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)); }
Perl is very similar to C in syntax, but it has a number of powerful semantic enhancements. Variables names begin with "$", or "@" for arrays, or "%" for associative arrays (aka hashes).

Author Topic:   Now available for testing: dBoard 3.0 Beta
Admin
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Posts: 12998
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Message 1 of 91 (512151)
06-14-2009 6:21 PM


More than 3 years in the making, dBoard 3.0 is rapidly nearing completion and a beta version is now available for user testing at:
This test board is identical to the main board as of about 11:00 AM this morning eastern time US, including all threads and messages. So that it's easy to tell when you're at the new board I've given it a slightly ruddy background, instead of black. I've created a thread at the test board for posting information about problems, issues and bugs:
Reasons for helping test dBoard 3.0:
  1. No moderation!
  2. Did you ever want to have full director powers? Just ask by posting to this thread! Directors can perform any and all board management operations, like creating new forums, suspending members, changing the boards appearance, and so on. Since the testing is being done on a copy of the board and not on the main board, no damage can be done. Of course, repeatedly copying the original board to the test area can grow tedious, so if too many "mistakes" are made I'll have to reconsider letting anyone be director.
  3. There are many improvements. Many are internal, such as moving all message data into a MySQL database (Did you know that there are over a half million messages at EvC?), but there are a number of visible improvements.
dBoard 3.0 is still a work in progress. It has some rough edges, and the database searches require more optimization, but it is important that it be released soon because the number of messages at EvC Forum has grown so large that moving them from their current text files into the MySQL database takes several hours, and some steps in the process are manual. If the number of messages grows much larger the process could become prohibitive.
So please help get dBoard 3.0 ready for prime time by testing dBoard 3.0 Beta. In fact, use it instead of the main board for a while. When the main board is finally updated to 3.0 I'll keep the test board in place while discussions in progress complete.
Thanks in advance for your help!
Edited by Admin, : Fix link.
Edited by Admin, : Redirect link to the test thread, which no longer exists, back to this thread.

--Percy
EvC Forum Director

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Admin
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Posts: 12998
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Message 4 of 91 (512177)
06-15-2009 6:30 AM
Reply to: Message 2 by Shield
06-15-2009 4:10 AM


Re: dBoard license
dBoard is not open source, but it will soon be become publicly available. We haven't yet been able to give much thought to this next stage, but it is important that we get feedback about the installation process. If you would like to be a beta site this should be possible fairly soon.

--Percy
EvC Forum Director

This message is a reply to:
 Message 2 by Shield, posted 06-15-2009 4:10 AM Shield has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 6 by Shield, posted 06-15-2009 7:15 AM Admin has replied

  
Admin
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Posts: 12998
From: EvC Forum
Joined: 06-14-2002
Member Rating: 2.2


Message 5 of 91 (512178)
06-15-2009 6:44 AM
Reply to: Message 3 by Wounded King
06-15-2009 6:24 AM


Re: By the power of Greyskull!!!!
Wounded King writes:
Can I have directors powers to play around with?
You now have director privileges over at the test board, use your new powers carefully. Feel free to play with all the board settings, but take care to restore any settings to their original state, or to leave them in a reasonable state.
I like the way you can limit a thread to only one posters posts, it lets me marvel at my own wit and intelligence without having to read the prattling of everyone else, speeds up my ego tripping no end.
I'm considering addition of an inverse, a link that displays the thread with everyone *but* that person's posts. More difficult to implement but probably more useful would be a personal preference setting that allows you to define a list of members you'd like to ignore. Their posts would never appear for you in the display of threads.

--Percy
EvC Forum Director

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Message 7 of 91 (512199)
06-15-2009 8:25 AM
Reply to: Message 6 by Shield
06-15-2009 7:15 AM


Re: dBoard license
rpb writes:
Free of charge but proprietary? That makes baby bambi cry
Join the programming team. dBoard is written in Perl with a fair amount of Javascript. And you can always make changes to your own copy.

