Forum Migration

[Flumble]

What kind of booze would increase the chances?

"depends on the person"; I think it was Angua who doesn't respond well to alcoholic offerings.
IIRC this has been answered in Madness threads, but those are of course hidden to us mortals.

[Giant Speck]

Returning any kind of search would be a nice start.

Yep. The fact that search doesn't work in any capacity has severely limited my participation here for the past several days.

Also: you can request things. Just don't necessarily expect that request to be fulfilled.

I'd love to request Tapatalk support and would gladly back such support with the necessary finances.

[Thesh]

As I said before, the only thing missing from this site is something that nags you to download a mobile app.

[Jplus]

Let's exercise patience and respect davean for everything he's already done. He doesn't need reminders of issues that have already been reported (even if they are meant as a joke).

[Thesh]

respect Davean

[gmalivuk]

I'm not sure spelling davean's name wrong is the best way to show respect.

As I said before, the only thing missing from this site is something that nags you to download a mobile app.

If that happens, I'm personally deleting Giant Speck's account and post history before joining up with ST for some murder.

[SecondTalon]

Can we do it underwater? (NSFW, cartoon breasts. The violence is A-OK for the workplace)

[gmalivuk]

Here's a link to a video that wasn't uploaded by some cunt with a Confederate flag avatar.

[SecondTalon]

I didn't even notice that. Thanks, Gmal.

[Flumble]

And here is one without the 'adult content' flag. (so you can enjoy* it without logging into you overlord google account)

*enjoyment is not guaranteed; I think dethklok is a bit bland and too fast

[Jplus]

respect Davean

I'm not sure spelling davean's name wrong is the best way to show respect.

Sorry, davean. I changed my original post.

[Pfhorrest]

browsing mobile for the first time since the change and wow it's a lot better

[Xanthir]

FFT finally loaded for me. I had to wait a while, though.

Me too; FFT is still loading after about a minute.

From what I can tell, the slow-loading threads are the long ones - when the thread builds up to more than a hundred pages you start getting a noticable slowdown, and it seems to be proportional to the length (the Minecraft thread in Gaming also took ~15s to load). This suggests there's something wrong with the DB queries that's making it do something per-page, or possibly a query goes quadratic in the thread length with a badly-structured JOIN.

(I know it's nothing to do with my connection speed; I just got a significant home internet upgrade last week and the behavior is roughly identical.)

[Giant Speck]

I'm not sure spelling davean's name wrong is the best way to show respect.

As I said before, the only thing missing from this site is something that nags you to download a mobile app.

If that happens, I'm personally deleting Giant Speck's account and post history before joining up with ST for some murder.

Had I known the notification couldn't be turned off by the administrator, I wouldn't have suggested it. Sorry.

[gmalivuk]

I'm not sure spelling davean's name wrong is the best way to show respect.

As I said before, the only thing missing from this site is something that nags you to download a mobile app.

If that happens, I'm personally deleting Giant Speck's account and post history before joining up with ST for some murder.

Had I known the notification couldn't be turned off by the administrator, I wouldn't have suggested it. Sorry.

Maybe it can be, hence the "if".

[Giant Speck]

It apparently can be disabled using code, but honestly, if it takes that much more effort to do, then I'm not willing to continue suggesting that he implement it.

[Soupspoon]

May or may not be related to Forum Migration, or else (being still a relative newbug) even occasionally happened with the pre-Migration forum version, but... this could have a bearing to the Search problems (which stop me easily checking for prior mentions, sorry!), and is definitely something odd.

Composite image here, specifically marked up:

Spoiler:

Top: Main (top-level) page, section summarising the "The Comic" sub-threads, with "Individual XKCD Comic Threads" noted as having a "Last Post" relating to comic 1583, Eternal Density having posted at a suitably recent timestamp.

Middle:"Individual XKCD Comic Threads" thread-page, indicating that the latest (unstickied) post was by Eternal Density, and at that time, but was in comic 1666's thread.

Bottom: After re-ordering, for ease of searching, 1583's thread is indeed found to be last edited back in last October, nothing like announced on the front page.

