Diner Forum News

[K-Dog]

I accidentally deleted the database.  It is restored it but the topic and board references are jumbled up a bit.  I will fix it.  Nothing is actually lost but clicking on some other messages will not go to the referenced message until I fix it.

[K-Dog]

The database remains quirky.  I fixed some of it by hand.  I am creating a tool to manage the confusion, as doing the job manually is very error prone.  There is a lot of juggling.

[TDoS]

The database remains quirky.  I fixed some of it by hand.  I am creating a tool to manage the confusion, as doing the job manually is very error prone.  There is a lot of juggling.

In the modern world, what does a "quirky" database mean? Once upon a time when dinosaurs roamed the Earth I wrote basic DOS stuff, because it was cool. I began with Ashton Tate and dbase III programming on PCs. I migrated from there to Access 2.0 and underlying VB programming upon its introduction, and then inline programming in Access to Oracle serves, whereby I wrote SQL code (which looks just like dbase code), ran it inside of Access, to do whatever needed done with the Oracel tables, and to get around MS Access issues with file size and whatnot.

I can't recall my databases ever having decided to just....become unstable....just because. Is this a size limitation in some weird way that when violated decides to just start changing things for fun, surely the Diner can't be so large with mostly text stuff...if we were talking stored log raster rastor files I could see things getting big, but ASCII?

Code works generally until it hits some weird other limit, I get that, and I imagine the code sits on someone elses server, but are modern server rentals so shitty they can't run little websites and keep all the things pointed at the right stuff?

Isn't an instruction required somehow of some sort to begin a randomization process that can deep six all the internal connections?

[RE]

Simple Machines Forum (SMF) is the database/forum software the Diner runs on.  It's a very old, open source piece of software that has evolved over the years as a HUGE number of independent developers contributed their time to create a variety of modules that increased its functionality as well as addressed a variety of security issues that have cropped up over the years.  Not all the modules are of equal quality because all the developers who added stuff weren't equally proficient, nor did they generally go through all the source code to look for places where one module might interfere with or trip over the code in another one.

As a result, the final product isn't always altogether stable, particularly if it gets interfered with from outside, as this one periodically does.  Sometimes this is the MIB poking around, sometimes the SMF folks issue updated versions, and sometimes Kdog himself who likes to tinker and tweak things makes a change which have unanticipated consequences.  The current version is v2.1.4

This version is pretty good , but it does have weaknesses I don't like, a major one is very old which is how threads get tied together.  They default to the topic of the OP as reference, and if that gets changed or disturbed later, it can orphan all the subsequent posts made in the thread.  They are still there, but they don't appear in the thread when you don't address it directly.

Anyhow, overall we don't lose too many postsand since Forums have gone out of style in favor of social media, there's nothing available FOR FREE that's better than SMF for running a forum.  It has a lot of functionality with levels and controls and for the most part operates quickly and has a good search engine.  It's not perfect though, so you gotta live with a few problems.

RE