--Percy
EvC Forum Director

This message is a reply to:
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Replies to this message:
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 Message 10 by Shield, posted 06-16-2009 8:52 AM Admin has replied

  
Admin
Director
Posts: 12998
From: EvC Forum
Joined: 06-14-2002
Member Rating: 2.2


Message 9 of 91 (512288)
06-16-2009 6:18 AM


Please Help Test New Board Software
I'm just giving this a bump to encourage people to help test the new board software. A few bugs have already been uncovered (a big thanks for the help finding them!), which I fixed last night and this morning. The test board can be found at:
You can visit all the pages without logging in, but you'll have to log in the first time you try to post a message.

--Percy
EvC Forum Director

  
Admin
Director
Posts: 12998
From: EvC Forum
Joined: 06-14-2002
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Message 11 of 91 (512303)
06-16-2009 9:29 AM
Reply to: Message 10 by Shield
06-16-2009 8:52 AM


Re: dBoard license
rpb writes:
Can i ask why it's so private?
My short term goal is to improve its quality (ease of installation and upgrade is by far my biggest concern) so that it can be given away to see if it can gain any traction.
My long term goal is a salable product that matches vBulletin in capability but undercuts its price by about 90%. Naturally any developers would share in any profits, should there be any, but its too early to begin thinking about such details.
Open sourcing dBoard would be a great motivation for a lot of developers to join in, including myself.
I don't know that the Internet needs another open-source bulletin board. There's phpBB and YaBB that I can think of off the top of my head, and I know there are a number of others.
I've never participated in open source development. How does it work?

--Percy
EvC Forum Director

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Admin
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Posts: 12998
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Message 15 of 91 (512455)
06-18-2009 8:38 AM
Reply to: Message 14 by Shield
06-18-2009 7:38 AM


Re: dBoard license
Thanks for the information. I suppose if dBoard had started as a group effort, even if only two people, that I wouldn't feel such a strong sense of ownership, but every innovation in dBoard is mine and I couldn't just throw it open with the possibility that anyone could do with it what they will.
A couple people have recently volunteered to help out, though they're still coming up to speed, and we'd love to have you join us. I understand your feelings about non-open source, but it needn't be a showstopper.
Oh, before I forget, Catholic Scientist and Stile, thanks for the attaboys, much appreciated. I'd also like to encourage you and everyone to give the test board a workout and give me your feedback. Adminnemooseus just posted his comments at http://test.///cgi-bin/dm.cgi?action=msg&m=103623. He didn't post about bugs but about his reaction to the changes. I take feedback like this very seriously, it definitely has an impact.

--Percy
EvC Forum Director

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Message 18 of 91 (512491)
06-18-2009 1:27 PM
Reply to: Message 16 by Stile
06-18-2009 12:04 PM


Re: I be suspended!
Stile writes:
I did not receive an email informing me of my suspension. I'm not sure if this is supposed to happen or not, but perhaps it may be an idea for future?
This is a great idea, definitely going on the list. Seems so obviouus, I can't believe this is the first time someone's mentioned this.
-If I hover over my suspension icon (the red circle with a white line in it beside my name on any of my posts) it says something about the suspension ending at about 12:02pm (EST, -5 GMT). A few minutes after that, the red icon remains, the text says something like "Suspension ends xxx min. ago"... yet I'm still suspended and can't post. Does the suspension ending need to be acknoledged by an administrator? Or should it release automatically?
The suspension releases automatically at the correct time, but for some reason the server's clock is running 10 minutes slow, I keep meaning to look into this but haven't had time. The server is supposed to stay in sync with a known source of correct time, the National Bureau of Standards website.

--Percy
EvC Forum Director

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Message 20 of 91 (512546)
06-18-2009 8:38 PM
Reply to: Message 19 by RAZD
06-18-2009 7:44 PM


Re: new thread - dbcode programming?
The code for the site is already under source control with Subversion. Most of the code is Perl, there's maybe a thousand lines of Javascript, there's heavy use of CSS (especially for the upcoming dynamic menus), plus good old HTML. Anyone who would like to join the development team should let me know. I'll give them Subversion access and set them up on the server with their own copy of the board that they can play with.
I plan to code review everything before it gets checked in.

--Percy
EvC Forum Director

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Message 24 of 91 (512899)
06-22-2009 7:13 AM
Reply to: Message 23 by xongsmith
06-21-2009 7:15 PM


Re: new thread - dbcode programming?
Not sure if this is a yes, a no, or "I'm considering it."

