User Comments, Suggestions, or Complaints | Privacy Policy | Terms of Service | Advertising
Page rendered in 0.4287 seconds
58 querie(s) executed
You are here > Home > Jim's Lab Notes > Discussion
| ||||||||
Jim's Lab Notes — Site News, Baseball Talk, and a Bunch of Other Stuff Monday, October 31, 2011Please Excuse the MessIt’s update time. The season is over and a slower news cycle is upon us. It’s time for me to roll up my sleeves and work on the site. First up is the transition of our Content Management System (CMS) from Expression Engine‘s 1.x series to its 2.x series. I had hoped to accomplish this upgrade last March but, unfortunately, some of the third-party scripts the site uses had not yet been updated to the new version, my personal life was much too busy and, frankly, I did not have sufficient funds to pay for a server upgrade and all the script upgrades. Although money is still tight, things aren’t as busy and all the scripts I need are now available. It’s time to get cracking. The CMS software was almost completely rewritten in this update. As a result, many of their native and third party scripts, and quite a few of my own scripts, either need to be updated or replaced with something new. I’ve already rewritten my homebrewed scripts. Unfortunately a few third-party scripts have no direct upgrade path, so I will need to pay for a replacement or I will need to write a replacement myself. Luckily many of the replacements are actually superior, so in a lot of cases we’ll end up with better functionality as a result. Getting BBTF updated is a rather large, time-consuming undertaking. I’ve done some trial runs on my development server and I must say the upgrades are not trivial and the process is often problematic. I’ve learned that the upgrade is better done in steps rather than trying to do it all at once by stringing together a series of upgrade scripts. It is also far easier to troubleshoot problems when the process is done piecemeal. This does cause a few problems because, with my schedule, some portions of the updates will need to be done over a number of days. Although I will try to make the transition as inconspicuous to you as I can, my tests suggest some things may not be available (like bookmarking, categories) for a longer time than I’d prefer. As in most anything, planning makes perfect. In preparation for the conversion to 2.x, a few items (polling, for one example) will need to be disabled. To keep you apprised of problems, I am creating this thread specially for the upgrade process. Although most of the upgrades will be done in the wee hours, there may be times I will need to take the site offline for short periods during the day. I will try to post a notice at least 24 hours in advance of any planned outage. With the size of the site’s database I have found less problems crop up during the upgrade when I reduce the number of fields in a few of the tables. Since changing the structures of some of the underlying databases also will make the upgrade of the archives and search features easier, I have decided to make most of these changes prior to the conversion. Again, from my testing, this changeover will, for the most part, be transparent. Nevertheless, I warn you that a few of the older/lesser trafficked blogs may go offline for short periods. I also warn you that the site will most likely be offline for most of the day I run the vendor’s conversion script. I will try to schedule this downtime in late November well before the Winter Meetings. Once again, I will try to give you sufficient notice to lessen the shock (especially for our most hardcore Primates). Once the conversion to 2.x is completed I will incrementally update the site. Unlike past upgrades I will try to keep the site’s architecture about the same and will simply incorporate new features into the existing site design. My plan also includes upgrading the site’s servers after the holidays. As I mentioned above, I had hoped to upgrade the servers last March but unfortunately with a wedding on horizon, I didn’t have the time or money to get it done. In the interim I was able to tweak the server configurations to get the site’s performance up to a passable level. I fear, however, with some of the features I have planned, our current servers will not be up to the task. I will do my best to get our servers upgraded this January. Anyway, with less stuff going on in my personal life this winter, I hope to use my time wisely to make the site more useful for next season. I hope you will find my additions worthwhile. Thanks for your patience through the process. Jim UPDATE: 12/9/2012 - The updates are underway. Due to requests from the Hall of Merit regulars, some of the updates were postponed until after balloting Donate to BaseballThinkFactory.org using PayPal.com
|
BookmarksYou must be logged in to view your Bookmarks. Hot TopicsPlease Excuse the Mess
