After my recent venture into the Cafe, I have noticed an alarming increase in the amount of irrelevant posts (ie, this or that etc.)

What about a forum that these posts can go in, and if possible, posts in that forum do not contribute towards the persons progressive count.  Now, I know that number of posts don't matter, but there may be some people that belive that it does.

So, what do you think?

yea, so will mark only have 1000 post or so (Mark, only a joke, ARRGH!! Marmalade bombs!! TAKE COVER! TAKE COVER!!!)  lol
Cheers Theis

About two years ago a similar thing was requested. The result of that request was the Cafe.

Then irrelavent twaddle will consume the forum and confuse newbies....like me

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I'm and in-the-middlebie and I'm always confused

As the guys have said - the Cafe was made for the personal - of little interest to anyone else  - stuff. 

As always - if it gets seriously dumb......  well ... what to do?


I would suggest a 'thumbs down' smiley - to get the message accross ...

& in the absence of an easy icon to click (sorry!) (& for anyone who's still reading..) .. copy this into the insert image button ....
http://www.simviation.com/yabbuploads/THUMBSDOWN.GIF



Or VERY simply - eyes to the sky ..... 

Anyone else with a better idea? We're all ears I'm sure ./.....    .... Above all we really must maintain the civil & polite atmosphere here ....

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Does the number of post really matter?

weathers bad, your retired. I cant think of much on TV. So no probably not:)

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Doug, maybe you could arrange a system that means your posts are counted down from there current number

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No idea Ben Aren't you at 3000 yet

I set up a yabb forum at work and, you know, the code is not that hugely complicated.  If Pete was up for a little bit of coding he could turn off post counts.

Edit:  Post counts could be turned off altogether or tailored in some fashion.

gw

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URL? What's the board? The we can see you work .....  I'd love to see what you actually did ..

& just tell us what you did & how you modified the code . I think the guys at the Yabb  & Yabb mods sites would love to know too ........ 

Pete,

It's an internal forum -- not available outside the company.  Actually it's just to keep track of projects that a small group of us are working on.  I installed it on Windows 2000 with Apache and had to fix a bug in the way email is sent on Windows (carriage return line feed problem).

I added a couple of web pages and perl scripts that produce custom status reports.  Essentially, you pick a date and select which forums you're interested in and it shows you all the posts in those forums since that date.  They work well on my little web site but SimV has a lot more activity so it would be hard to say how they might scale up.

I haven't actually looked at post counts but it doesn't look like it would be a big job.  I'll take a look on Monday to see what would be involved.

gw

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OR - messing around with post counts anyway!  (I actually have 6000 more than I show....)

If the post count doesn't matter, why would anyone bother taking it off?  lol  (You're right, it doesn't matter, but it had to be asked.)

Oh look, this got me one more.   

Email sent  ....... It will be interesting to see how this can be done for one board only. 

You suggestions will be much appreciated.

Nope didn't get it ....

Why don't you reply here?

Thx

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...and you're less likely to break it in the process...

Pete,

Here goes ...

The location I found is in yabb/sources/Post.pl.  The version I have has this version info at the beginning:

# Version:        YaBB 1 Gold - SP 1.3                                       
# Released:       December 2001; Updated April 6, 2003                      

In the function Post2, at line 663, there is this bit of code:

if($username ne 'Guest') {
    # Increment post count for the member.
    $settings[6] =~ s/[\n\r]//g;
    ++$settings[6];
    fopen(FILE, ">$memberdir/$username.dat") || &fatal_error("213 $txt{'106'}: $txt{'23'} $username.dat");
    foreach (@settings) {
       print FILE qq~$_\n~;
    }
    fclose(FILE);
}

This appears to be the code that increments post count ($settings[6]) if the user is not Guest and writes it back out to the user's dat file.  Just above this, at line 647, is this guy:

fopen(FILE, "+<$boardsdir/$currentboard.txt", 1) || &fatal_error("211 $txt{'106'}: $txt{'23'} $currentboard.txt");

This line is opening the current board's txt file.  We're not necessarily interested in the txt file but the line does show that the current board name is in the variable $currentboard.