(Did not bother to check each and every top-level thread-summary vs. its target, for other mismatches.)

...maybe interesting, probably reproducible, possibly investigateable (at leisure). Hopefully not precipitative towards disabling the front-page summary, for the duration, though...

[chridd]

May or may not be related to Forum Migration, or else (being still a relative newbug) even occasionally happened with the pre-Migration forum version, but... this could have a bearing to the Search problems (which stop me easily checking for prior mentions, sorry!), and is definitely something odd.[...]

Look more closely at the post in question.

That view is showing post titles, rather than topic titles like it used to. Therefore, if someone changes the post title (by editing the "Subject" field in the reply screen) then it'll display whatever title they put. That particular post happens to have a weird title for reasons that may or may not be clear if you read the post itself.

[Soupspoon]

That particular post happens to have a weird title for reasons that may or may not be clear if you read the post itself.

Ah, apologies. I did know about the pre-reported 'fault' when it came to Time's contributors' little quirks... And I'd read and appreciated the Brain Upload post concerned, but without noticing how far Eternal had gone with the 'art'...

Carry on, then. Nothing to see here.

[Mikemk]

I just noticed that posts in forum games now contribute to your total. (And I can't believe I've been here for months and have less than 100 posts.)

As I said before, the only thing missing from this site is something that nags you to download a mobile app.

As long as it redirects to the home page if you click no, I'm cool with that.

[gmalivuk]

Would it also be possible to ensure that it never pops up a second time? I don't care where it redirects me, if it happens more than once it'll be your account I delete before ST and I carry out that hit.

[SecondTalon]

In the interest of being fair, the benefits of tapatalk that I'm seeing are

Ad free forums. The xkcd forums don't have ads.

No giant avatars or signatures. Before we get into the rules prohibiting most of those, the new software minimizes that issue. And there has always been the ability to turn them off in your preferences, but that's not ideal as that's universal and applies to your desktop experience too.

Mobile-friendly format. See:the forum now.

Ability to view multiple forums on one page. Okay, we can't do that.

So one benefit that benefits the end user who wants to view multiple forums at once, but not the end user who doesn't. And that's all I'm seeing.

In exchange, davean gets a plugin to dick around with and figure out how to make work (and remember to turn off the fucking thing that harasses you if you use the forum on mobile without tapatalk) while simultaneously creating yet another security flaw.

Not seeing how the one benefit outweighs the many flaws.

[flicky1991]

I just noticed that posts in forum games now contribute to your total.

I don't think they do. I'd have quite a lot more if they did.

[Mikemk]

I just noticed that posts in forum games now contribute to your total.

I don't think they do. I'd have quite a lot more if they did.

I think it's only posts posted there after migration that contribute.

[flicky1991]

I just noticed that posts in forum games now contribute to your total.

I don't think they do. I'd have quite a lot more if they did.

I think it's only posts posted there after migration that contribute.

Just posted there, nothing changed. Where were you posting that seemed to affect it?

[Giant Speck]

Would it also be possible to ensure that it never pops up a second time? I don't care where it redirects me, if it happens more than once it'll be your account I delete before ST and I carry out that hit.

Or we can just forget that I mentioned it.

[gmalivuk]

Would it also be possible to ensure that it never pops up a second time? I don't care where it redirects me, if it happens more than once it'll be your account I delete before ST and I carry out that hit.

Or we can just forget that I mentioned it.

I already did, which is why I moved my threat along to Mikemk instead.

[Kewangji]

I feel bad for reading less and less here but the forums are so slow now. Like, pages take 20 seconds or more to load no matter what network I'm on. I seem to recall they were fine when the migration first happened, although I might be misremembering. I don't know if this has been discussed here? Seems mostly to be focused on the search kaputness. Anyway, thought I'd bring this up. I'm certain y'all are doing everything you can.

[Zohar]

Forum slowness was discussed at least some place (FaiD maybe?). In any case, I actually wanted to report forum seems quicker to me today than previous days. FaiD Fleeting Thoughts is still very slow, but other stuff seems mostly normal.

