SDMB Archived On Another Site

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42

femtosecond,

Great idea on displaying both the cache through a button or something like that. I will look into this. I will also look into adding a few more seconds to our connection time so to more likely connect to Straightdope.

As you stated “And, like erislover’s problem shows, some threads seem available at our board, but have posts missing. Make sure your software doesn’t overwrite its complete copy with our incomplete one, thinking it’s more recent.” we always go off date and time so not to have this problem. As far as the id’s are concerned that is one of the parts that makes message boards so dynamic. We are trying to stay on top of this. :slight_smile:

Scott

43

I’ve alerted Ed and Jerry again to this thread, let’s see what happens.

your humble TubaDiva
Administrator

44

Fingers are crossed. My favoritre debate ever, “The Problem of Universals” started by yours truly, has the last two pages eaten. :frowning:

45

erislover,

Here is an example of the lost threads posted from Straightdope on 12-7-01. I didn’t want to post all of it because it is just to long much like this thread! :slight_smile: Is this what you wanted. Just wondering.

Pochacco
Member

Registered: Jun 2000
Posts: 93 quote:

Originally by Spiritus Mundi

quote:
This is why we have three primary colors. If we had four types of cones in our eyes, there would be four primary colors. Color is very anthrocentric.
Nitpick alert:
The sensitivity of the three types of cones does not align with the three primary colors folks learned in art class (blue-red-yellow, the primary colors of pigment) but are generally associated with the primary colors of light (blue-green-red).

In fact, the “red” cones actually have their peak of sensitivity in the “yellow-orange” part of the spectrum.

But I wasn’t saying that the peak sensitivity of the cones lines up with the primaries. What I was pointing out was that because the eye has three types of receptors you have to have three primary colors in system of color reproduction. What those primaries are depends upon the physical properties of the system.

If the eye had four types of primaries (instead of three) schoolchildren would learn about the four primary colors of pigment.

12-07-2001 08:57 AM

Spiritus Mundi
Member

Registered: Nov 1999
Posts: 3165 DSeid

quote:
By the standards of the initial quote I must be a nominalist, but I don’t believe what Spiritus says nominalists believe. Hmmm.
Really? Perhaps you could tell me what part of the nominalist position (as I have discussed it) you are in disagreement with.

quote:
Patterns exist.
I think this mught be the source of the confusion. In what manner do you believe that patterns exist?

Do you, like Abelard, find for them a special existence as human conception?
Do you, like most nominalists, find no objective existence for them at all asking, “Where is spiral? Can you point to zig-zag?”
Or do you, like myself, find that some patterns are inherent in the structure of reality and thus have the same claim to “existence” as any particular manifestation of matter or energy?
quote:
So called “universals” and so called “particulars” are both our models of the world formed from our the filtered products of our perception. Ways to classify our perceptions of reality.
Do you see no difference, then, between the types of “filtration” for each? If not, how do you argue that one has an existing referent while the other does not?

quote:
Length? We percieve length with our senses - sight, touch.
So we perceive it directly yet it is not real. How, then, do you argue that other things which we perceive directly are real?

quote:
We infer from past experience that a set of perceptions will change in this dimension in predictable ways. This inference is a model of the world and has been a reliable one, I entirely expect it to continue to be so, but that does not make it a “universal”.
Perhaps you are finding an implication in the word “universal” which is absent from the standard form of this debate. The OP contains a fairly clear treatment of the “universal::particular” dichotomy. If a word is predicable, if the concept behind the word can be common to many things, then it is a “universal”.

That is the definition of the word in this context.

quote:
“Universals” are inferential from particulars, not deductive.
They can be either. From a given logical structure I might deduce that “DSeid is a physician.” Every element of that statement can be viewed as a universal. “[DSeid-identity] [group membership] (or [equivalence]) [physician]”

Pochacco
Well, I warned that it was a nitpick. I didn’t actually disagree with your 1-to-1 relationship between types of cone sensitivity and primary color (though it is conceivable that a 4th type of cone could have it’s sensitivity “nested” entirely within the range of one of the present 3. This would afford greater differentiation between hues in that range, but it would not necessitate a 4th “primary ocolor” to represent.

Hey, it was just a little hijack because I’ve always found color perception to be fascinating.

12-07-2001 09:10 AM

46

erislover,

Do you want me to post all that we have at this location?
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=102884&pagenumber=1

Scott

47

eris: now that I see the dates on the universals thread, I think I understand why you were having difficulty.

IIRC, the hack occurred sometime in February and at that time wiped out all posts made after December 8, 2001. The SDMB was reopened at the end of March. All posts made prior to 12/8 and all posts made after the reopen date are here. (I know I saw a few threads from pre-12/8 bumped post-March, so we do have some threads spanning both periods.)

