I want to give away a prize.

[BellGab.com]

Hi.  My forum is coming up on 100,000 posts soon, and I'd like to give a prize to the person whose post brings us to that number.  Is there any easy way to determine who that person is?

Thanks.

[kat]

I might be VERY wrong, here...

It's also not terribly easy. Well, it's easy, but not anything like "Automatic".

Right-click on the title of the topic, in a post, and select "Copy link address".

If you paste that, somewhere, you'll see something like this:

http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=432690.msg3042730#msg3042730

The "msg" number MIGHT be the post number. So, yours was (Possibly) the 3, 042, 730th post on this forum.

But, as I said, I might be totally wrong, with that.

So, whatever you do, don't quote me.

[Arantor]

That number certainly is the 3,042,730th post, for example, but any deleted posts (including spam) will still push the count up. It is the 3,042,730th post ever made on the site, but if you deleted 10k spam messages it will be the 3,032,730th post on the forum if that makes sense.

[BellGab.com]

I might be VERY wrong, here...

It's also not terribly easy. Well, it's easy, but not anything like "Automatic".

Right-click on the title of the topic, in a post, and select "Copy link address".

If you paste that, somewhere, you'll see something like this:

http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=432690.msg3042730#msg3042730

The "msg" number MIGHT be the post number. So, yours was (Possibly) the 3, 042, 730th post on this forum.

But, as I said, I might be totally wrong, with that.

So, whatever you do, don't quote me.

thanks for the reply.  when i look at the forum index, it says there are 94,589 posts, but when i look at the url from a particular post, this is what i see:  http://coastgab.com/index.php/topic,2547.msg103133.html#msg103133

so that suggests to me that perhaps the act of deleting posts over time has caused an offset between what is in that url and what's reported on the index?  hmm.

[Arantor]

o that suggests to me that perhaps the act of deleting posts over time has caused an offset between what is in that url and what's reported on the index?  hmm.

Exactly it. There have been 103133 posts in the forum's history, of which about 9,000 have been removed at some point, e.g. spam.

[kat]

That's about the best that I can come up with, I'm afraid.

Still, technically speaking, even the Spam posts were posts, so...

[kat]

******... That means that, as I post, we've had 198, 426 posts removed, here... Most of them Spam...

[xrunner]

Hi.  My forum is coming up on 100,000 posts soon, and I'd like to give a prize to the person whose post brings us to that number ...

Can I have a link to your forum? 

[Colin]

It looks like he has it on his profile. http://www.coastgab.com/


Congrats by the way.

[Bob Perry of Web Presence Consulting]

I might be VERY wrong, here...

It's also not terribly easy. Well, it's easy, but not anything like "Automatic".

Right-click on the title of the topic, in a post, and select "Copy link address".

If you paste that, somewhere, you'll see something like this:

http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=432690.msg3042730#msg3042730

The "msg" number MIGHT be the post number. So, yours was (Possibly) the 3, 042, 730th post on this forum.

But, as I said, I might be totally wrong, with that.

So, whatever you do, don't quote me.

thanks for the reply.  when i look at the forum index, it says there are 94,589 posts, but when i look at the url from a particular post, this is what i see:  http://coastgab.com/index.php/topic,2547.msg103133.html#msg103133

so that suggests to me that perhaps the act of deleting posts over time has caused an offset between what is in that url and what's reported on the index?  hmm.

Yep, but don't give up, trust me it wouldn't be that hard to do, your vision in the original post, you find the right coder and it depends on how much you're willing to spend on getting him/her to fix you up with a quick hack... I might be willing to try and tackle this one on my site because it's a great idea, still rolling it around in my mind... registered at your site, you don't make it easy to see who runs things there and really? 24 hrs with users online? Interesting, but I'm liking your registration verification questions, I'm going to redo mine and add some similar to yours, I like the fill in the blank concept...

[Oldiesmann]

As with most database systems, when you have an auto-incrementing ID column, it just keeps incrementing even if a previous number is available. It's easier to do that than to try to keep track of what the next ID should be.

[Ricky.]

Well, it wouldn't be hard, let me know if you want then I can make something which can tell you when you completed eg.. 100000 post and who was the real poster.

