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Started by FragaCampos, February 27, 2013, 03:17:56 PM

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NanoSector

How do you feel it is broken front-end? (just seeing what you had in mind :))
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Justyne

Not on my 2.1 test install yet so i don't believe they are just yet.
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NanoSector

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"I've heard from a reliable source that the Answer is 42. But, still no word on what the question is."

Justyne

Apparently PM drafts have a separate check box that totally escaped me. XD
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Arantor

How do I feel they are broken? The entire concept of handling privacy as individual messages seems broken to me.

I'd far rather see it go towards being like XenForo has, where it's essentially a topic with individuals present, where you can invite people to the conversation and they can see the whole conversation.

Right now, you can have *parts* of a conversation - even the parts YOU wrote might be missing from that conversation. And other people might have BITS of a conversation.

Let me just clarify it for you. Under SMF 2.0:
A sends PM to B (message 1)
B replies to A cc'ing in C (message 2)

Message 1: B will have it, A *might* have it, depending on which PM mode they are in at the time and whether or not saving PMs was enabled. C will not have it (which might mean there is a lack of context)
Message 2: A and C will have it, B might (depending again on PM mode).


At least I had the presence of mind to do away with the 'save to sent items' checkbox so you will always have the messages you sent which fixes some of the above issue but the concept is still broken.

If, then, you have the concept of 'conversations', you can search them far more easily (since there's no separation between 'recipient' and 'sender' the way there is in SMF), you simplify the logic, and you end up with a much nicer presentation than the UI c-f that is the current PM UI.

Justyne

That's an interesting idea actually.

How would you see that working if somebody intentionally only wants to share part of a conversation? I think that situation would occur quite often.
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Arantor

Then you copy/paste it, pretty much like you'd have to do now anyway.

Kindred

I both have some points of agreement and disagreement with this approach.

My biggest disagreement is that -- if we went and did all this stuff (in addition to all the other stuff that is getting finished and fixed) 2.1 will never get released. :P

that being said, The concept of "private" or "semi private" posts has come up several times...  and I see a point for it... but not necessarily to the exclusion/replacement of PMs.
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Arantor

Oh, I wasn't talking about doing it for 2.1. I stopped worrying about what should be in 2.1 months ago when I realised that too many people just want minor incremental increases rather than trying new things.

On the other hand, in my sandbox such a thing is entirely possible...

Note that semi private topics are a different concept to conversations but that's the quickest way of explaining it. Seriously, go look at XenForo and see how they do it. If you're not a member of any XF forum, use the main XF forum, and feel free to start a conversation with me there about it and I'll show you how it works. The only downside to XF's conversations system is that it has no categorisation, either in terms of folders or labels, but that's hardly insurmountable.

Justyne

I couldnt help thinking about this some more... what actually happens when one partner in the conversation starts deleting items? Does the whole history get sent to that person again when there is a new reply? Does it delete things for both?

It seems to me this could be quite data storage intensive especially for those with larger communities. I'd  think a 50 pm limit, for example, would fill up rather quickly this way.
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Arantor

That's just it. They can't delete them. They can remove themselves from the conversation which is the nearest thing to deleting it.

I also think you're not grasping the nature of what I'm saying. It's not like you send the messages to everyone over and over. It is essentially a single unit - a topic, rather than a series of messages - that is available to people to read.

This is also why I specifically pointed out XenForo and invited people to try it there to see what I'm getting at because that's a live demonstration of the concept.

And no, you wouldn't have per-PM limits, you'd have per-conversation limits where any amount of messages in a single conversation wouldn't be a factor. As for space, you still only store each message once; it'd use no more space than SMF's current solution and likely would use less space in the long run.

Justyne

So if all people remove themselves they would get deleted then?

I am not entirely ready to let go of the space concern as I can see this being troublesome for larger communities.

For example, the production database on my community has 300MB. About half of that data is PMs and that is the community running on a 50 PM limit. I'd be worried what that size would look like if they all got to keep as many PMs as they wanted to.

The size is already unwieldy - though having shell I cope - but getting to that unwieldy might be a real pain for people who have to rely on phpMyAdmin or the internal SMF method of backup.

Not really arguing against it - it sounds like an intriguing concept. I'm just failing to imagine how this would not take up lots and lots of additional space.
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Arantor

The space is not a concern, just as it isn't now, and that's why I don't think you understand what I'm getting at.

Even in SMF currently, no message is stored multiple times. If I write a message and send it to 50 people, only one copy of that message is stored. The message is stored once with a flag to say 'the sender has deleted it (or not)' so keeping something in the sent items is essentially free. After that there is a table to say who the recipients of a message are, and if someone deletes a message sent to them, it is that table which is amended, nothing more. Once all references to a message are gone, it should be deleted.

In my proposal, the space requirement would theoretically go down, not up, in ANY case. Because in my proposal we still have one copy per message *total*, but instead of tracking which individual message has gone to which users, we're only tracking which *collection* of messages has gone to which users. Instead of tracking it per message, we track a collection of messages, and we do away with all the *extra* tracking that makes conversation mode currently 'work' (by declaring that each message simply belongs to a conversation rather than each message is adjoined to another message implicitly under the hood)

I'm also extremely concerned with what you're saying because it doesn't tie up with what you've said before. If you've got messages of 100KB per message, you only need 10 of those to hit 1MB. Your forum seems like it has 50,000 messages which even on the standard average size in SMF would amount to around 50MB typically, let alone having any significant amount of larger posts. It just doesn't quite make sense somewhere.

But honestly... 300MB? That's really tiny in the scheme of things. Even the lowest VPS plan at my host (which works out at $20/month) provides 48GB of storage...

Justyne

#33
I think I must have done a poor job of expressing myself - or maybe I misunderstood you.

I was more worried what keeping every PM ever sent would do over time. That seems like an awful lot of messages to keep.

If I recall right the average user's forum usually stays under that magic 50MB mark when things like phpMyAdmin stop working or people run into issues like the database backup tool hanging up or being unable to actually open a backup in a text editor anymore.

Just seems like having a feature without a limitation mechanism could get people into quite inconvenient spots.

It's not like topics an admin could just prune.

(Well, I guess you could prune the table as an admin, but I don't think users would appreciate that.  ;D)

Not sure which community you pullled numbers from here as I have a few XD Indeed doesn't make sense here. <3

edit: just fixing spelling - it bugged me.
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Arantor

That's where it gets interesting because IIRC, it's possible every PM ever sent could still be retained because I have a feeling - I'd need to check to be sure - that it isn't just 'if all recipients to a message are deleted', but only if the sender also has deleted a message (so, effectively, no-one has a copy of it), and sent messages aren't counted towards the limit.

The backup tool is unreliable even below 50MB, as it happens. phpMyAdmin is better about size that it used to be, so 50MB shouldn't really be a problem anyway. Failing that any decent host will offer backups anyway.

You'd limit it but you'd limit it to conversations rather than messages. Most of the time this doesn't significantly change things from what it would seem.

Justyne

Okay sold! Now who do we talk into coding it? XD  O:)
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Arantor

Well, it won't happen in SMF 2.1... I might work on it for Levertine if I feel up to it but there's a shortage of that going around at the moment...

AllanD

As I go through and see all these great ideas better and at the end I always see no matter who the poster is "You won't see this in 2.1".
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Arantor

That's because 2.1 was supposedly 'feature complete' last September and I wilfully and deliberately ignored that rule on several points in a semi-futile attempt to bring SMF into this decade.

AllanD

So now to get features other software has already,we wait for 3.0.
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