Tubadiva,
Do you know when the members function will be available again?
Zev Steinhardt
It’s not.
Sorry, but we will not make our membership list available for spammers and scammers. We feel the potential benefit to our legitimate users is outweighed by the damage and hassle factor inherent by putting our business in the street, as it were.
We regret that we have to turn off/deaccess so many nice little functions of vB, it’s the nasty times we live in.
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
Thanks for the answer TubaDiva.
Oh, well. I was hoping to watch from time to time and see myself rising from 490th place to 489th (in total posts. Gee, I have no life…), but I understand.
Zev Steinhardt
Would it be possible to make a list that doesn’t provide entire profiles, just screen names, registration dates, post count and last post? That way we could still figure out who the SDMB addicts around here are. I realize this is pretty low on the list of priorities, but is it actually possible?
I just saw this thread that may be what you want, i.e., nothing sensitive.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=29678
Presumably any one of the mods could do the same without trouble. You might check back after this current upgrade shakes out. They seem preoccupied with simple things like too-many-connections.
It is the function of the Member to spread the word about the greatness of Cecil Adams, the usefulness of the Straight Dope books, and the entertainment value of the SDMB, in a manner that pleases the Administrators and Moderators.
So far, you Dopers have done a pretty good job! 
We really do have our hands full with what we’re doing every day. No offense meant, but I certainly wouldn’t be able to add this on to my duties and I don’t think anybody else on our staff has this kind of time either.
And besides, I appreciate that a member of the Teeming Millions cares enough to do something like this; who are we to take that away from them?
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
“Dopers are doing it for themselves.”
Well… To do it requires the members functionality. Perhaps special permission can be granted to someone to access the membership list occasionally to generate this sort of thing. Personally, sorting the first list was an amusing enjoyment for me, but I can’t do it every week.
I was merely wondering if it would be possible to provide a non-sensitive list, not actually requesting that you do it. The teeming millions can easily rank us on their own, but a member list would be required to do so (the thread in question was compiled while the feature was active). Certainly not a big deal, but I wanted to know if it was something to hold out a glimmer of hope for.
In that case, probably not. Sorry.
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
Well, what you could do is use the names listed in that thread, and then get the relevant data from each of the individual profiles, but that would probably either kill the board from too many hits, or take forever.
More simply, you could track your standing relative to specific other people, so, for instance, if Joe were just above you when that thread was posted, you could periodically check your profile and Joe’s profile and see if you’ve passed him. This would take only two profile accesses, not a thousand, so it’d be a lot more practical.
Actually, I wrote a java program to go through and parse each member profile for some information (total posts, name, some other stuff).
It would be trivial to update it to gather whatever information we want that is in the profile.
The problems are:
-
it takes a while to run since it actually gets each of the 6000+ profiles.
-
it has to be run again each time one wants to update the info.
I’ll be happy to share the source code if someone wants it.
Yeah, that’s what I was talking about with it taking forever. It probably also has a noticeable effect on board performance… I hope that you weren’t actually testing it without asking the admins first?
We are having real problems with board functionality right now . . . our techs are working very hard to try to get the system tweaked so that it operates swiftly and efficiently for everyone.
That someone would add in something that would put extra burden on the system now just to get some list of post totals or some other useless shit strikes me as being selfish and inconsiderate at the very least. It’s not a competition, it’s not a sport, or at least, it shouldn’t be.
Yeah, it would be nice to be able to offer you all kinds of fun things like that, you could play all the little games you wanted to, but at the present time we’re more concerned with making sure people can sign in, read, and make postings in a timely fashion. That’s more important than anything else and I would think that anything that gets in the way of that is not in our best interests, however well intentioned the idea might be.
You wanna be truly helpful? Help us (and vB) figure out how to get better functionality out of the system as it’s currently configured. That would be about the coolest thing I can think of.
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
No, I didn’t test it on the entire board. And my testing was all done at least a month ago (more like two). I only did enough for proof-of-concept. only a few hundred profiles per batch.
It’s designed to allow non-continuous updates, so all the profiles don’t have to be done at once. It could be spread out over time.
Anyway, someone did request the program, and I gave it to him. Goes by the name of “Show_Biz”, apparently. So if you’re getting a crapload of hits from a single IP, call him on it.
You might try changing the default on searches, like you did on the other screens, to a smaller range and perhaps default to the most recent forum.
I don’t know how many searches are done, but I have timed out on them a lot the last 3 days.
Thanks for the program, but no, I never tried it.
I couldn’t figure out how to use it. I’m not a programmer. You sent three programs and I had no idea what to do with them.
I guess I was thinking it would be like a link I could just click on from inside my email, like some Java slide shows that car companies emailed me.
Like I told you when I asked, I only wanted to update the list of who were the milestone guys, #100, #1000, etc. that Satan(?) listed one time.
I have enough trouble now just getting in to post that I’m in no mood for anything extra. The idea is shelved for me.