Hi All,

There seems to be a growing tendency when replying to a post to use the 'Reply With Quote' or 'Quick Reply to this message' buttons. This is convenient and I tend to do it myself. The problem is that some people rarely edit out the unneeded parts of the points they are replying to, and we often end up with posts with a one sentence reply and a several paragraph original Quote, over and over again.

Besides being redundant and making the thread more difficult to read, this is causing the size of the forum database to grow at an alarming rate. For example, the DB download for archive/backup purposes in January was 180Mb, now it's over 300Mb. I hate to extrapolate to next year at this time.

The DB is backed up daily on the server and the size isn't really a big deal, but for those of us who download it regularly to our harddrives for safety, size does matter as they say. Note that this will also increase the size of the Archive .chm file of the forum unnecessarily, which you guys/gals download, and makes it harder to read.


I'm not certain why the increased tendency to include quotes, I think it's just the layout of the new VBulletin version we're using and the 2 "quote" reply buttons, the regular Reply button at the end of the thread is not quite as prominent.

All we're asking is that people be aware of this and be a little more selective when including quotes, and we'll have a more streamlined and easier to read forum.

Thanks.

Regards,
Kayaker

Kayaker:

I seem to recall reading about some mods on the vBulletin.org Forum to change the position and/or location of the "reply with quotes" button and/or add a standard "reply" button which did not quote the post. I know I've visited sites using vBull which had removed that as a standard or moved it from it's prominent location. Maybe we should consider the modification ourselves. What I've seem most prequently are separate "reply" and "quote" labelled buttons, which make it clear when one is "quoting" and/or just replying.

Regards,

what about cut and paste certain imoprtant portions? I think it would reduced the database.my 2 cents


Regards

Thanks for the suggestion Esther, actually, we've got a couple of other ideas as well. One is to fix the buttons so they are a bit more logical and don't default to including quotes.

The other is to make sure the server goes down every few days, as it just did, so no one can reply to anything! I figure if "someone" crashes the server for 10 days out of every month our database growth will decline by 1/3...

Cheers,
K.

Just to keep the record straight:

No one "crashed" the server on this occasion. I have it on good authority that there was simply an accounting error with the company hosting the server and they locked us out until the issue was resolved.

Regards,

Last time I checked, the prime suspect of a certain act does not count as "good authority" for information implicating his innocence.

Well then, there is no excuse for not checking the logs, is there?

Hope you had a good "midsommarafton."

Regards,

It's happened before, and I'm quite sure it could happen again, that "someone" could take down the server without leaving a single trace in most kinds of logs. And thanks, midsommarafton was great.

Holy smokes... there's still familiar faces in here!
(Hi Kayaker, JMI, dELTA, Zairon, esther, etc.)

Been awhile (years), but I stumbled across a woodmann URL while I was looking for something at work today & thought I should pop in & say "Hi" LOL

Dunno if I'll have time to get back into reversing (would be fun again), but I'll have to at least pop in & harass you guys once in a while ;-)

?ferret!

Good to hear from old friends. What's this, twice in four years you've dropped by now? What will it take to encourage you to take up reversing again? C'mon, you know you miss it!

The rest of us are lifers.., besides, we're not allowed to leave anyway. Even if you don't take up the game again, your $.02 is always welcome here.

Cheers,
Kayaker

I'm still a reverser at heart LOL

I spend most of my time taking old single user applications and figuring out how to get them to run in multi-user environments (without access to source code, and in most cases the people that coded them are nowhere to be found). I recently spent 6 months doing this for a suite of applications at a 50 billion dollar company. That was fun. I knew the software better than the people who were supposed to support it by the time my contract ended.

Maybe I'll have to dig up some tools again & see what reversing protections under Vista is like. (shudder)

Hi ?ferret,

Wow that's a blast from the past (well, and so am I) Nice to see you still around.

well who's turn was it to get the beer in anyway?.

/me buys a round

Hehe, always nice to see the old faces around.

Especially when they know what they are talking about!

Regards,

Rules me out! hehe