Forum Migration

[gmalivuk]

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

Do you mean post count? Because no one was talking about post count, and post IDs are kinda important.

[Neil_Boekend]

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

Do you mean post count? Because no one was talking about post count, and post IDs are kinda important.

Then I misunderstood. My knowledge of both PHP and databases is limited. I thought it was to generate this number:

Spoiler:

and only to place that number on the screen, not the post order or anything else. Cause the post order is, of course, important.

[gmalivuk]

Thesh was talking about finding page by post ID, which happens to also involve getting a post number but would need to be done without that.

(I'm not using that theme, so I didn't know displaying the number of a post within its thread was even a thing.)

[Flumble]

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.

Aww, that was the second part of my second hypothesis.

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.

I vaguely remember something in CFT about how a lot of programming people don't know how to write efficient queries. Is that a good excuse?

[edit]

and only to place that number on the screen

It would indeed be that number, which can then be divided by posts-per-page to find out which page of a thread has to be served. Wait, that's kind of what gmalivuk said too.

[davean]

So does the search index rebuild fix everyones problems? And give you a pony?

[Deva]

Yes. Searched "pony". Returned an image in the fourth result (now fifth). Thanks.

[Ubik]

I can't talk for everyone, but the both new post listings (new posts and unread posts) and egosearch look right to me. A couple simple searches also seemed to work properly. Thanks for upgrade and fixing things!

[flicky1991]

Thank you davean!!!

[Flumble]

Huzzah for davean, fixer of forums.

[rmsgrey]

I've finally found my ego again!

[emlightened]

Thanks for the fix!

Possible problem: when I just searched through 'my posts', the number of results was about a quarter of what it used to be. Flicky also claimed to have had around 60k posts (including forum games) before Chocolate Chips, and that figure's now around 23k. Still, given that searching with keywords doesn't seem to have an issue, I think it's just a minor problem.

[HES]

We're back in business! Thanks davean!

[speising]

I'd be interested in seeing a graph of useage stats before, during, and after the searchless time...

[gmalivuk]

So does the search index rebuild fix everyones problems? And give you a pony?

It fixes the problem of not being able to search, but I haven't seen anything about a pony yet. Maybe one of my roommates signed for the delivery?

[davean]

It fixes the problem of not being able to search, but I haven't seen anything about a pony yet. Maybe one of my roommates signed for the delivery?

Perhaps you overlooked it because its made of diamond.

If someone wanted to collect the suggested styles it would speed up that stage of the process, otherwise I'll reread the thread for them in a bit.

[Deva]

I'd be interested in seeing a graph of useage stats before, during, and after the searchless time...

Fora Activity Migration.png (6.83 KiB) Viewed 47819 times

Settings: This month. Read full log. Purple line: Approximate start of Moderator Madness. Red Line: Approximate start of Forum Migration. No data with searching re-enabled. (Happened hours ago.) Suffered unexpected downtime, also. Indicates no such event there, strangely.

Fora Activity Year.png (6.36 KiB) Viewed 47819 times

Settings: This year. Read full log. Same line meanings.

Source
Usual disclaimer: Does not understand activity's calculation or its units. May or may not be accurate.

_____________

For davean:

Thanks, davean! It's close, at least. But there's still the right-side avatars/info (Allan Style - SUBSILVER is still a prosilver-based style). Would it be possible to try out the actual prosilver2 style? Though, I think it might break some plugins/add-ons. Not sure if we're using any of those.

https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/style/subsilver2/

Posted a userstyle here also. Assumes those to be different. Mentioned it as a precaution.

davean, I have a couple of styles for possible inclusion. 1 is a prosilver_left sort of thing that I customised specifically for the xkcd fora, https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/style/xkcd_left/, and the other, which will make some people happy, is subsilver2 updated for 3.1.x, https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/style/subsilver2/

Note: Error on the first link. Awaits validation still, apparently.

As for board style suggestions, it doesn't seem like many have been updated for phpBB 3.1.8, which I'm assuming to which we have updated.

I kind of like this one, but I think it'd require a bit of twerking.

If we can have some sort of subsilver_left back then I'm a happy man.

Might exist under a different name (including one above). Tried searching board styles. Spat out an error. Appears to be a recurring theme for phpBB.

[Soupspoon]

Settings: This month. Read full log. Purple line: Approximate start of Moderator Madness. Red Line: Approximate start of Forum Migration. No data with searching re-enabled. (Happened hours ago.) Suffered unexpected downtime, also. Indicates no such event there, strangely.

But the sharp up-tick definitely coincides with the (delayed) April 1st comic of Garden.

[Thesh]

The search is not 100%. For example, I posted in the "energy currency?" thread is SB, and it doesn't show up on my egosearch. Everything I posted in before and while search was disabled seems to show up.

[Deva]

Noticed an anomaly. Remarked about "pony" appearing fourth, now fifth. Double-checked out of neuroticism. Failed to come up. Tried "search". Remained absent. Worked with "searched". Saw it under Search User's Posts too. Chalked it up to caching or something.

Attempted it again now. Resisted efforts, even with variations (with quotes, without quotes, and with quotes and a period). Listed new entries for "search", however. Monkeyed around. Gave different results depending on log-in status.

