Hi all,

I was wondering whether an administrator would be so kind as to PM me to let me know what exactly i have done to merit this, please? I wasn't aware that i had done any wrong-doing or rule-breaking, i simply tried to access the forum one day and i was greeted with that message.

I've accessed it from a proxy page this time, otherwise the whole www.woodmann.com website gives me that message...

HR,
Ghandi

I guess it was not YOU who did something wrong - maybe just a coincidence.
If you did something against the rules, your username would have been banned.
Don't worry. I'm pretty sure someone will fix this.

Regards
darkelf

It's not you at all Ghandi. I temporarily banned a few IP families because of incessant spam. Can you PM me the ip in question and I'll remove the block. Sorry about that, but getting rid of spam here is a never ending battle.

Regards,
Kayaker

I get spam all the time too... "Access these CRACKS now!" and some such. Only, these are of the two-legged variety than the binary kind.

Have Phun

On a related note... any ideas HOW the board s/w brings up these "SIMILAR THREADS" stuff you see under each post?

Have Phun

Or more importantly....

Why are the "similar threads" under this thread so random?

Woodmann



Shit, it took me three times of reading that before I got it. I'm getting old

Yeah, I'm still trying to get the unbidden thoughts of two-legged cracks out of my head..

Whaddya talking about random? The hits look perfectly fine, refs to similar threads about "ip, banned, administrator,...". I guess you are getting old

Nah, I'm just messing with you. I optimized to get better hits. The original title had quotes around it, so internally the title actually looked like
"Sorry. The administrator has banned your IP ...

This apparently screwed up the search algo. As soon as I removed the quotes from the title it generated reasonable similar thread hits.

"Similar threads" are based on words in the title, there is a somewhat complex mysql query in a function called get_similar_threads(), duh, which works on a table dedicated for that purpose. The query makes use of the mysql MATCH/AGAINST syntax used for full-text searching.

It seems to work pretty well, this was just a unique failure I think because of that " symbol. Can you say "vBulletin bug"? (" is a reported bug in titles in other situations as well).

I hope this clears up all misconceptions this forum sucks...

Kayaker

Dont you have anything better to do at work
then figure this random shit out?

Woodmann

I bet he count the random stuff too much and screw up the algo

Thank you for your prompt response Kayaker, sorry i didn't get back to you with my IP, i've been on and offline the last few weeks. Everything is working fine now, thanks.

HR,
Ghandi