all of us search fanatics.
Sorry for the delay in replying to you Jerry. My computer has been down. 
Anyway, thank you so much for your update and as you’ve now cleared up any misconceptions about asking after new features, I’ll head over to the other thread to repost my question there.
We appreciate all your hard work!
Jerry, a quick suggestion if it’s something easy to implement (and of course if Ed give the OK):
Guests are registered users of the site that haven’t paid, of course. Probably they’ve filled in their location field, and assume that’s visible. So they’ll say things like, “In my state, the laws provide this…” without realizing that nobody but them knows what state that is. If you could enable display of Guests’ locations without a major hack to the software, it’d be useful for all concerned without putting much of any strain on the system – one small bit of additional data retrieved from the member database that the display is engaging anyway to fill in the other data associated with a post.