(193 - 4:10pm, Aug 25) Last: Smitty* Site Issue Fixed (2 - 10:02am, Aug 17) Last: SoSH U at work Sorry about the Downtime Today (11 - 4:48pm, Apr 02) Last: bjhanke Join Jim's OOTP League (2 - 9:27am, Sep 06) Last: jimfurtado How much do minor league players get paid? (33 - 2:48pm, Apr 20) Last: Man o' Schwar Site Slowdowns (161 - 3:05pm, Nov 16) Last: Golfing Great Mitch Cumstein Sorry for the Downtime This Morning (10 - 5:43pm, Oct 13) Last: Infinite Yost (Voxter) Recent Updates and Turning off Advertisements (55 - 5:50pm, Mar 28) Last: Jose is an Absurd Sultan We're Moved! (And Burst.net can bite me!) (118 - 10:56am, May 20) Last: Hot Wheeling American We're Back Up! (84 - 4:05pm, Apr 03) Last: snapper (history's 42nd greatest monster) microBBTFs: I Have Keys and I am not Afraid to Give Them Out (33 - 4:32pm, Aug 16) Last: Publius Publicola Join My Sim League (30 - 1:36pm, Jan 03) Last: booond BBTF.org Beta, Take 2 (24 - 9:34am, Dec 28) Last: jimfurtado Staying Logged In Issue (135 - 6:20am, Sep 16) Last: Bote Man BBTF.org Beta (18 - 12:47pm, Aug 02) Last: JJ1986 |
|||||||
About Baseball Think Factory | Write for Us | Copyright © 1996-2021 Baseball Think Factory
User Comments, Suggestions, or Complaints | Privacy Policy | Terms of Service | Advertising
|
| Page rendered in 0.4287 seconds |
Reader Comments and Retorts
Go to end of page
Statements posted here are those of our readers and do not represent the BaseballThinkFactory. Names are provided by the poster and are not verified. We ask that posters follow our submission policy. Please report any inappropriate comments.
Yeah, I'm seeing the same thing as you.
Didn't log on at home last night or this a.m., but I can only assume the same would've happened for me as well.
You know, you're exactly who I thought of when I realized what was going on.
This change was made to discourage spammers from adding links to to comments. It's a growing problem and it requires more of my time than I'd like.
As for the login issue, I have tried to replicate the login problem on the many computers, phones, and tablets at my disposal and can't. Has everyone tried deleting cookies and checked the "Auto-login on future visits" box when logging back in?
When I rewrote the Hot Topics script, I didn't add a check for Open/Closed comments. I also started closing comments instead of deleting them recently. Put the two together...
I will fix the script. Nice catch, BTW.
Thanks to everyone for taking the time to point out these issue. I really appreciate it.
Yes, but it doesn't help.
(Work PC and iPhone.)
Yes, but it doesn't help.
Doesn't help me either.
I tried deleting cookies, and the box is checked.
(I'm on Chrome if it matters.)
Yesterday evening I logged in on my home computer. This morning I needed to log in on my work laptop. So I'm pretty certain that logging in on my home computer caused the loss of my auto-login on my work laptop.
It talks about different browsers (IE vs. Firefox vs. Chrome) but based on the description I would guess that it's the same problem.
It may be be our problem. I don't use sessions currently, however. I just use cookies. I will look into it at some point tomorrow and will add this fix into my necessary code hacks if it does prove to be the issue.
I'm guessing somebody broke something. Then somebody else said, "Umm, yeah, that's expected behavior." Wouldn't surprise me.
Thanks for the explanation. That makes sense.
Have you tried using the nofollow attribute on links? I understand that while that makes the spam worthless, it still may not discourage stupid spammers, so it may not really work as a solution.
I don't doubt that some of you are experiencing the problem. What I haven't been able to do is replicate it so I can find the cause.
---
Here's a weird one. On the NBA thread right now, the counter doesn't agree with the number of posts because of the 20 or deleted spam posts from the weekend. So right now, the counter shows 2204 posts, but there's really 2100 something. So if I click on 'last' in the hot topics bar, there is no 23rd page to take me to so it takes me to page 1 of the thread. Obviously this is a relatively minor thing, but thought I'd at least mention it.
Anyway, when I click 'edit' in post 126, it actually takes me to the top of this page and I can't edit the post.
I have the same problem on this page, but it's working fine on Newsblog thread pages. So it seems like a legit bug, but I'm guessing low priority if it's only affecting Lab Notes.
Comment editing on this page: fixed.
I am looking into the closed comment count problem. I initially thought it was a problem with my Hot Topics code but, after looking at the code, it's not.
Harold, the nofollow wouldn't have any effect. I hid the member profiles to discourage spammers from creating spam accounts to get link juice from links in member pages, but I'm still getting multiple new spam accounts every day.