I would think that the problem with this particular thread is because it existed in full version when the boardreader software read it back in December; unfortunately, because it wasn’t entirely wiped out (as all threads started post 12/8 were), the boardreader software read it again post-March when it existed only in truncated form because of the hack. Boardreader, if I’m correct, viewed this as an updated thread and overwrote the previous version it had read. (Whether the previous longer version exists anywhere in a boardreader cache is a question for spurdon.)

Anyway, there should only be a couple of hundred threads(?) that were active both before Dec. 8 and after Dec. 8 but before March. Most of the lost threads were both started and were only active after Dec. 8 and before March, and therefore should be cahced in their full glory on boardreader (with some workarounds as suggested by femtosecond).

Does this sound right?

48

spurdon, I don’t necessarily need it reposted somewhere, just if I could have access to it once and print it out.

(sorry for the late reply, I was out of town!)

49

Humble Servant, your timeline is correct, give or take a few hours. Looking at the forum list, the last pre-crash post still remaining in GQ is from 12-07-2001 09:08 AM GMT, new posts start at 03-11-2002 03:19 AM GMT. (Along with the update this board changed its default time zone from CT to GMT, so there may be some difference.)

As opposed to the meagre 24 posts left here, the universals thread had reached and is displayed by BR as having been archived with 120 replies (that agrees with my xmas list). Like Scott said, going off date and time prevented confusion. From what I gather from seeing double search results, BR seems to treat ambiguous pages as another copy rather than getting messed up when indexing them.

Perhaps my combination of the Opera Browser with a good deal of paranoia concerning having JavaScript enabled is playing tricks on me again, but I tried and can’t make display large cached threads in their entirety through BoardReader’s web interface.

The problem seems to be that the cache display page, being only second choice after the original pages and intended to be called from a search hit, displays its vicinity and then stops after some number of posts. It’s confusing that it doesn’t always start and stop at the real beginning and end of a thread and gives no means of navigating through previous and following posts. With having an offer like Scott’s (!!!) it’s not that important to retrieve our pages, though I hope there is a “next page” button scheduled for the cache pages along with the new layout. Did I miss an ‘official’ way to display entire cached threads?

Psst, Scott, I searched for “…always found color perception…” and when the cache displayed, your search hit highlighting code recursively tried to highlight its own <font color=red> output.

50

femtosecond,

My connection is really slow today. I hate that. What can you do? :slight_smile:

You all are giving great comments. I never though about displaying the next page in archive view. I will see what happens.

As far as us treating ambiguous pages as another copy, this is true. We try and display page by page instead of long treads reaching 500+ posts per page. This is just not possible.

Quote:
“Psst, Scott, I searched for “…always found color perception…” and when the cache displayed, your search hit highlighting code recursively tried to highlight its own <font color=red> output.”

I’ll have to look into this.

Thanks,

Scott

51

Ah, Fish Gunk Solace…you’re still alive, my old friend…

Memories…

(FYI, my ass has still not been kicked)

52

Curious, what about threads that were deleted on purpose at a later date, like the “Falsely attributing quotes to other members” situation - would that thread still be archived at boardreader? (I can’t think of a single thread title that was so deleted, otherwise I would have checked myself).

53

Geez, I’d almost forgotten about this thread…

spurdon…
Welcome to the Dope. Thanks for dropping by, and for lending a hand. It’s appreciated.

Hope we haven’t put too much of a strain on your site by starting this thread. I only visit there about ten times per day :wink:

-David

54

SoulFrost,

Thank you and I’m glad you enjoy using Boardreader.com. StraightDope members have helped us with our new upcoming layout and features that I think will greatly improve what we are doing. I’m looking at about one more week before we launch this. I will let you know when it is up. Again thanks for the welcome!

Scott

P.S. femtosecond, we are fixing that bug that you found with the highlighting. Thank you for that one. Very interesting bug that you found. :slight_smile:

55

…

(eagerly awaiting an update)

56

On Monday afternoon (6-24-02) Boardreader.com (http://www.boardreader.com) will be launching our new layout displaying some of the comments that were given here on this board. Hope all like it and please submit responses. Thanks.

Scott

57

Hey! I like the new layout, spurdon!

:slight_smile:
David

58

SoulFrost,

Thanks!!! :slight_smile:

Over the next few days we are going to be adding more features, but we just wanted to get something up asap so that we could get feedback.

We are also adding some new boards, bigger main stream boards soon.

One thing that I’m interested in hearing from you all is your reaction to seperating posts from threads. This would provide faster upload speeds and less bandwidth usage for forums in general. It is very intensive for a forum like Straightdope to upload a page that contains 20+ posts per page even though someone might only want to read the most recent post.

I’m thinking more like Yahoo boards how they show one post at a time with the option to see each post title after the original thread

I know it is not as nice but the speeds and the costs of displaying posts like this is much more economical and saves time for both sides. The time savings is crazy fast!!!

