Forum problems

also done

Cheers, Fons.

It seems to me that the server gives time in “UTC + 1 hour [ DST ]”. Could someone, please, switch the “DST” off (seems one needs to do this “manually”). (Note: I’m talking about time that’s seen by guests here, not about registered users’ settings, which everyone needs to change “manually”, as well.)

Also, maybe you could allow “.csv” extensions for attachments.

Ok done.

Cheers, Fons.

Great, thanks.

I can see that the vast majority of people (me including) read RootTalk forums as guests.
The problem is that, in this case, the “new/unread forums/topics” are not marked in another colour -> links to these forums/topics do not become red (and there are no “View new/unread posts”, “Mark forums/topics read” and similar links, of course).
Maybe there’s an appropriate administration option which can be switched on?
There exists the “Delete all board cookies” link down there (working even for a “guest” user), so the phpBB system probably keeps track of the “last visit” in a cookie (even for a “guest” user), and so it should be possible to utilize it (maybe one just needs to “enable” it somewhere).
I’ve seen systems on which it was working this way for guests (though I cannot guarantee that they were also phpBB based, and not MyBB, for example).

I’ve just found … a bug fix note …

What’s new in phpBB 3.0.8:
November 22nd, 2010
(…)
Bug:
(…)
[PHPBB3-9840] - Display view unread posts link for guests
(…)

Well, it seems to me that you do not really think that improving the life of “guest users” is worth the effort …

So, during the last several days I collected some typical “WHO IS ONLINE” numbers (just one per day): [quote]In total there are 23 users online :: 3 registered, 0 hidden and 20 guests (based on users active over the past 5 minutes)
(…)
Registered users: Exabot [Bot], Google [Bot], MSN [Bot][/quote] [quote]In total there are 24 users online :: 2 registered, 0 hidden and 22 guests (based on users active over the past 5 minutes)
(…)
Registered users: Bing [Bot], Google [Bot][/quote] [quote]In total there are 25 users online :: 1 registered, 0 hidden and 24 guests (based on users active over the past 5 minutes)
(…)
Registered users: Google [Bot][/quote] [quote]In total there are 21 users online :: 3 registered, 0 hidden and 18 guests (based on users active over the past 5 minutes)
(…)
Registered users: Bing [Bot], Google [Bot], Google Feedfetcher[/quote] Let me know if you need more statistics in order to become convinced.

Ok, I found the option:

Enable topic marking for guests:
Stores read/unread status information for guests. If disabled, posts are always marked read for guests.

and did turn it on (was turned off).

Cheers, Fons.

Great, thanks.

New/unread posts are “red” now and I can see the “Mark forums read” link now.
That, in principle, solves the problem.

There are no “View unread posts” nor “View new posts” links, though. The picture present in the PHPBB3-9840 bug discussion seemed to suggest that at least the “View unread posts” link should appear (even for “guests”). Maybe it’s phpBB version specific.

I’d like to share my experience with the newly enabled feature … “topic marking for guests” (well, I’m usually reading ROOT forums as the “guest” user).

In general, all topics with “new” / “unread” posts are really marked “red” now, and so are the links to the relevant forums in the “Board index”.
As soon as I “view” such a topic, it becomes “black” (i.e. “old” / “read”).
However, it happens quite often that, even though there are no more “new” / “unread” topics / posts in a particular forum, the link to the forum in the “Board index” remains marked “red”.
I don’t know how to fix it, but I have found that there are two simple ways to overcome this problem:

1. after I viewed all “recent” topics / posts in a particular forum, I click its “Mark topics read” link,
2. after I viewed all “recent” topics / posts in all forums, I click the “Mark forums read” link.
   In both cases, all relevant links to forums in the “Board index” become “black” again.

For the record … I am using an Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS / i686 / 32-bit machine and Firefox 16.0.2 (Mozilla Firefox for Ubuntu canonical - 1.0).

Could you, please, add “.spkg” and “.bz2” as valid extensions of attachments (a “.spkg” is actually a “sage” package in “.tar.bz2” format). Thanks in advance.

ok, done.

– Fons

Well, it seems that after phpBB upgrade the [url=https://root-forum.cern.ch/t/forum-problems/13756/1 words" and “at least 4 characters”[/url] problems are back.
Could you, please, again change the search word length from 4 to 2 and disable the common word algorithm (and maybe one can also make underscores “ordinary” characters in the new phpBB version).

Hi,

With the MySQL search index (that you asked for in another post) none of this can be configured

How does this surface in practice?

Cheers, Axel.

You can’t search for “arm” nor “ios”, for example.
Note that many classes have methods with names which are three characters long (like “Add”, “FFT”, “Fit”, “Get”, “IsA”, “Pop”, “Set”, …) and so it’s not possible to search the forum for posts which contain them. There exist also methods which are just two characters long (like “At”, “Cd”, “Cp”, “ls”).
The “underscores” problem is that if you try to find “CINT”, you will get all “cint” appearances instead (way too many, of course).

Hi,

So what do we do? Go back to builtin search instead of mysql? Or not support short identifiers? Can you pick one?

Axel.

Well, I’ve found this (note: the “common words” seem to be also called “stopwords” in MySQL Fulltext Search):
phpbb.com/community/viewtop … 5#p8939885
phpbb.com/community/viewtop … 5#p8907075
wiki.phpbb.com/MySQL_Fulltext_Search
dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/ … words.html

Fine-Tuning MySQL Full-Text Search: dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/ … uning.html
Note that we can also set our own stopword list / file -> so we can have an “empty” list / file or one based on the default one but with some words removed (like “at”, “get”, …, for example).

Hi,

We don’t maintain the MySQL server ourselves and thus don’t have access to its config.

So I’m afraid that we’re back to: do you prefer MySQL search or searches for three letter words? You asked for both, I let you decide I’d say it’s better to have code search but >= 4 letters.

Cheers, Axel.

Hi,

Just to make sure that there is really no way: I have opened a ticket with the database people to ask whether we can tweak the full text search. I’ll let you know!

Axel.

I think I also prefer to stay with the “MySQL Full-Text Search”, but let’s see what another forum users say.

If the database people agree to:

1. … lower the “minimum lengths” to 3 but not to 2 then it should be o.k., though 2 would be better, of course
2. … modify the “stopwords” file then we should make sure that we revise it before they apply it (i.e. we should make sure that some ROOT relevant words are removed from it -> e.g. “at”, “get”) -> actually I would prefer to disable stopword filtering at all (setting the “ft_stopword_file” variable to the empty string ‘’).

Hi Wile E.,

That’s exactly what I asked them for. Let’s see.

Axel.