The forum is shaping up. It is almost ready for a launch.
I connected the main site to the forum. When writers post in Editorials or Features, that story gets immediately posted to the main site. Unregistered users are free to post but Cyberista reserves the right to call them Anonymous Retard. Articles are now automatically calculated every time the front page is refreshed.
That last issue is particularly odd. I'm surprised that isn't already done considering how absolutely fscking simple it is to implement. The developer took the decidedly hard way of doing this. The original code puts relevant statistics (article count, user count & last post) into a database.
Why? Why? Why? All this stuff can be automatically calculated on the fly. Perhaps a database table for statistics is good for someone who wants to pad their numbers but, given the design, mere ignorance is probably at fault. Here's why: On MSSQL databases, you need a primary key to manually change information in a table. The forum statistics table had no primary key. Most people would give up before adding a primary key so that pretty much rules out conspiracy to pad numbers. The original developer just didn't know basic ADO techniques.
I have given the developer written summaries of all my code changes. I'm sure he'll use a couple and I'm grateful that he doesn't get offending by people fscking with his code and (nicely) rejecting some of his solutions to questions. His code is based on a basic forum by the Code Project. At some point, I might toss this and write my own because there's quite a bit that I don't like but the learning is priceless.
That's the point of open source.
In the meantime, have fun posting here. Even if the code changes, your post will survive. Cyberista has been around a long time. If we lost anything, it might have been on purpose.
Peace.–Chris
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Laws are for people with no friends.