Close to 100% of my BB posts are being eaten. Often the post disappears and I am taken to a blank post reply screen where all the text is gone. Sometimes if I preview first, the post works. Sometimes it does not. Sometimes, if I respond to a post, it works, and other times, it goes to the blank post reply screen. It is quite frustrating and all new since the, uhm, upgrade.
Oh, I also flushed cookies, and cache, and all that jazz. No help.
---
I've turned off Rank Denial for user submitted links for now. As HCO, said the spammers probably don't notice anyway. I will implement Vinay's suggested EE addon for applying nofollow to links, so members will be able to still see links when they hover over them. I will have to come up with another option for the forum links.
I've spent some time going over EE's logon code. They overhauled the logging in process. Some of the changes enhance security; some of them don't have a real purpose. I've made a change to one of the ways EE processes cookies. They were doing something funky that, frankly, makes no sense at all. I'm still poring over the code to see if they are anything else worth amending.
Can people clear their cookies and let me know whether the logging in situation has improved?
Frigging iPhone. If this was happening on a real browser, I'd tell you what's happening with my cookies, etc. Anybody else still having problems like this? I'm using an iPhone 4S on the latest version of iOS.
Thanks for all the effort lately, especially the debugging. I know it's not fun. Also, thanks for changing the linking back -- I know a lot of people have posted that they're happy about this.
I do as well. I wonder if bookmarks are returning in stages.
Same here. I'm also seeing them on this page only.
I had this problem and I finally figured out that in the Settings->Safari the AcceptCookies flag keeps getting set back to "Never Accept Cookies". I had to toggle it again this morning to get it to work for me.
As far as I can tell, it's working fine for me on my iPhone 4S now.
The formatting buttons are missing from the "submit a news story" page.
I have fixed the NBA thread comment count.
Here's an example.
It lists 89 comments, but none appear.
Thanks for pointing this out.
Visit the thread and click "Bookmarked".
I may change the description to something else. Would "Unbookmark" be better?
I just noticed the problem mentioned in #100 seems to be back, at least for the Starlin Castro thread. As I'm writing this, the links in the sidebar (Hot Topics and Bookmarks) have the thread at 5195 comments, but the thread actually has 5202 comments. It's not a big deal, but the link takes people to the wrong page when the discrepancy occurs around a page-flip (i.e., last comments are in the high '90s or low '00s). Thanks.
For example, some people are asking for more off-topic content, like football and basketball. Other people, like you, are asking for the ability to ignore such content. With the re-design, members will be able to choose whether to include those sports or not in the site-wide Hot Topics box by setting the option in their Profile Settings. Additionally, each member will have his own "My BBTF Homepage" (name may change) where he can subscribe to specific content topics by blog (BBTF, Hall of Merit), subject (Red Sox, Steroids), or category (Baseball, Football).
Look for a new Updates post in the next day or so. In it I will discuss some of the upcoming features and ask for a few more Alpha/Beta Testers.
So I'm guessing my IE is caching the pages, but the site never behaved like this before.
That's basically what is happening to me. It just took me a while to figure out that refreshing would update the pages to the actual count.
This sounds fantastic.
Agreed. I am beyond stoked for this. The inconveniences have been rather minor anyway, but even so they're well worth it given what's on the horizon.
Can the people having the IE caching issue please let me know which version of IE they are using?
@Chris and Jose: I more excited about the upcoming changes to the site than at any other time in the site's existence, and I include when Sean and I first released BaseballPrimer.com. My primary focuses on the updates are serving pages as fast as I can, enhancing the community nature of the site, giving users more control over what content they see, helping them find the news they are interested in, and making the site as easy to use as possible.
From Help/About:
IE9, version 9.0.8112.16421
Update Versions (whatever that means): 9.0.5
- IE 8
My page is still stuck on Feb 14 at about 9 AM CST, which is weird because i wasn't on the computer then. No new posts are showing at all. I tried closing, clearing and restarting and have the same problem
it is now working fine on my computer
I still can't login on Firefox, which is a pain in the butt because that's what I use for everything else. I've raised this issue several times but still haven't gotten a satisfactory answer, since it's ONLY BTF where I have this problem.
And yes, I've tried enabling cookies, deleting cookies, and enabling cookies so many time I feel like a Pepperidge Farm bakery. Still hasn't solved the problem.
You must be Registered and Logged In to post comments.
<< Back to main