Shoutbox topic

[Verdauga]

He's like a benevolent ghost...
*Ahem* Thanks James!

[Sebias of Redwall]

Thanks, James. 

[Russa Nodrey]

Thanks, James!

[lass of something much]

Thanks, Charlie!

[James Gryphon]

Lately, as a consultant for the staff, I have been working on a series of under-the-hood tweaks and changes to fix problems with the forum as it stands, to reduce both site and user trouble. Unfortunately, one of those changes involved killing off the Anonymous posting mod.

This decision wasn't made flippantly or unilaterally, but any decision that is made concerning a number of people, especially those who now use the forum much more frequently than I do, bears a reasonable explanation.

The forum had been generating millions of errors for months on end, mostly notices that such-and-such was deprecated in the current version of PHP. ('Deprecation' means that although the feature is supported now, it will be removed in a future version.) Although not apparently having an impact on the forum's performance, these millions of errors made an error log that could be many gigabytes large. This kind of constant writing is a Bad Thing, reducing the life span of solid state drives, and requiring mechanical hard disks to work all the time (also reducing their life span, albeit not in a statistically predictable way). You will see how this played into this decision shortly.

As mentioned, most of the forum's errors were deprecation notices, so I installed a mod that is supposed to improve PHP 7.2+ support, which apparently fixed all of the problems with the standard forum software. This meant that the only problems left were problems caused by old mods that hadn't been updated.

After making other adjustments, the only mod left that caused substantial problems with deprecation notices was the Post Anonymously In Topic mod; its creator Doug ("dougiefresh") used the deprecated "create_function" three times. Although my programming skills have advanced over the last few years, I freely admit that I couldn't begin to untangle or understand how those functions worked, so it was beyond me to fix them:

Code ("Doug's code") Select Expand


// Precompile our MySQL decisions into functions in $smcFunc:
$smcFunc['PAIT_id'] = create_function('$tbl = false', '
$tbl = !empty($tbl) ? $tbl . (!strpos($tbl, ".") ? "." : "") : "";
return "' . (empty($user_info['id']) ? '" . $tbl . "id_member' : ($see_mine ? 'IF(" . $tbl . "anonymous ' . ($see_all ? '> 0' : '= ' . ((int) $user_info['id'])) . ', " . $tbl . "anonymous, " . $tbl . "id_member)' : '" . $tbl . "id_member')) . '";
');

$smcFunc['PAIT_an'] = create_function('$tbl = false', '
$tbl = !empty($tbl) ? $tbl . (!strpos($tbl, ".") ? "." : "") : "";
return "' . (empty($user_info['id']) ? '0' : ($see_mine ? 'IF(" . $tbl . "anonymous ' . ($see_all ? '> 0' : '= ' . ((int) $user_info['id'])) . ', 1, 0)' : '0')) . '";
');

$smcFunc['PAIT_ts'] = create_function('$tbl = false', '
$tbl = !empty($tbl) ? $tbl . (!strpos($tbl, ".") ? "." : "") : "";
return "' . (empty($user_info['id']) ? '0' : ($see_mine ? 'IF(" . $tbl . "anonymous ' . ($see_all ? '> 0' : '= ' . ((int) $user_info['id'])) . ', 1, 0)' : '0')) . '";
');


Not only can I not fix it, Doug hasn't been active in SMF modding for the last couple of years, and when he was last active, he was known for being stressed and overworked, so the chances are not good that he will be back to fix this mod anytime soon. If he isn't working on it, it is uncertain whether anyone else will, so the mod's future is doubtful.

If the mod was very popular and a key part of what the members were doing, it would be worth rolling the dice and waiting on it, perchance somebody did fix its problems. I did an investigation, however, and found out that since the mod was most recently installed (in 2017), there were less than 400 Anonymous posts. The majority of recent ones had been in the "Anonymousity" thread; the last time it was used for another important game was "Mafia: Lie or Die", almost two years ago. By any reasonable standard, 400 posts in 3 years is neither 'popular' or indicative of particular importance.

Meanwhile, in spite of being used for such a small number of posts (probably less than 0.1% of posts a day), the mod called its deprecated functions every time any page was loaded, writing multiple lines of text to the error log.

I didn't think about it months ago, but it dawned on me during this process that it is irresponsible, wasteful, and possibly actually immoral, to let the forum go on constantly writing this text to the disk - disks owned and operated by the server's hosting company. If it was for a legitimate purpose (doing things that really need to be written) or if the members were getting exceptional benefits from this mod in spite of its flaws, then perhaps it could be justified, but it cannot be justified for something that was hardly being used.

Based on the statistics, I know this change won't inconvenience most of you very much , but I do apologize for the loss of a cool mod which should have had a lot of potential. I don't like to remove things without adding or changing something to compensate for it, so if you have suggestions for ways that things can be improved, whether by fixing something or adding it, we'd be happy to hear about it.

Thanks for reading.

[Russa Nodrey]

Thanks for the heads up, James!

