Diminishing Post Counts

[richhotrain]

It means we talk too much.  

Rich

[jeffrey-wimberly]

Deggesty

I, too, have red stars, Indicating that I am an end (ultimate) contributor, but I have made less than half as many contributions as other end contributors have. So, what does "ultimate" mean?

For me (when mine was showing all red stars and twenty thousand plus posts) it might mean I better shut my trap and let somebody else talk for a while.

[Murphy Siding]

     Dear Abbey-

      All my friends are losing their post counts, but mine keep increasing.  I mean, just yesterday,  I had 8213 posts.  Today,  I have 8218, and there doesn't seem to be an end in sight.  I've even tried giving them away, but to no avail.  How can I get my post count to go down like my friends' post counts.  I feel like an outcast.  What can I do?

-a loyal reader

[richhotrain]

Murphy Siding

     Dear Abbey-

      All my friends are losing their post counts, but mine keep increasing.  I mean, just yesterday,  I had 8213 posts.  Today,  I have 8218, and there doesn't seem to be an end in sight.  I've even tried giving them away, but to no avail.  How can I get my post count to go down like my friends' post counts.  I feel like an outcast.  What can I do?

-a loyal reader

Dear Loyal Reader,

The fastest way to do this is to change your screen name.  That way, you can start all over at zero.  Another way to do it is to get your posts moderated. That won't decrease the post count but it will slow down the increase.  A third way is to be patient.  Sooner or later, you will lose post count like the rest of us.

And, in the future, spell my name correctly.  If you address your questions to Abbey, you will only manage to get a response from Broadway Lion.  Him responds to anything and everything.  

Abby

[BaltACD]

What really gets me - all the correct data is in our profiles?  Is it that difficult to make a database call to that data, display it, increment it after a post and store the incremented value back in the database.  I thought that got taught in Programming 101.

[jeffrey-wimberly]

richhotrain

And, in the future, spell my name correctly.  If you address your questions to Abbey, you will only manage to get a response from Broadway Lion.  Him responds to anything and everything.  

No offense to Broadway Lion but that's hilarious!!

[Murphy Siding]

BaltACD

What really gets me - all the correct data is in our profiles?  Is it that difficult to make a database call to that data, display it, increment it after a post and store the incremented value back in the database.  I thought that got taught in Programming 101.

    I don't think it's the technical aspects that are the problem.   I believe it's the priority of the issue that's causing the problem.

     To paraphrase Humphrey Bogart; 

"It doesn't take much to see that the problems of a group of posters on a free website message board doesn't add up to a hill of beans in this crazy world of for-profit magzine publishing." ........ or something like that 

[Semper Vaporo]

BaltACD

What really gets me - all the correct data is in our profiles?  Is it that difficult to make a database call to that data, display it, increment it after a post and store the incremented value back in the database.  I thought that got taught in Programming 101.

 

You'd think so, wouldn't you.  But I find that with this distributed processing called a "network", duplicates of things get stored in different computers, being duplicated for expedience sake, and the duplicates get out of sync because of reboots and restores done in individual processing centers where the duplicates are, and they are never sync'd again, but just receive count updates to add to the duplicate instead of receiving a specific value to replace the duplicate.

 

I have a few videos on YouTube and I have been tracking the view counts for several years and there have been times when the counts went backwards in some of the reports where I can get the counts.  There several ways to see the count on any video;

It is on the page where you can watch the video,

and on my private profile page there are two ways to view my list of videos,

then there is also the "Analytics" section and I have differing counts in different lists there.

("Analytics" used to be called "Insite" and when it was changed the counts went backward for several of my videos). 

And there is no one particular way of viewing the counts that is always higher for all the videos... One method will show some counts from 1 to 50 below another method, but may have one or two videos at a higher count (by 1 to 50) than that same other method. 

There are times when there will be a message displayed stating that the counts are being delayed for some reason (that never makes any sense!) but that they will catch up and not to worry as no counts have been lost...

But if they are not "lost"... Then just WHERE ARE THEY such that I can't see the true count? 

 

And if you sum the counts in any of the lists, the sum does not match any of the lists that show total counts on my channel!  It cannot even add the counts it displays to get the same sum it displays!