I wonder your thouhts on this? Of course vbulletin would have to implement this in a new version so it might not be possible, I just was wondering. In addition to this we might be able to do it on Boardreader’s side but to get the full effect it would take the message board manufactures coding hand to fully do the job.

Any comments would be great because if this would be ok then I could approach the powers that be (it wouldn’t be a manditory feature but an option).

Best,

Scott

59

dqa, I somehow got lost in deciding after how long it would be appropriate to ask again, but I intended to do a post that would have been frighteningly similar to your’s! Be assured, you’re not the only one who is still curious about it.

Admins, even in case it should be decided that it isn’t worth the effort to re-integrate the lost threads into our database - Perhaps set them up as static pages? Smaller chance of dropping a wrench into the hamster wheel, if you worry about that. Get the data from Scott and put up a browsable index of thread titles. Just like a really long ‘Threadspotting’-list, but linking to static pages with the recovered versions, instead of leading to the board. From all solutions to get the threads back to this site it would be the one involving the least work.

Scott, at first I was disappointed about losing the overview over 25 thread titles at once in the search results. But displaying the text from around the search hit more than makes up for it for finding a relevant thread.

The ‘Replies:’ and ‘Date:’ fields have to stand out a bit, but bold and black is too similar to the search hit text. Set that whole line off in another color, preferably green text and gray links, like Google does.

With the Opera browser the search results wrap around about in the middle of the page. If it is the ‘feature’ I think it is, then Netscape could have trouble too. Not all browsers give width attributes in nested tables the same priorities, due to the lack of a precise standard. Check your html coding, and if you find one that will look the same on all browsers, maybe tell the vBulletin guys. They’ve got the same problem with their boards. :smiley:

You’re right, having to load a 100K page to read only the last post saying ‘me too’ is insane somehow. But when I read this board I go online, load a bunch of threads in the background, and go offline again. Skipping through a list of single posts doesn’t work for me, even if it would be as fast as Yahoo (and for some boards I won’t name here I doubt that :)). Most of my waiting comes from the lag between requesting a page and receiving it, not from the size.

I need all posts to be on one page. Something could be done about how many posts this page displays, though. The ‘goto=lastpost’ buttons of vBulletin’s thread list could be more intelligent, for instance. Instead of loading all posts and jumping to an anchor just have it create a page with the new post(s) since the last visit. Or a row of dumb buttons leading to pages with the last 5,10,25… posts. It wouldn’t be a perfect, but a simple solution, if you want to read only the latest posts.

In the forums I like at this board you more than often need to go back and re-read the first post or the whole thread anyway, though. The threads in the GQ forum reach 10.2 posts on average. Ask a question and get it answered, there isn’t much branching. Still, a separate posts list would allow the branching of a thread into sub-threads. Boards with ‘chatty’ big-thread forums like our MPSIMS really would benefit from having to load only the posts you are interested in. But I don’t know too much of the message board world outside of GQ to have an opinion on that.

On your site, as an option, why not? I think giving the user an extra choice never hurts.

60

femtosecond,

Thank you for the response and comments. Well taken! I will try the coloring of the Date and Post Replies today sometime. The reason I wanted to bold the ‘Date’ and ‘Replies’ is because you may sort by these two catagories.

With Opera I will have to look into this. We only get about 25 views a day from this system so it wasn’t a high priority nor did we do real testing on this but I will get on it as well. Thank you again on the heads up. You sure are good! Can’t fool you so I guess I have to stop trying!:slight_smile:

As far as the posts verse threads display I agree 100%. Point again noted. You sometimes need to read the prior post to get yourself up to speed on the conversation.

I guess what I should have mentioned if I didn’t clearly before is that we would like to return results only on the post level in Boardreaders search results instead of only showing the thread starter. This would give users the direct access to the exact area or areas for their search query. You would still see the hole post but this way you would go directly to the post section on the page. I’m not sure at this time what we have to do to make this happen but I will keep you posted on this. I guess for vbulletin sites this is not a huge problem because we use highlighting of the search term inside of the page but for other message board technologies we are not able to show the search matchs through highlighting (not all message boards are as well writen as vbulletin you have to understand that is why searching different types sometimes gets tricky).

Quote:
“Instead of loading all posts and jumping to an anchor just have it create a page with the new post(s) since the last visit. Or a row of dumb buttons leading to pages with the last 5,10,25… posts. It wouldn’t be a perfect, but a simple solution, if you want to read only the latest posts.”

Here is the main problem that we are having even though your suggestion is a great one. We grab the page when we index. We can not determine until after we index the page where the post starts and stops. Maybe we could just have vbulletin insert a post id number that we could follow for each post so that we could index one post at a time. Let me think about this a little more.

Thanks again for the help!

Scott