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UER Forum > Archived Forum Announcements > Forum Read States Change (those little circles) (Viewed 3006 times)
el nerdo 

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Re: Forum Read States Change (those little circles)
<Reply # 20 on 12/6/2010 3:03 AM >
Posted on Forum: UER Forum
 
Posted by hydrotherapy
Can the new read states replace Xmas this year?

Please?


Fuck that. Needs MORE Christmas - and earlier.

hydrotherapy 

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Re: Forum Read States Change (those little circles)
<Reply # 21 on 12/6/2010 3:40 AM >
Posted on Forum: UER Forum
 
Posted by el nerdo


Fuck that. Needs MORE Christmas - and earlier.


I will fight you.

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Re: Forum Read States Change (those little circles)
<Reply # 22 on 12/6/2010 3:45 AM >
Posted on Forum: UER Forum
 
Posted by WarBird69
Hm...am I doing something wrong?

New threads are showing green, existing threads with new replies are showing blue. This is reguardless if I've read the thread or not, which is sort of annoying..


With the new system, UER won't know exactly which threads you've read. If your "read date" was Tuesday and a new thread was posted Monday, with new posts Wednedsay, it will show in Blue, even though you haven't read it at all.

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Re: Forum Read States Change (those little circles)
<Reply # 23 on 12/6/2010 4:12 AM >
Posted on Forum: UER Forum
 
Posted by Avatar-X


With the new system, UER won't know exactly which threads you've read. If your "read date" was Tuesday and a new thread was posted Monday, with new posts Wednedsay, it will show in Blue, even though you haven't read it at all.

-av


IM CONFUSSSEDD :/

i'll get over it..


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Dougo 

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Re: Forum Read States Change (those little circles)
<Reply # 24 on 12/6/2010 5:20 AM >
Posted on Forum: UER Forum
 
Posted by Avatar-X
With 36,000 members and hundreds of thousands of threads, that adds up to a hell of a lot of rows.


I don't really understand how this stuff works, but if you killed off the 20,000+ who haven't logged in for however long, wouldn't that clear things up a bit (I'm guessing that UER is saving everyone's "read-dates" even if they haven't logged in for years)?

If they haven't logged in for two years then kill their account (or something like that) or is there an advantage to having stats in the tens of thousands? <sounds sarcastic, but is a genuine question>

I think also because my posts are all qual-ah-tee that I should get a Premium Membership for keeping UER that little bit classier.

And remember, there are no stupid questions, just stupid people...

I mean...

Cheers,

Doug
[last edit 12/6/2010 10:13 PM by Dougo - edited 3 times]

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White Rabbit 

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Re: Forum Read States Change (those little circles)
<Reply # 25 on 12/6/2010 5:25 AM >
Posted on Forum: UER Forum
 
Edit: Meh, I figured it out on my own.
[last edit 12/6/2010 5:29 AM by White Rabbit - edited 1 times]

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Re: Forum Read States Change (those little circles)
<Reply # 26 on 12/6/2010 2:16 PM >
Posted on Forum: UER Forum
 
Hi, to answer your questions:

Dougo: We already do this, actually. But UER is a big site and has a lot of users.

WR: He originally asked why we don't archive threads more often -- I just did an archiving run this weekend, actually, but there are still a lot of things that don't get archived.

I think the options I've offered are fair and balanced. A lot of people don't even like UER's "advanced" system, they prefer a more forgetful system.

-av

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Re: Forum Read States Change (those little circles)
<Reply # 27 on 12/6/2010 4:33 PM >
Posted on Forum: UER Forum
 
I loved the way it was before, so now I have to pay to keep it that way? Sigh.

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Re: Forum Read States Change (those little circles)
<Reply # 28 on 12/6/2010 4:58 PM >
Posted on Forum: UER Forum
 
Posted by macgruder
I loved the way it was before, so now I have to pay to keep it that way? Sigh.


you havent been here long enough to bitch.

