AtariAge

Yes, "View New Content" is very slow. ..Al

Interesting stuff, thanks for the additional information. Every now and then I'll look to see what vBulletin is up to, but I haven't gone over there in a while now.. ..Al

What are the VB users angry about? The fact that customer feedback has been moved to a private forum, or issues with VB (or both)? ..Al

What I was proposing was just a simple means to go back and forth through errors, not seek to a specific error. You'd start at the beginning, and allow the user to jump forward or backwards one error at a time, and jump to the beginning and end of the file. Logically it's more work managing a buffer (or buffers) and scanning for the appropriate text and parsing it, but it's not unreasonable. In this fashion you would not need to worry about the problems associated with loading a potentially enormous file (although I guess you could put a cap on the size of the file it would attempt to load). I agree that arbitrarily searching for a given error in the file (jump to error #4) is more demanding as you'd be slowly scanning through the file, and that loading the entire file if memory allows would be ideal. Looking at the logs on my live forum, there are only a few and they are quite small (the largest is only 25K). Although if something goes wrong and you're getting tons of driver errors, you're probably going to be dealing with files significantly larger. I'd be happy to see the entire file loaded into memory if that would work in most cases. I also like your suggestion of providing a list of the error files with a link to download each. Even that would save some time and make things easier. :) ..Al

You don't need to read the entire file, just fread an arbitrary block at a time and parse that in memory. When you find the delimiter, process the text until you hit the next delimeter. You could even use fgets to read the specific error a line at a time once you are fseek'd to the proper place in the file. Going backwards is a little more tricky, but not terribly so. This is not a difficult problem. ..Al

I would just present a list of the error files in the cache directory, allow the user to pick one to view, and then show a single error at a time, as opposed to loading the entire file. Display the timestamp, error number, error description, IP address, URL nicely, and then the array dump after that. Allow the user to go up and down through the errors one at a time, and go to the first and last error as well. No need for pagination as far as calculating page numbers. ..Al

It would be nice if these errors could be viewed from the ACP--I had to look up an error yesterday while doing some testing. I was already in the ACP, but had to jump into a shell to take a look at the cgi file . ..Al

Huh, hadn't seen that before. I like it, especially if it would remember your preference (not sure if the Blog does). ..Al

I see what you mean now. :) If a choice was made available, I would likely make the default view the columnar format. I'm sure some people would experiment to look at the "New" style, but not sure how many would stick with it. ..Al

I appreciate your offer to spend your own time to work on this issue, but really feel that it's important enough that this should be done on Invision time. If you make available a mod of some sort that formats the search results akin to 2.3, that's great and I'd certainly take advantage of it (so it certainly would not be a waste of your time), but ideally I'd like to see this integrated into the base software. As I stated earlier, I visit other IP.Board forums on a routine basis, and it sure would be nice to have "View New Content" be comparable to the 2.3 version whenever I visit those forums. I'd be quite happy if an alternate search results view was made as an option, either globally (the admin sets it) or individually (users can modify it in "My Settings"). And as Michael mentioned, also having an option to determine if "New" (since your last visit) or "Unread" posts were displayed would be ideal. I'd then shut the hell up about this once and for all. ;) ..Al

I personally feel that "View New Content" should work as it did with 2.3.6, that is, show only new posts since my last visit. This is what happens now with the other tabs, so it's not even internally consistent. I will certainly make the same change you did, although it would be nice if this was a global setting in the ACP instead so admins could set it as they wish. Finding "New" content is one of the most important features forums provide. After all, that's often why you repeatedly visit a forum, to find out "what's new". Giving users the ability to personalize how this feature works is not useless at all in my opinion. ..Al