 

I'm was a programmer for nearly 40 years (retired now, but I still dabble in it for "fun") and I worked hard all those years at not letting this sort of thing happen, but I think today's "Computers 101" teaches 'do what is expedient for yourself and let someone else worry about if it is right or will work for the long term'.

 

 

To compound things, today's operating systems have routines that try to keep malware from upsetting the apple cart by watching things and periodically resetting things if it sees something happen that might have been unwanted...

 

I have a program I wrote way back in WIndows 3.0 that has worked in all versions up to Windows 7 (have not been able to try it on Windows 8) It is a simple (HA! been "enhanced" to death!) "Alarm Clock" where the user can set any number of alarms to occur on any repeat basis (by minutes, hours, Days, Weeks, or Months) and can be "snoozed" any number of minutes, display a user entered message for what the alarm is about and play any sound file as the alert sound.  (I use it to remind me a week in advance for birthdays, aniversarys, appointments and other events (trash day, payday, bills due, etc.).  As such, it stores a lot of data for each alarm (about 20 parameters each!) in the Windows Registry AND a duplicate in a seperate file. 

 

I did the duplicate file writing recently because I have noted that sometimes an alarm I had set, seen occur, and deleted, will repeat the next day when I boot the computer up!  I DELETED IT, how'd it come back?  I have set a new alarm and later I remember setting it, but it failed to occur.  Where'd it go? 

 

Something in Winders is resetting the Registry back to what it was before I deleted or created an alarm... It also seems to know about the separate file and resets it, too!  I am now working on a method of writing the data someplace else to see if I can detect when the "reset" occurs so I can try to find what is really doing it and find a way to make it leave my program's data alone!

 

So the different post counts here are just one more, um... STUPID in the world of computers that I bet no one will ever really understand.  The best that I think CAN happen is someone will create a new database entry that will try to find all the other counts and take the highest one to display, but that will require work that is not in the budget so don't hold yer breath about it.

 

 

[BaltACD]

Murphy Siding

BaltACD

What really gets me - all the correct data is in our profiles?  Is it that difficult to make a database call to that data, display it, increment it after a post and store the incremented value back in the database.  I thought that got taught in Programming 101.

    I don't think it's the technical aspects that are the problem.   I believe it's the priority of the issue that's causing the problem.

     To paraphrase Humphrey Bogart; 

"It doesn't take much to see that the problems of a group of posters on a free website message board doesn't add up to a hill of beans in this crazy world of for-profit magzine publishing." ........ or something like that 

 

And along the lines of 'for-profit'; why do otherwise smart organizations believe, when they do offer forums, that they have to invent their own software to do it - when there are already a number of correctly operating stock products on the market.

I participate in a number of forums on a variety of subjects - each of the organizations that tried to reinvent 'the wheel' has failed for a variety of reasons, some where square, some had flat spots, some had failing bearings, some had tires that came of the wheel - Organizations that are much larger than Kalmbach, whom I suspect invested even greater amounts of money into their attempts - FAILED, when there are stock products that would have done the job.

I understand human nature of reinventing a product line to improve it - but smart inventors and businessmen understand when their 'new & improved' is not measuring up to the old standard and take actions either to bring it up to the expected level or revert to the old product while they reinvent the new one.  Think 'New Coke' and the old standby which then came to be known as 'Coke Classic'.

 

[Murphy Siding]

     In the same way,  I'll never understand the need to change forum software.  If it works fine, and there's no monetary incentive to do so, why would any company spend the money on a forum software upgrade?

[BaltACD]

Murphy Siding

     In the same way,  I'll never understand the need to change forum software.  If it works fine, and there's no monetary incentive to do so, why would any company spend the money on a forum software upgrade?

They THINK there is a monetary advantage without thinking about the COSTS.  I am certain there are discussions that take place that we have no knowledge of - unfortunately, it appears that the participants in these discussions also have no knowledge of the realities of what is being discussed.

[zugmann]

Murphy Siding

     In the same way,  I'll never understand the need to change forum software.  If it works fine, and there's no monetary incentive to do so, why would any company spend the money on a forum software upgrade?

Isn't it usually done for bugs and security issues?