[20:58:22] <3mpolack> i realise that i am the scum of society
EatsTooMuchJam 


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Re: Forum Read States Change (those little circles)
<Reply # 29 on 12/6/2010 5:03 PM >
Posted on Forum: UER Forum
 
The new system is clunky, ineffective, and $5/month to be a member of a forum with a functional read state system is overly high, given that I can pay like $25/year for a flickr pro account. Are you suggesting that your hosting fees for uer are 250% of flickr? You're right. Some people are going to call this a cash grab. They're going to be right.

There are a number of relatively simple ways to re-engineer a read state system (do you even have a caching layer in place yet to offload the database?). enyim memcached client works nicely on Windows. When a user clicks into a forum group (like, for instance, "great lakes", you could query the db once then store a single object containing all of the read states for that user and all displayed topics and then update memcached in a foreground thread with a lazy write back to the db in the background - possibly even use a queuing mechanism and batch writes to reduce i/o contention since there the actual db data can tolerate relaxed consistency).
Otherwise, have you also considered something which would allow a user to disable read states on the ldb for those of us who can't be bothered to care about them, but leave them active on the forum? If LDB read states are causing so much of a burden, then it would make sense to let users who don't need them simply not use them without compromising overall site usability.

Otherwise, you risk (and probably will discover) that your traffic problems resolve themselves a different way in that fewer people will use your forum. That's also a nice way of keeping your database load down.

"The large print giveth and the small print taketh away."
-Tom Waits
EatsTooMuchJam 


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Re: Forum Read States Change (those little circles)
<Reply # 30 on 12/6/2010 5:04 PM >
Posted on Forum: UER Forum
 
Posted by EatsTooMuchJam
The new system is clunky, ineffective, and $5/month to be a member of a forum with a functional read state system is overly high, given that I can pay like $25/year for a flickr pro account. Are you suggesting that your hosting fees for uer are 250% of flickr? You're right. Some people are going to call this a cash grab. They're going to be right.

There are a number of relatively simple ways to re-engineer a read state system (do you even have a caching layer in place yet to offload the database?). enyim memcached client works nicely on Windows. When a user clicks into a forum group (like, for instance, "great lakes", you could query the db once then store a single object containing all of the read states for that user and all displayed topics and then update memcached in a foreground thread with a lazy write back to the db in the background - possibly even use a queuing mechanism and batch writes to reduce i/o contention since there the actual db data can tolerate relaxed consistency).
Otherwise, have you also considered something which would allow a user to disable read states on the ldb for those of us who can't be bothered to care about them, but leave them active on the forum? If LDB read states are causing so much of a burden, then it would make sense to let users who don't need them simply not use them without compromising overall site usability.

Otherwise, you risk (and probably will discover) that your traffic problems resolve themselves a different way in that fewer people will use your forum. That's also a nice way of keeping your database load down.


(That's aside from slightly more complex, but not-so-horrible ideas like sharding the read states table based on a hash of the username to keep individual table sizes down and potentially keep every write from blowing out your entire query cache (that depends somewhat on the database you've chosen for your backend))
[last edit 12/6/2010 5:05 PM by EatsTooMuchJam - edited 1 times]

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Re: Forum Read States Change (those little circles)
<Reply # 31 on 12/6/2010 5:11 PM >
Posted on Forum: UER Forum
 
Posted by EatsTooMuchJam
The new system is clunky, ineffective, and $5/month to be a member of a forum with a functional read state system is overly high, given that I can pay like $25/year for a flickr pro account. Are you suggesting that your hosting fees for uer are 250% of flickr? You're right. Some people are going to call this a cash grab. They're going to be right.


I'm not going to debate the technical merits of your argument (you bring up a number of good points), but opening with this almost made me ignore your entire post. Are you really suggesting that Yahoo-owned Flickr is a good metric for server costs?

