TribalWar Blog
Saturday, February 24, 2007
Xionic put together a new bump control for the front page. The HTML is a bit more streamlined and there's a nifty new feature: When you mouse over the bump control and someone on your friends list has bumped an item, a little box pops up showing you which ones did so.
Labels: bump, frontpage, new.feature, new.stuff, tribalwar
Posted by AW at 9:21 AM
Friday, February 9, 2007
Beren implemented [YOUTUBE] forum bbcode last night that will take [YOUTUBE]whatever[/YOUTUBE] and turn it into an embedded Youtube video link. They don't autostart, you have to click them, but it does show a small preview of the video.
I went in and cleaned it up so worksafe template users won't see the embedded video and see links instead. I figured I would hear some bitching about video on the forum because some people would rather click a link, some just want to see it on the page.
I went through and added a new profile field that let's you choose. By default, it is ON and you will see YouTube code. If you'd rather see it as a link, just uncheck this box and you'll see a link instead.
You change this setting under your power ignore setting in the 'Edit Options' section of your user control panel. Here's a link: http://www.tribalwar.com/forums/profile.php?do=editoptions
Labels: forums
Posted by Rayn at 10:02 AM
Thursday, February 8, 2007
I've been working on search for vBulletin extensively over the last week.
I have made notable improvements in the keyword search; I have moved to a search daemon called Sphinx which operates outside of MySQL and does not lock the post tables, which was a big problem. This allowed me to turn down the time between searched from 120 seconds to 5 seconds.
However, Sphinx could not deal with searches for threads or posts by user. It CAN do posts by user if you specify a keyword, but not everyone specifies a keyword.
Colosus and I decided searching threads started by user isn't the end of the world if we turn up the search time. This was increased to 20 seconds today to balance things out.
What I wanted to do next was allow searching for posts by a user, but only if they specified a keyword, so it would use Sphinx and not lock the post table. Searching the post table - which is several gigabytes in size and contains about 8 million posts - is a disaster. It can cause the site to lock up for anywhere from 1 to 10 minutes.
After looking at the code, I was unable to find where it determines when a search is made to find all posts by user without a keyword. I wanted to hardcode that out, then add javascript to the search form to tell users they MUST enter a keyword if they want to search the post table. Because I could not discern the two things apart in the vBulletin code, I disabled search for all posts by user completely for the time being. Search for all threads started by user is currently inefficient, but not bad enough to cause a problem (I think) so it is still working.
The next step is to talk to people who know more about vB search than I do and find out how to disable a search server side if it is for all posts by a user and does not contain a keyword. Right now, I can't tell.
Posted by Rayn at 12:04 PM
Wednesday, February 7, 2007
By now you are all well aware of the major change to the front page. We've adopted a Digg style community submission and voting system. We have our own publishing algorithm that determines when a news item is ready to go on the front page. Our method differs a little from Digg's. One that you may notice is that once news makes it to the front page it has a chance to stay there. That is to say a popular news item may actually leapfrog an item that was published later. This ensures really popular news gets maximum exposure.
The algorithm will continue to be tweaked over the coming weeks and months.
The other difference from Digg you will notice is not only do news items go into categories, but like everyone else going into the Web 2.0 world, we also have tags on news items. Most should be familiar with this and its benefits which I don't believe I need to go into now.
Currently we are working on bringing the forums and front page closer together. You'll start to see that stuff over the coming weeks. One feature is the comments will be displayed with the news item on the static news page (posting will happen here too). This will lead to a change in the new forum.
We're also playing with the idea of automatically creating a thread link in General Discussion automatically if the popularity on a news item reaches a certain threshold. Still early in discussion on that one.
Stay tuned for updates.
Posted by AW at 1:16 PM
Friday, February 2, 2007
Welcome to the TribalWar Blog. This is where we'll put news items relating to the site as a whole or just editorials that are too long for the front page. Thanks Xionic for the wonderful design.
Posted by AW at 10:42 AM
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