So, at a minimum, you could do something like this at line 663:

if($username ne 'Guest' && $currentboard ne 'xxxx') {

where xxxx is the internal name of Cafe Simviation, for example.

Here's what I'll do.  To make sure that this idea works I will try it on my yabb system at work on Monday.  It's lightly used so, if I break something, I can repair it without a lot of problem.

What I'm inclined to do is insert a function call so you can get more elaborate in your decision making.  So the post count code above would be changed to look like this:

if($username ne 'Guest') {

    $countPosts = doWeCountPosts($username, $currentboard);   # do we count this post?
    if($countPosts == 1) {

       # Increment post count for the member.
       $settings[6] =~ s/[\n\r]//g;

       ++$settings[6];
       fopen(FILE, ">$memberdir/$username.dat") || &fatal_error("213 $txt{'106'}: $txt{'23'} $username.dat");
       foreach (@settings) {
           print FILE qq~$_\n~;
       }
       fclose(FILE);
    }
}

I would insert the function doWeCountPosts at the end of Post.pl.  In it you could do whatever logic was necessary to determine whether to count posts or not.  For example, you could have a text file in the Boards directory that listed the internal names of the boards you didn't want to count posts for.  If you find $currentboard in the file then return 0 otherwise return 1.  To make it a bit more bulletproof, if our special file doesn't exist then return 1.  Initially you'd have to maintain the file with vi but we could probably add an admin function to make it more friendly.

This all sounds great but, just to make sure, I will try this on Monday and let you know.

Gordon

Personally I would just leave it be...

BUT, feel free to do what you think you gotta do..

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I agree with Hagar, most people seem to like the current system (or are fine with it).

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Most people agree that the number of posts is irrelevant so I don't see that it matters in the slightest.

Who is to say if a topic is pointless or not? Note that many of these so-called pointless topics have far more views & replies than all the others put together. Most people like chatting about pointless things, just go to the average party & listen to what they call small-talk. Nobody forces you to look at anything that doesn't interest you. It's a bit of fun that's all.

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I've often remarked that I never understood why the number of posts is considered important. Apparently it matters to some people & that's fine with me. Live & let live. If you feel as I do, the number of posts or stars that someone might have doesn't impress me or interest me in the slightest. They could have a million posts & still be an idiot which is quite obvious if you read what they have to say. That doesn't mean they have no right to say it, providing it's not offensive.

This is not directed towards you Craig (or anyone else in particular) but it strikes me that too many people spend their lives looking for silly little things to moan about. Like the people who watch a TV show & then write & complain about it. I never understood that either as nobody forces them to watch anything they might find offensive & they seem to do this deliberately.

Until recently most of my considerable number of posts in this forum were answers to people wanting help. I must have come across to many people as a humourless old git.  I've lost touch with most of it now & many members know far more than me so I leave them to it. This means I spend far more time joining in with the banter in the Cafe & joking around with Fozzer. When I do try to say something interesting (well I think it's interesting) very few people bother to reply. I've posted plenty of useless stuff over the last few months. Unless anyone tells me not to I'll probably continue doing so.

Post counts do and don't bother me. It will keep time wasters away, but I personally like to know how much of a regular a person is and how much I can trust them. The post count tells one an awful lot and if people are as foolish as to post just to notch up another mark then they are nuts and those people will soon get bored and go away.
Leave it as it is. I prefer it that way. 8)

What I could suggest is, is that you scrap the residents 5 star labels. That gets people posting here for nothing. It doesn't help the site and would get rid of folk who are here just to get the reisdent status. I think that would benefit the site - but don't scrap the post count.

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NOOOOOOOOOO!  It's too much fun messing them up!