I'd imagine the number of Flickr Pro accounts pales in comparison to the number of free accounts, as on any site. Do you really think $25/year covers the hosting costs for more than 5 billion images? (http://blog.flickr.../09/19/5000000000/) No, a whole lot of that is covered by Yahoo, a benefit Av doesn't enjoy.

But at 7 years and 4159 posts, why bother contributing anything to a site you enjoy for free?
[last edit 12/6/2010 5:15 PM by -MisfitStyle- - edited 2 times]

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KublaKhan 


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Re: Forum Read States Change (those little circles)
<Reply # 32 on 12/6/2010 5:34 PM >
Posted on Forum: UER Forum
 
Posted by tholcomb
Can we has christmas now?


With the cursor-trailing thing? And singing dogs? Maybe singing kittehs? Maybe a farting Santa?

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Re: Forum Read States Change (those little circles)
<Reply # 33 on 12/6/2010 6:39 PM >
Posted on Forum: UER Forum
 
I am not yet ready to part with LDB read states, so I made a donation. However, this will give me a month to grow accustomed to the idea that without donating, I will no longer be able to properly obsessively monitor the locations to which I am subscribed.

Ian 

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Re: Forum Read States Change (those little circles)
<Reply # 34 on 12/6/2010 7:19 PM >
Posted on Forum: UER Forum
 
ETMJ, why on earth are you suggesting that this could be a cash grab?

Well let's see...

36,000 accounts, and let's say that 1/4 of these are active - so 9,000 active accounts.

Picking a random low number, let's say that 2% of these are willing to pony up five bucks a month for their readstates. I'd bet 180 people care enough.

So that's $900/mo, or $10,800/yr. Hopefully enough to cover a DB server, but you never know... wouldn't want to slow down UER for the users, unless, of course, it's for a dancing Santa which.... you know... slows down UER for the users.

Hey wait, maybe Premium members could opt-out of "UER Christmas"?

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Re: Forum Read States Change (those little circles)
<Reply # 35 on 12/6/2010 7:41 PM >
Posted on Forum: UER Forum
 
It blows my mind how often people think someone else's time and effort should be free.

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TurboZutek 

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Re: Forum Read States Change (those little circles)
<Reply # 36 on 12/6/2010 7:42 PM >
Posted on Forum: UER Forum
 
Posted by Ian
Hey wait, maybe Premium members could opt-out of "UER Christmas"?


I think you can if you switch to UER corporate theme?

Anyways, I'm all for this new system, if it makes UER a bit faster - 'cause lately it's been slower than fuck for me.

Also, as for the 'cash grab' accusations; Av didn't have to leave it possible to view read-states the old way AT ALL. Most board admins would simply say "it's changing, tough shit, deal with it" which they are totally entitled to do. As it stands Av's left a way to do it the old way if you want to, if you don't want it; don't pay for it.

Pretty simple!

Chris...

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Re: Forum Read States Change (those little circles)
<Reply # 37 on 12/6/2010 8:01 PM >
Posted on Forum: UER Forum
 
Ultimately I do wish there could have been some kind of middle-ground, ie. retain the old read states system for everyone as far as the forum is concerned, but only for threads with recent activity (ie. new reply within the last two weeks). I know some people are LDB power users who actually use and depend on the read states system in the database, but I think quite a few of us will miss it far more on the forums themselves.

I do not echo ETMJ's baseless comments about a cash grab. However, the change does significantly degrade the way that most long-time users read the forums (through the new posts page), and I do think that $60/year is pretty steep for the privilege of being able to visually separate what you have read and cared about from what you haven't.

As an alternative to the flickr comparison, I would point to metafilter.com. Much like this site, it is a self-funded, basically one-person operation (I think they have two techs actually, but same difference). What Metafilter does is charge a one-time $5 fee for account registration. For that, you get to post on the Metafilter family of sites, you get the text ads removed, and you get some control over the way that threads on its sites are displayed. Frankly I think UER would probably be far more secure financially if it followed that model, but I've come to understand Av's ideas about the openness and accessibility of the site and I understand why the idea of a registration fee probably wouldn't fly. No problem.

