ILXOR reformat: Classic or Dud ????

BTW bob I didn't ans that q abt ILXOR in yr email (I was in a hurry so I just ans the q regarding music/tapes etc) but ILXOR has been fine.

Can you explain in what way is it difficult?

The interface strikes me as being pretty transparent. What is difficult about it?

how has ILXOR changed? I notice no difference.

i can only see good changes (the new answers link on the bottom, vg).

I'm not sure what's being talked about. I noticed some new options lately, like the blog view, which is kind of fun, but aside from that, I don't see anything that would make life more difficult.

(Aside from the giant alligator that now pops out of my monitor and into my room every time I try to submit a message, forcing me to wrestle with him before I can finish posting, obv.)

answers please. is it the new answers delay? i've a horrible feeling it's got worse of recent (i.e. since my meddling) -- I've some ideas how to improve that, but I haven't had the chance to fiddle much recently. Also, if you really want to start a thread like this ILE might be a better place to catch me -- but I'll make the effort to look in here nonetheless.

at times ILXOR does slow down but its still miles better than when it was at greenspun (remember when the server basically fucked off for a day or two).

I haven't noticed much of a change, to be honest. I have noticed recently that slows down more often, but not so much as to be a big problem.

it IS quite possibly ME seeing as i am ultra luddite (unable to link to another thread or post a picture, even!!!!). but i get that "view all answers last seven days" thing (surely that's new??) and then new answers don't show w/out a load of clicking on links and "show all details". and i am just too lazy and too impatient for that - unless i just got both of the typwriter/tv screen machines i use set up wrong cookies or summat i dunno , both at the same time??? help !

whu?

The "all new answers last 7 days" can time out cos there are so many new answers -- the usual view you are looking at just lists the last 100 (which curently only goes back 2 days, and often only 1). This isn't new, it used to be at the bottom of New Answers, I just moved it to the top, to parallel the same link on New Questions, and to add the RSS (and blog) links.

You shouldn't need to go through view all details - not sure what's going on there.

I've noticed that it's a lot slower than it was about 6 months ago

i'm not having much fun tracking down bottlenecks. I think that searches cause the generation of the newanswers list to slow down dramatically (and hence requests for the newanswers page also get delayed until the searches resolve)

I'm going to look at the search code but right now I'm going to trial setting the newanswers cache generation to kill long-lived mySQL processes in some hope of improving things.

How widely read is ILM? I know you can never be truly accurate, but how many users generally hit ILM?

i haven't noticed any problems...

classic classic, like the new features altho i dont actually use em that much

wow, New Answers at the bottom of the page. much thanks, Alan.

(Aside from the giant alligator...
Yeah. The alligator was a bad idea. And the pop-up blocker doesn't stop it either.

For the record, New Answers has been at the bottom of the page since v early in the life of ilxor. No thanks to me - send Graham a postcard!

i'm still getting most recent new answers coming up as 30th june. i can only get any further through absurd amounts of linking. have i inadvertantly spazzed my computer or is this a common problem or a new problem?

Try annihilating your Cookies, it could be the fault of a bad Cookie. go to Tools->Internet Options and click on 'Delete cookies'. It could be that i don't know what the hell i'm talking about too, it never happened to me but it makes sense, try it.

you could mail me a small snapshot of your new answers page -- i'm baffled

some searches seem to fail for me from .nz -- they just take forever

it's tempting to hit [refresh] but i presumed that doing that triggered another search -- i don't know whether that's the result or not but many webusers would hit [refresh] i guess, treating search results like a search result web page from amazon (or any other web page)

of course it would be cool to be able to list x columns/types of qns on screen, different colours for above-average-popular threads, all GUI end user toggle-able stuff i suppose -- on the other hand the site looks good and reads easy as a text type faced old fashioned html page, ie just text and hyperlinks, as per the the uncluttered html of the original idea of the world wide web/ hypertext information system (and so discourages people using it like a lonely teenage hearts chat room, which at the moment it thankfully isn't)

will searches always succeed ? even searches for very un-common terms as well as 3 and 4 letter words ? sometimes i give up waiting, and sometimes i'm timed out, and sometimes i can't find a message even though i know key phrases, names (ie the two common terms for the search), i know it exists and enough of what it says to be able to nail it -- do some threads die or is everything still totally archived ?

is there a way end users could have a uder-interface "skin" they could program for their end ? i guess it's all already done in the link to simple html, so maybe it's something i could experiment with, but at the moment multiple AI meta-searching and result pooling and stats are beyond the search timings and result reliabilities aren't fast enough for me to use the search function in that way (lousy big ISP on 56kps in new zealand i suppose)

ok NOW I FEEL LIKE A FOOL. cos the problem it transpires is at my end - god why do i have to get so darn INDIGNANT about these things?
>so embarrassing< no it turns out my senile autistical housemate had screwed the settings on this PC. there is no rhyme nor reason to his actions, and i am just a big wannbe-victim drama queen. ILXOR is pristine and fine and beautiful and i am sorry to have sullied it with my unfounded accusations. many apologies all.
bob.

3-letter words it ignores george: 4-letter is the minimum it will search for

as far as i know everything is archived

i'm on broadband, hence high speed access, and have never had a search which took more than maybe three mins, except when other traffic problems are generally and visibly intervening (eg probably several other ppl searching simultaneously, or site itself saying "OVERLOAD WILL ROBINSON TURN BACK U POXY FULE") => what this means is that i believe ALL searches will eventually terminate successfully, but slow bandwidth and heavy traffic can make them sluggish and tedious sometimes

(refreshing probably jumps you to the back of the search queue: you 'd have to ask alan about that)