[Colin]

As with most database systems, when you have an auto-incrementing ID column, it just keeps incrementing even if a previous number is available. It's easier to do that than to try to keep track of what the next ID should be.

The mod would just account for the removed posts though. It wouldn't touch the database field type.

[Arantor]

Code Select Expand

SELECT m.id_msg, mem.real_name
FROM smf_messages AS m
LEFT JOIN JOIN smf_members AS mem ON (m.id_member = mem.id_member)
ORDER BY m.id_msg ASC
LIMIT 99999, 1

This should fetch you the 100,000th actual row of the messages table (counting starts at 0) including its msg id and the name of the person who made it.

[BellGab.com]

Congrats by the way.

thank you.

...registered at your site, you don't make it easy to see who runs things there and really? 24 hrs with users online? Interesting, but I'm liking your registration verification questions, I'm going to redo mine and add some similar to yours, I like the fill in the blank concept...

as far as easily determining who runs things on the forum, i've deliberately kept that ambiguous.  i want to be treated as much like a regular user as possible... but i realize that is essentially an exercise in futility since, with time, everyone learns who is running things.  it just sets a nice tone of everyone being equals.  this approach has never presented any administrative problems.  also, if someone comes to the forum for the single purpose of contacting the admin, i probably don't want to hear from them anyway.

is there a technical/performance reason why one shouldn't set the users online time to 24 hours?  or is it just a matter of standard forum practice?  i always thought it was nice for people to easily see who was online during any given day.

i tried to select verification questions that would be easy for any westerner to answer.  i think narrowing things geographically/culturally in that manner eliminates probably 95% of the spam out there.  i have probably 15 verification questions, two of which are randomly selected from the pool during registration.

Code Select Expand

SELECT m.id_msg, mem.real_name
FROM smf_messages AS m
LEFT JOIN JOIN smf_members AS mem ON (m.id_member = mem.id_member)
ORDER BY m.id_msg ASC
LIMIT 99999, 1

This should fetch you the 100,000th actual row of the messages table (counting starts at 0) including its msg id and the name of the person who made it.

thanks for this.  i'll let you guys know how it goes.

[Arantor]

is there a technical/performance reason why one shouldn't set the users online time to 24 hours?  or is it just a matter of standard forum practice?  i always thought it was nice for people to easily see who was online during any given day.

Yes, there are a number of good reasons for not doing it. Though it really depends on how you do it.

Doing it through the Users Online Today mod is safe. Doing it the way you are is wrong.

1. It bloats log-online table. This is queried every single page load. You want to keep it lean.

2. It makes people appear to be online when they are not. Right now it says you have 1430 users online. That's about what's typically online here - and this site has some serious expensive servers to manage it. Only here the window is much smaller.

3. If someone opens a page and then closes their browser, they will continue to be online for all systems purposes for the next 23 hours and a bit, in their profile, in the poster information and so on.

[Bob Perry of Web Presence Consulting]

is there a technical/performance reason why one shouldn't set the users online time to 24 hours?  or is it just a matter of standard forum practice?  i always thought it was nice for people to easily see who was online during any given day.

No technical issues in setting it so high, it just caught me off-guard and its the highest I've run across on any SMF site I've visited, no no, mine is rather high too, and you're right, it seems to attract traffic a bit better if the users can see who's been on during the day, but you may consider that there is a module that does this quite nicely... then you can set that threshold lower, thus getting the stat about most users online "ever" to change more frequently & still allow the users to view who's been there "today"

[Arantor]

No technical issues in setting it so high

Yes, there are.

[Bob Perry of Web Presence Consulting]

No technical issues in setting it so high

Yes, there are.

I suppose you are right, it doesn't affect system performance that I am aware of though, so I guess it depends on your definition of technical issues...

[Arantor]

I suppose you are right, it doesn't affect system performance that I am aware of though

Yes, it does.

I thought I had intimated this in the post a few up from here, but I guess not.

smf_log_online is visited almost every page. It is a very heavily accessed table with constant additions and deletions. It must be waded through every request, sometimes even twice in a single page load (and not even on the board index), and the massively more data in there from this will slow it down by a much larger factor.

There is a reason it is set to 15 minutes by default, not a full day. It's deliberately to keep that table lean.