Returned 2522 results for pony while logged in. Showed davean's initial post about the search index rebuild at the top. Logged out. Matched 2470 results for pony. Displayed three posts higher than davean's initial post, including the one in question.

Presumes different totals due to searchable locations. Cannot explain missing hits while logged in.

Edit1: 2522 and 2470 immediately afterwards. Will check again later. Does not display this or the graphs post under Search User's Posts, though. Sounds similar to Thesh's issue.
Edit2: Matched anomaly. Same numbers otherwise. Could have been correct initially.
Edit3: ~34 hour edit. Same numbers.

[Thesh]

When I search for pony, I get 4090 matches, but it doesn't include all of the posts from this thread.

[Ubik]

Well now I noticed a thing with egosearch - this thread is not there, unless I change the "Display posts from previous" option to something else than "All results" from the bottom of the egosearch results.

[Giant Speck]

Thank you, davean!

Can we make donations to the forum administration? Is that a thing here? Do we do that?

[Grop]

\o/

Well now I noticed a thing with egosearch - this thread is not there, unless I change the "Display posts from previous" option to something else than "All results" from the bottom of the egosearch results.

I see this thread in my egosearch.

[Ubik]

This is just a hunch, but that might be because you had posted to this thread before the reindexing happened.

[Jplus]

I'm happy.

Thanks, davean!

[doogly]

Salvation!

[flicky1991]

The "Hugs!" thread is not appearing in my egosearch. Just when it's active again, too.

[New User]

I don't see that this has already been noted.

Some of the thread icons aren't displaying properly, to indicate that I have participated in the thread. I think describing this is much simpler with a picture.

[Felstaff]

If, like me, you rely on favicons to find your way around tabs and bookmarks, a quick 'n' dirty manual repair for the missing favicon (for Chrome at least) is to right-click anywhere on the page, select 'inspect element', then in the element inspector screen, right click the line of HTML that says

> <head>...</head>

Then select 'Edit as HTML'. An editable box should show up. Under the line that says

<title>xkcd - Index page (or whatever page you've bookmark'd/tabb'd) </title>

Paste in the following code:

Code: Select all

<link rel="shortcut icon" type="image/x-icon" href="http://xkcd.com/favicon.ico" sizes="16x16 24x24 32x32 48x48">

The favicon should then cache automatically, hopefully showing up on every xkcd forum page, as well as the bookmarks.

Note: you can do this for any page without a cached favicon, and you can change the image link in the code to a favicon of your choice.

[Fractal_Tangent]

The great and almighty davean has fixed the things!

[Meowers]

I like the new search feature.

[Soupspoon]

...a quick 'n' dirty manual repair for the missing favicon...

Until you mentioned this fix, I didn't actually notice, but (here on Firefox), there's a FavIcon now featuring (again, I presume - it appears I'm just generally unobservant), after the recent noticeable "No special icon here" icon that I had been seeing during the height of the forum migration hiccups (although, as before, only after someone mentioned it...)

TL;DR; it's working again for me, without needing the 'fix' (on the forums.xkcd.com domain URI, for reference) but I've no idea even when it came back.

(Still, the 'fix' idea is noted, to add to the many and various handy things that might be useful in the future.)

[Mikemk]

My egosearch isn't working again. Specifically, viewtopic.php?f=14&t=114885 isn't showing up

[New User]

This very thread isn't appearing in my egosearch.

[rmsgrey]

Yeah, the default egosearch doesn't show threads I've first posted in since the transition. Setting it to threads from the last year does, but misses older (but still active) threads.

[gmalivuk]

Which means default egosearch is going to become increasingly useless as time goes on.

[Soupspoon]

FWIW, it seems to be working for me...

No thread that I know about is absent from my Egosearch. That includes 1669 back to 1659 in the Comics thread, at least, when I have a quick look at the up-to-two pages of Egoworthy threads I have so far accumulated, which demonstrably covers the whole time of the Migration onwards. At least for thread-start, if not the moment I decided to start contributing and thus made it Egorelevant in the first place.

(PPE: Erm. Scratch that bit I've struck out. I am 99% sure that 1169's thread, i.e. today's, had showed up on the Egolist, ever since I contributed my own so-far-unremarked contribution to the conversation, but when I just now double-double-check in an adjacent tab to this very composition page it only shows up if I use a time period cut-off option on it. And find that there's definitely a (newer) new message since I last visited, mere moments ago. However, I can still find every other other thread in the default "All results" display, as well as in any suitably long "from previous <timescale>" option. Go figure...)

[Felstaff]

New and brilliant posts wot I dun don't appear to be showing in my post history.

Lesser, more frivolous posts, such as this one, also don't appear to appear.

[Flumble]

But please don't turn searching off if it's not necessary to do so when fixing the current problems.
Because the unread posts search is working fine. (which I like a lot more than egosearch)

[SecondTalon]

New and brilliant posts wot I dun don't appear to be showing in my post history.

Lesser, more frivolous posts, such as this one, also don't appear to appear.

By my reckon, that was posted at the 2:45pm. It is now midnight:38, and that post is showing as your most recent.

I do not know if you have posted since then, but I'll check again in the morning.