@@ End of Day Wrap - Tues 10/6/14 Sydney, Australia Time 11:40pm
hi Everyone,
A nice day on the forum I think. Not too busy. Great answers were provided by CPhill, Alan, Nicklvlup, Rosala, NinjaDevo, Zegroes, Bertie, Morgan Tud, GoldenLeaf, Kitty<3, admin and Heureka. You are all fantastic!
Nicklvlup and MorganTud have just become members. Welcome to web2.0calc forum. We hope that you enjoy yourselves here.
MorganTud, thou hath been a guest here for some time. Now that thou art a member WE shall expect thou to conduct thineself properly, with considerable restraint! Your Queen doth adore your avatar. It fit thee so well!
Your Lady, Lady Guinevere, Queen of Camelot, hath spoken!
A HUGE CONGRATULATIONS TO KITTY<3. SHE HAS HER STAR!
Kitty is a quiet achiever. Many of you wonder who she is. Well Kitty has always been my right hand girl. She was by my side when I was the only adult and certainly the only mathematician on the forum. I could not have coped without her. Her answers are always of exceptional quality and her presence on this forum is still extremely highly valued. Her star has been slow to come but it is very much deserved. Thank you Kitty!
Now, 2 days ago I sent Andre Massow, owner and developer of the Web2.0calc.com site an email. He responded almost immediately and many of the requests that I made have already been implemented. We now have an inbox and an outbox. Soon we will have a return button on our received messages. There are many other requests and improvements as well. I will just give you the link to the correspondance page that I have put together.
Communications with Admin - (there are three posts above this one that are also relevant)
http://web2.0calc.com/questions/communications-with-andre-massow-with-reply_1#r5
Now for our interesting posts;
A very nice offer from NinjaDevo
http://web2.0calc.com/questions/profile-pictures
A joke. I though it was funny
http://web2.0calc.com/questions/why-is-this-calculator-so-biased
I liked this one, it was just a little different from the standard ratio questions.
That is it for this evening/day/morning whatever. some of you are very confused and do not realise that it is evening,
Enjoy what is left of your day - mine is over - midnight has passed and a new day begins.
Melody.
Two days ago I sent an email to Andre Massow, owner and developer of web2.0calc.com. He replied almost immediately and many of the issues that I spoke of have already been addressed. Thank you Andre. Your timely efforts are very much appreciated.
Below are extracts from the letters:
8th June 2014
Hi Andre,
There are a number of things I should discuss with you but the most pressing one is the message system and the member section.
I like many of the features that you have introduced but a lot of tweaking is definitely needed.
Introducing the avatar feature was extremely popular with all the members.
We are all receiving phantom message notifications. Every time someone posts anything on the forum we are each sent a new message notification.
This thread was posted on the forum yesterday. Some of the members were not very polite but they were just having fun.
http://web2.0calc.com/questions/attn-registered-users#r
Answer: this should be only notifications for questions you have viewed before. Maybe it is more reasonable to only show notifications for questions on the watchlist.
Clarification email
The pop-up messages that we get for posts are fine. No one is complaining about those. Sometimes they are helpful.
The problem is that these messages then trigger a phantom pop-up message saying that we have a PRIVATE message.
It is the phantom messages announcing private (non-existent) mail
that is upsetting people.
Now you have made it so that only new messages are displayed when the message centre is entered. Once I click on an avatar that person’s new mail is displayed. This is fine but whether I deal with it or not the message is then transferred into the person’s file and that is where I need to go next time to deal with it. …….
RESPONSE: Andre has already introduced an inbox and an outbox. That was quick.
Thank you Andre!
I would also like the ability to reply to individual messages.
I just saw on the forum that Andre told Rosala that this would be implemented soon.
Thank you Andre.
If I want to send a message, I have to find the username somewhere else on the forum or I have to choose from a list. I am not at all sure that that list is comprehensive. Anyway, why can’t I just type in the name that I want, or maybe just the first couple of letters, and have the possibilities presented to me from the list?
The member list that was available on the old forum was infinitely better.
Sometime in the future I would like to send a welcome note to each new member. At present I do not even know which members have joined on any given day. I have no comprehensive list of member statistics at all. Please make it more like it was before.
RESPONSE: Which features do you want? a "recently created user accounts list"?
I think members would like to know some limiting numbers eg
RESPONSE: limit: 25. when overflowing, the oldest entry is deleted
but the current list feels way to long. 5-10 would be a "cleaner" look, especially for first time forum visitors.
RESPONSE: no hard limit yet. but this has to change in the near future for performance reasons (displaying a list of e.g. 1000 messages uses a lot of database and application server resources)
RESPONSE: I have to think about this
RESPONSE: Icons are now on the left - Thank you Andre.
RESPONSE: Scrollbar has been added - great, thank you Andre.
RESPONSE: this is not really easy to implement, so this could take a while
I see. Would an additional line in the search results with a link to the corresponding question be helpful? (Yes it would - not sent yet)
RESPONSE: Do you have a link to such a question?
RESPONSE:
This is a very difficult topic. There are so many LaTex commands which are not designed to be called by irresponsible users in an web service environment. If you call these commands on your local PC and the PC crashes, this is one thing, but if any user can crash a webserver with just a single command, it only takes seconds and all webservers will be not available for other users. At the moment there is a whitelist with allowed command with a high probability that it is not easy to find a LaTex command combination to crash the webservers, but there have been crashes in the past even with the whitelist. Every additional package increases the risk for crashes dramatically. For displaying math formulas LaTex is really fantastic, but from an developer point of view the language itself and the whole software design of it is the most ugly thing ever created.
Really, the message system and the member section is the priority as far as I am concerned at the moment.
Thank you, Melody.