[lass of something much]

Spoiler

Lately, as a consultant for the staff, I have been working on a series of under-the-hood tweaks and changes to fix problems with the forum as it stands, to reduce both site and user trouble. Unfortunately, one of those changes involved killing off the Anonymous posting mod.

This decision wasn't made flippantly or unilaterally, but any decision that is made concerning a number of people, especially those who now use the forum much more frequently than I do, bears a reasonable explanation.

The forum had been generating millions of errors for months on end, mostly notices that such-and-such was deprecated in the current version of PHP. ('Deprecation' means that although the feature is supported now, it will be removed in a future version.) Although not apparently having an impact on the forum's performance, these millions of errors made an error log that could be many gigabytes large. This kind of constant writing is a Bad Thing, reducing the life span of solid state drives, and requiring mechanical hard disks to work all the time (also reducing their life span, albeit not in a statistically predictable way). You will see how this played into this decision shortly.

As mentioned, most of the forum's errors were deprecation notices, so I installed a mod that is supposed to improve PHP 7.2+ support, which apparently fixed all of the problems with the standard forum software. This meant that the only problems left were problems caused by old mods that hadn't been updated.

After making other adjustments, the only mod left that caused substantial problems with deprecation notices was the Post Anonymously In Topic mod; its creator Doug ("dougiefresh") used the deprecated "create_function" three times. Although my programming skills have advanced over the last few years, I freely admit that I couldn't begin to untangle or understand how those functions worked, so it was beyond me to fix them:

Code ("Doug's code") Select Expand


// Precompile our MySQL decisions into functions in $smcFunc:
$smcFunc['PAIT_id'] = create_function('$tbl = false', '
$tbl = !empty($tbl) ? $tbl . (!strpos($tbl, ".") ? "." : "") : "";
return "' . (empty($user_info['id']) ? '" . $tbl . "id_member' : ($see_mine ? 'IF(" . $tbl . "anonymous ' . ($see_all ? '> 0' : '= ' . ((int) $user_info['id'])) . ', " . $tbl . "anonymous, " . $tbl . "id_member)' : '" . $tbl . "id_member')) . '";
');

$smcFunc['PAIT_an'] = create_function('$tbl = false', '
$tbl = !empty($tbl) ? $tbl . (!strpos($tbl, ".") ? "." : "") : "";
return "' . (empty($user_info['id']) ? '0' : ($see_mine ? 'IF(" . $tbl . "anonymous ' . ($see_all ? '> 0' : '= ' . ((int) $user_info['id'])) . ', 1, 0)' : '0')) . '";
');

$smcFunc['PAIT_ts'] = create_function('$tbl = false', '
$tbl = !empty($tbl) ? $tbl . (!strpos($tbl, ".") ? "." : "") : "";
return "' . (empty($user_info['id']) ? '0' : ($see_mine ? 'IF(" . $tbl . "anonymous ' . ($see_all ? '> 0' : '= ' . ((int) $user_info['id'])) . ', 1, 0)' : '0')) . '";
');


Not only can I not fix it, Doug hasn't been active in SMF modding for the last couple of years, and when he was last active, he was known for being stressed and overworked, so the chances are not good that he will be back to fix this mod anytime soon. If he isn't working on it, it is uncertain whether anyone else will, so the mod's future is doubtful.

If the mod was very popular and a key part of what the members were doing, it would be worth rolling the dice and waiting on it, perchance somebody did fix its problems. I did an investigation, however, and found out that since the mod was most recently installed (in 2017), there were less than 400 Anonymous posts. The majority of recent ones had been in the "Anonymousity" thread; the last time it was used for another important game was "Mafia: Lie or Die", almost two years ago. By any reasonable standard, 400 posts in 3 years is neither 'popular' or indicative of particular importance.

Meanwhile, in spite of being used for such a small number of posts (probably less than 0.1% of posts a day), the mod called its deprecated functions every time any page was loaded, writing multiple lines of text to the error log.

I didn't think about it months ago, but it dawned on me during this process that it is irresponsible, wasteful, and possibly actually immoral, to let the forum go on constantly writing this text to the disk - disks owned and operated by the server's hosting company. If it was for a legitimate purpose (doing things that really need to be written) or if the members were getting exceptional benefits from this mod in spite of its flaws, then perhaps it could be justified, but it cannot be justified for something that was hardly being used.

Based on the statistics, I know this change won't inconvenience most of you very much , but I do apologize for the loss of a cool mod which should have had a lot of potential. I don't like to remove things without adding or changing something to compensate for it, so if you have suggestions for ways that things can be improved, whether by fixing something or adding it, we'd be happy to hear about it.

[close]

Thanks for reading.

Hah, jokes on you, I didn't read it, I got a robot to

[Scott McLamok]

*Shouts at a box*

[lass of something much]

HAH. no

[Scott McLamok]

Why not?

[lass of something much]

*Peeks out from the box*

Becaaaauuussee...