You state a few times that perhaps I am just being resistant to change. That couldn't be further from the truth. I've embraced most of what Invision has done with 3.0 and there have been considerable changes. However, "View New Content" as it pertains to posts is clearly a step backwards. The old "View New Posts" feature works well and conveys useful information in a reasonable amount of space. I'm not saying "pack information onto the screen until it's completely covered", please don't put words in my mouth. While I certainly do not use every feature and link of the "View New Posts" page every time I call it up, I can say that I have used all of the features at some time, and some of the removed elements I use quite frequently. And appearance-wise, it's just easier to parse this information when it's in a columnar format. Have you had people complaining that the "View New Posts" results are too cumbersome to use? I've never had anyone complain about it on my forum (which has been running IP.Board for 4+ years), and as I stated before, it's very similar in appearance to how the forum view looks now (even in 3.0). This also extends to the normal Search results, which I'm also not happy about. I just haven't used them very often here since 3.0 arrived, so I forget that those are also formatted the same way. Sure, individual forum admins can skin their forum in such a way to add some/most/all of this information back, and to skin it in a fashion more akin to 2.3. However, I visit many forums, some of which run IP.Board. If IPB 3 ships with this implementation of "View New Content", that means pretty much all IP.Boards I visit will have this retrograded "View New Content" layout. I used to use "View New Posts" all the time on your company forum--now I hardly use it at all. I don't feel it's fair to compare forum search results to those of a generic search engine like Google. It's like comparing apples and oranges. Forums have very specific data that is returned when you search, whereas Google has to be very generic with their results. If that's the model you were going after, I don't feel that it is appropriate in this case. I can understand your goal in wanting a more "generic" search that encompasses the Discussion, Gallery, Downloads, Blog, etc. modules of the forum, and returning those results in a somewhat consistent appearance. This is admirable, especially if you are ever able to get the master search index working and can merge all the results onto a single page (as was initially the case). But as it stands now, the results are shown independently on each tab, and as a result, I feel you should base the formatting on the data available, and not try to shoehorn that content into a particular style as is being done now. ..Al

That old running thread on the Preview forum had quite a few posts in agreement with what I (and others) wrote, and my first post in that thread was quite upvoted. I would hazard a guess that the majority of people that regularly use the "View New Posts" function on 2.3.6 see the new "View New Content" results as a downgrade. Some. Yes, please do make the results tabular. Overall you guys have done a great job with 3.0, I'm quite confident that you are up to the challenge of properly remedying this issue. This is really the only major sticking point I have with 3.0 and it's a big one (the other being new topic markers, which is somewhat related). It wasn't broken to begin with and did not need fixing at all. 1) Bring back the columnar format. It's easy to parse, and your eyes know right where to go for each bit of information once you're familiar with the format. The new format uses two "rows" of information for each "new" result and there is plenty of wasted white space. In this particular instance, adding white space for the sake of making the results appear "cleaner" simply doesn't work in my opinion. This goes against the grain "form follows function". 2) The topic title links to the first new post in the thread. Previously, the topic title linked to the first post in the thread and you used the "New Post" icon to go to the first new post. Now there is no way to go to the first post, which is useful if you want to catch up on a thread you haven't viewed in a while (among other reasons). This is completely inconsistent with how the title link works when viewing the topic list in a forum (which itself isn't consistent when viewing the forum index!!) 3) Number of "Views" was removed. Useful to see threads that are particularly active. 4) "Topic Starter" was removed. This is nice information to have, as you may be more interested in threads started by particular users than others. As a forum admin, this is also useful when you want to keep an eye on threads started by particular users (for instance, someone who may be a trouble starter). 5) You can no longer click on the number of "Replies" to get a popup showing the replies in a thread. 6) No attachments icon so you can see threads with attachments in them. This also includes the accompanying link that would give you a popup showing all the attachments (which I have used many times). 7) No means to get to the "Last Post". Currently in 2.3.6, the "Last post by" text links to the last post in the thread. Useful if you want to jump right to the end of a thread. 8) Page links were removed for threads spanning multiple pages. This includes the "Jump to page" link shown before the page links. 9) The "Get active topics for:" dropdown at the bottom of the "View New Post" results is gone. Functionality removed. As you can see, even with the improvements you've made, there's still quite a bit missing from the original "View New Posts" results. Much of this functionality exists when viewing the topics in a forum. Link to first post in thread, topic starter, attachment link, replies link, link to last post, and number of views are all present, in a nice, columnar format. But the "View New Posts" results as it exists in 2.3, which is nearly identical in appearance, contains too much information? What? Please bring back the functionality and appearance of the 2.3.6 "View New Posts" results. ..Al

I agree with the original poster--it's a shame that Invision appears ready to ship their updated flagship product with this new incarnation of "View New Posts". I started a long-running thread on the Preview forum regarding this, and while some improvements were made, overall the net result is that useful information was removed and it's now more difficult to parse. And don't get me started on returning "Unread" results instead of "New" results--the various tabs in this search aren't even consistent with how they work. ..Al

Excellent idea! I'd really love a nice skin that works well on the iPhone and supports most of the functionality in the primary skin. :) ..Al