[bentheimmigrant]

I find slowness generally corresponds to thread size. The big threads (random natterings, rant threads, fleeting thoughts, etc.) are all markedly slower than small ones.

[Neil_Boekend]

Time seems reasonably fast, so that is not an absolute law.

[bentheimmigrant]

Nah, that's just relativity. Time has apparent discrepancies from Newton's first law of Foradynamics: All threads have identical kinetic energy. However, that's because it's Time, when you try to measure its speed (in time), you cancel out either side of the equation, and thus it loads instantly.

[Flumble]

I hypothesize that long threads load slowly when you're the first to view it after a modification, as if the server caches/optimizes a thread once it's viewed in the current state.
Hypothesis the second is that it is dependent on forum load and when you request a (long) thread during high load, it may have to cache your query results to disk making it incredibly slow.
Hypothesis the third is that the forum just adds a random delay when requesting a thread because fuck you.

In any case I have found the load times to correlate with thread size, too.

[Soupspoon]

I feel bad for reading less and less here but the forums are so slow now. Like, pages take 20 seconds or more to load no matter what network I'm on.

How many Gardens do you have active?

(They do seem to be resource-hogs. I can't actually afford to keep them running, 24/7, because they cause problems all across my browsers. "This script is taking a long time to run" errors on unrelated tabs, etc, which I traditionally keep running in parallel with no(/few) prior problems...)

Not that I think this is much to do with the Migration, but...

[SecondTalon]

Re: Forum Slowness

In the olden times of the long long ago, before even I walked this landscape, threads were shut down and locked or migrated after so many replies were made (hence things like the Introduction thread being Intro Thread The Third) because of forum weirdness making threads or the whole forum or whatever slow.

Later versions of php or whatever cleared that problem up.

We may be entering a time when the tools and rules of the dark ages are needed once again.

Or, y'know, maybe it'll clear up after the search thing gets fixed. I'm not 100% sure on davean's priority order here, as I know dick about phpbb, much less what the problem(s) are in play here. Could be whatever thing he fixes will just magically make all the problems vanish, or.. I dunno, he's doing all he can just to keep the thing up and running and will work on fixing issues when that's resolved.

Hell, I don't know how much the garden issues have distracted from fixing the forum.

At any rate, it's something that I know has been bouncing around my head - big threads = slow, so we should discourage large threads.

Not a goddamn clue what to do about TIME. I'm not even sure handing them their own subforum would be a good idea as a lot of the culture and interaction is based on everything being part of the same long, unbroken string.

[Neil_Boekend]

Thank you davean for fixing the speed.

[Xanthir]

OMIGOD FFT LOADS IMMEDIATELY AGAIN

This is great, davean is great, everything is great.

[davean]

FFT finally loaded for me. I had to wait a while, though.

Me too; FFT is still loading after about a minute.

From what I can tell, the slow-loading threads are the long ones - when the thread builds up to more than a hundred pages you start getting a noticable slowdown, and it seems to be proportional to the length (the Minecraft thread in Gaming also took ~15s to load).

So ... when you load a thread, phpbb is now selecting a list of every post id in said thread, ordered. So, whats the solution? Well, making sure it all just fits in memory works wonders. I have no idea why they programmed it like that though.

Hopefully the search index will be rebuilt by morning. Then I can turn the search back on and we can see if stuff breaks again.

[Thesh]

So ... when you load a thread, phpbb is now selecting a list of every post id in said thread, ordered. So, whats the solution? Well, making sure it all just fits in memory works wonders. I have no idea why they programmed it like that though.

My guess is that they wanted an efficient way to find page number by post id, without having to store the relative post number in the database (which would have to be updated every time a post is deleted), since MySQL doesn't have a row_number function like PostgreSQL, SQL Server, or Oracle.

Note, that even that's not a good excuse if that's the case since you can just do a count where the post id is less than or equal to that value and it's in a particular thread.

[Neil_Boekend]

I kinda prefer a fast forum over having a post number.