--Percy
EvC Forum Director

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Posts: 12998
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Message 27 of 91 (512949)
06-22-2009 5:33 PM
Reply to: Message 25 by xongsmith
06-22-2009 10:36 AM


Re: new thread - dbcode programming?
Automatically generated HTML code is not very easy to read, but the code that generated the HTML is formatted and commented Perl, so it's fairly readable, e.g.:
if ($folderOn) {
    my $hot = ($ActivityCount >= $Gbl_ActivityCount)
        ? true
        : false;
    my $new = false;
    my $userID = $Gbl_Cookie{'UserID'};
    if ($userID > 0) {
      if ($lastMsgTime > $timeHorizon) {
        my $timeOfLastAccess =
            &GetQueryDatum("select Time from $Gbl_ThreadAccessTimesTable " .
                           "where TID=$threadID && MBRID=$userID");
        if (!$timeOfLastAccess || $timeOfLastAccess < $lastMsgTime) {
          $new = true;
        }
      }
    }
    $folderHTML =
        (qq(\n
) . &GetThreadIconHTML($threadID, $forumID, $hot, $new, $closed) . qq(
--Percy
EvC Forum Director

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Message 28 of 91 (512950)
06-22-2009 5:45 PM
Reply to: Message 26 by Phat
06-22-2009 1:33 PM


Re: I'll help
I've given you director privileges, thanks for the help.
The new feature in the control panel is the appearance themes - multiple ones can be defined, and you can switch easily between them.
You'll also notice a link for dynamic menus, but they're not working yet. You can play with the control panel for dynamic menus, but you can't see the results.

--Percy
EvC Forum Director

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Message 30 of 91 (512982)
06-23-2009 7:15 AM
Reply to: Message 29 by RAZD
06-22-2009 6:38 PM


Re: Some of your wisdoms of Perl, please ...
Perl often comes installed by default on Linux systems. If you already have Linux installed then just check if it's on your search path by giving the "which perl" command.
If Perl isn't found it may be your search path that is at fault, so look in /usr/bin and /usr/local/bin.
If your Linux system doesn't have Perl already installed then simply download the appropriate binary from the perl.org site.
I wouldn't compare Perl to Basic, but it's much more like structured Basic than Fortran. Hopefully nothing again is ever like Fortran. Perl doesn't really resemble Lisp. In Perl, lists and arrays are the same thing. An array can be defined with a simple list, e.g.:
my @Names = ('Tom', 'Dick', 'Harry');
You then access the array or list with an index, e.g.:
my $secondName = $Names[1];
Wysiwyg HTML editors generate HTML. It would be taking an indirect route to generate Perl code to generate the HTML.
The tutorial excerpt you provided contains a minor error. Assuming the bang line in the Perl file contains the correct path to Perl ("#!/usr/local/bin/perl"), then you don't need to type "perl first.pl", you only need to type "./first.pl". And if "." is in your search path then you only need "first.pl".
Edited by Admin, : Grammar.

--Percy
EvC Forum Director

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Message 34 of 91 (512987)
06-23-2009 10:07 AM
Reply to: Message 32 by Phat
06-23-2009 9:31 AM


Re: DBoard 3.0 Beta Observations
All signatures longer than 500 characters got truncated when I copied the database from the main board. I've removed the character limit for signatures, but I didn't recopy the database, which means your signature will stay truncated over at the test board, though you can cut-n-paste your signature from your profile here to your profile there if you want. The signatures will be correct when the main board is upgraded.
I can only guess about the funny characters that they are what happens when you try to copy the open/close kind of quotes ( and ), rather than the flat quotes ("). I think some types of open/close quotes don't copy/paste well.

--Percy
EvC Forum Director

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Message 41 of 91 (516872)
07-27-2009 7:27 PM
Reply to: Message 40 by xongsmith
07-27-2009 4:35 PM


Re: the little boat - Noah's Ark or HMS Beagle?
xongsmith writes:
Is this not a Happy Accident that I cannot tell whether it is supposed to be Noah's Ark or the HMS Beagle?
Still looking for volunteers to create icons for the site.

--Percy
EvC Forum Director

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