UER has had a much better system for tracking read states and post activity than Metafilter. I think it would be reasonable to charge $5-10 per year for the privilege of using it, and I think you would get a lot better uptake at that price point. Certainly you would get folks like me who appreciate the presence of these forums (that may be a surprise to some people, but so be it) and the technology that goes into providing a fairly advanced forum experience, but who has never donated and doesn't immediately plan to, certainly not as long as the expectation is that those donations need to be monthly in nature.

If the purpose is to discourage people from using the advanced but resource-consuming read states system (and indeed from participating and posting), then by all means keep the price of that system at a fairly usurious monthly fee. On the other hand, if the purpose is to encourage loyalty and to make a small amount of additional revenue to support maintenance of said resource-consuming system, please do consider a more reasonable annual fee, which I think a lot more people could get behind.

EatsTooMuchJam 


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Re: Forum Read States Change (those little circles)
<Reply # 38 on 12/6/2010 8:01 PM >
Posted on Forum: UER Forum
 
Posted by Ian
ETMJ, why on earth are you suggesting that this could be a cash grab?

Well let's see...

36,000 accounts, and let's say that 1/4 of these are active - so 9,000 active accounts.

Picking a random low number, let's say that 2% of these are willing to pony up five bucks a month for their readstates. I'd bet 180 people care enough.

So that's $900/mo, or $10,800/yr. Hopefully enough to cover a DB server, but you never know... wouldn't want to slow down UER for the users, unless, of course, it's for a dancing Santa which.... you know... slows down UER for the users.

Hey wait, maybe Premium members could opt-out of "UER Christmas"?


$10,800 would buy a server far more powerful than uer.ca would need. For that amount of money, you can get a 1U 12-core Westmere box with 72G of RAM and ~8T of internal disk (4x2T).
I seem to recall that the current site runs on a Sun X2100 (2-core, up to 4G of RAM, 2 hard drives) unless Av has upgraded in the last few years.

"The large print giveth and the small print taketh away."
-Tom Waits
EatsTooMuchJam 


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Re: Forum Read States Change (those little circles)
<Reply # 39 on 12/6/2010 8:04 PM >
Posted on Forum: UER Forum
 
Posted by -MisfitStyle-


I'm not going to debate the technical merits of your argument (you bring up a number of good points), but opening with this almost made me ignore your entire post. Are you really suggesting that Yahoo-owned Flickr is a good metric for server costs?

I'd imagine the number of Flickr Pro accounts pales in comparison to the number of free accounts, as on any site. Do you really think $25/year covers the hosting costs for more than 5 billion images? (http://blog.flickr.../09/19/5000000000/) No, a whole lot of that is covered by Yahoo, a benefit Av doesn't enjoy.

But at 7 years and 4159 posts, why bother contributing anything to a site you enjoy for free?


You're right. I know absolutely nothing about profitability of websites and/or scaling therein. It has nothing to do with my daily job.
And of course $25/year doesn't cover the hosting costs for 5,000,000,000 images. It almost certainly, however, covers the hosting costs for my <1,000 images reduced in resolution for posting on the web.

"Flickr was acquired by Yahoo in March 2005, when Flickr was just on the border of becoming cash flow breakeven. According to Alexa, Flickr’s traffic is up >10X since the acquisition, so the company was able to extend its reach outside of its initial core user community."

As an alternative, another suggestion could very well be to have an ad-supported variant of uer.ca using non-obtrusive google adsense-type ads tucked discretely away into a not-often-used corner of the screen. I could tolerate that.

"The large print giveth and the small print taketh away."
-Tom Waits
UER Forum > Archived Forum Announcements > Forum Read States Change (those little circles) (Viewed 3006 times)
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