[blownout cylinder]

zugmann

Murphy Siding

     In the same way,  I'll never understand the need to change forum software.  If it works fine, and there's no monetary incentive to do so, why would any company spend the money on a forum software upgrade?

Isn't it usually done for bugs and security issues?

It depends on what the issues are I guess..sometimes it can be done by just patching or using 'hot fixes' but sometimes it gets to the point that it needs a complete overhaul. Around here it seems to need it around every 2 years or so....

[Semper Vaporo]

zugmann

Murphy Siding

     In the same way,  I'll never understand the need to change forum software.  If it works fine, and there's no monetary incentive to do so, why would any company spend the money on a forum software upgrade?

Isn't it usually done for bugs and security issues?

 

There are also issues with the ever changing "standard" for how a browser is supposed to work.  Improvements made for some new feature sometimes breaks the old way of doing things and the old forum software just will not work any more.  So it is a matter of update or die.

 

Some forum software was written to run on a small PC and it was not expected that there would be thousands of users and so the small PC just won't hold it all.  So new forum software has to be installed in a bigger computer or network of computers.  What works so well in a small scale operation may not work when the number of items being tracked becomes large, larger, or "You want to store HOW MANY?!?!?!"  (I have seen that happen hundreds of times.)

[BaltACD]

Semper Vaporo

zugmann

Murphy Siding

     In the same way,  I'll never understand the need to change forum software.  If it works fine, and there's no monetary incentive to do so, why would any company spend the money on a forum software upgrade?

Isn't it usually done for bugs and security issues?

 

There are also issues with the ever changing "standard" for how a browser is supposed to work.  Improvements made for some new feature sometimes breaks the old way of doing things and the old forum software just will not work any more.  So it is a matter of update or die.

 

Some forum software was written to run on a small PC and it was not expected that there would be thousands of users and so the small PC just won't hold it all.  So new forum software has to be installed in a bigger computer or network of computers.  What works so well in a small scale operation may not work when the number of items being tracked becomes large, larger, or "You want to store HOW MANY?!?!?!"  (I have seen that happen hundreds of times.)

 

This is not a particularly large forum.

[Modelcar]

........Perhaps it's time for another update and improvement.....

Wow....!  Looks like it might have just happened...Thanks to whomever.

[jeffrey-wimberly]

Looks like somebody tripped over their shoe laces and did something right! My post count is just what it's supposed to be. Wonder how long that'll last?

[zugmann]

Whaddya know?

I am ultimate again.  Bow down before me, lesser star mortals! 

[BaltACD]

Many thanks to the programmers that found the error of their code!

[Murphy Siding]

    Rats!   There goes my plan for world domination through superior post counts.  I had it right in the grasp of my fingertips, and I would've made it,  if it hadn't been for you meddling kids.  (Insert Scooby-Do icon here.)

[Stourbridge Lion]

Stourbridge Lion

Talk about missing Post Counts, I am all the way back to Newbie with 0 Stars... 

From Newbie to 5-Star Admiral - Yippee!!!!!!!

[BaltACD]

And the counts are incrementing!  Fabulous!

 

No sooner to I say that and my count did not increment from before to after this post! 

[blownout cylinder]

Yay.....or rather....mmmmmmm

[BaltACD]

blownout cylinder

Yay.....or rather....mmmmmmm

 

Seems like there may be a time element in incrementing the post count.  Back a couple of hours later and posts have incremented.

[tree68]

Woo Hoo!  I got my post count back!

I really need to get a life.... 

[richhotrain]

jeffrey-wimberly

Looks like somebody tripped over their shoe laces and did something right! My post count is just what it's supposed to be. Wonder how long that'll last?

About 9 months, Jeff.   

Rich

[Norm48327]

Post counts for some are way off. Some posters who had five stars now have none. It's a recent occurrence, and may be a glitch in the software. Time for the IT folks to get their act together.

[BaltACD]

I have lost most of mine - and I can see more posts in my profile page than the software is giving me as a total post count.

[Norm48327]

My profile shows I have made only one post. Rather skimpy for all the years I've been posting here.

[tree68]

Norm48327

My profile shows I have made only one post. Rather skimpy for all the years I've been posting here.

Now Norm, you're not living up to your avatar...