test please delete

[ladymuck]

I'm hoping that cough HWMBO has isn't you-know-what. He tested negative yesterday before we joined the parentals for dinner

[ladymuck]

You snuck in! The page reloading time was obviously working against me

[BR14]

You snuck in! The page reloading time was obviously working against me

sorry hen, jist couldnae help masel'

[NickFitz]

Afternoon denizens

Another grey day but a balmy 15°C out there, though it'll plummet to 14° after dark; barometers are up at 1001/1009mB

[NickFitz]

Not trying to be awkward but given how other systems do it and how post Ids work, what about a completely different approach. Write an api that returns the number of likes and thanks against a postId and then use Javascript to call and display the results.

I suspect that approach may be more robust than you plan.

Also remember that the x to y posts of z figure may well be wrong - remember that when I go to the latest post on TPD I end up seeing page 34505 at the moment due to the number of people I have on ignore while WTFH ends up on page 38000 or so as he can't escape the soft deleted posts.

The post IDs are actually sort of fictional; I wanted to maintain them because of existing links but vB5 broke them completely, so I implemented a layer on top to keep them going. Internally, they're all mapped to node IDs, because the single worst mistake the vB developers made was thinking that as everything (threads, posts, PMs, even infractions) was going to be a subclass of the abstract vB_Node class in the PHP code, they should therefore make everything live in a single "node" table in the database. It's a classic case of failing to understand that an object-relational mapping doesn't, and often shouldn't, result in a one-to-one mapping of classes to database tables, but it's right at the heart of the system and all kinds of things end up requiring complicated workarounds because of it, not to mention being hideously inefficient at the database level

And TBH I'm not keen on things that break if JavaScript is disabled

Good point about the x to y of z thing though; I may have to implement a new internal API instead. Though TBH it may not matter, as all I need is to know is if the thread size is greater than some arbitrary cutoff, so a few hundred or even few thousand posts here and there may not matter. It's just to stop the system attempting to serialise an array that's too large and thus causes an out-of-memory error in the PHP process. As I can make that cutoff comparatively low and make the extent around the current node (i.e. the specific post on the page being viewed whose thanks and likes are being counted) comparatively large (i.e. spanning a couple of hundred pages), there should be very few cases where it has an effect, and all that would happen in the case of a cache miss caused by it is that the cached values would have to be recalculated.

So if you came to a page where several posts were ignored, the mechanism I envisage would not take into account your ignore list; it would just get all posts for that thread for a certain distance either side of the first one that was visible to you, up to my arbitrary limit, and cache their thanks/likes counts. Then if I, without any ignored users, came to the page that contained that first post for me, those values would already be cached even though you never saw them.

There might be a bit of cache thrashing if someone (probably me or DrS) goes off to look up something in TPD from 2008 while other, normal people are trying to look at the last page, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it

[xoggoth]

And TBH I'm not keen on things that break if JavaScript is disabled

Disabling javascript must prevent people from doing lots of stuff, all the online payment methods I've looked at are javascript based.

[eek]

Disabling javascript must prevent people from doing lots of stuff, all the online payment methods I've looked at are javascript based.

Anyone disabling javascript nowadays is usually someone you want to keep a very long distance away from.

[NickFitz]

Mundane laundry on (quick wash)

[NickFitz]

"Everyone has JavaScript, right?"

[eek]

"Everyone has JavaScript, right?"

Do we need Likes / Thanks or are they are Progressive enhancement those without javascript or on mobile could live without?