Open House

Hey everyone - thanks for attending FortyToo's Open House - and thanks JP, Curly and Larry Elvis for hosting it. Coming out parties are always so exciting!

I've got to work today, so I can't give detailed answers to every question, suggestion or complaint. I don't really even have time to bask in the praise! But I'll address a couple of things quickly, and add the rest as FortyToo comments here tomorrow.

First, the "crash:" this is, as someone pointed out, the reason we have Beta versions. There was not a server problem. There was not a volume problem. As with all systems, there is an upper limit, but 288 comments isn't it. I've tested over 900, which with the Alpha version started showing some slowdown, mostly due to the Gravatar connection - Beta doesn't slow down there, but it can take a while for all the "hides" to work through. In either case, once the initial thread is loaded, it speeds right back up.  And the text version is totally immune to volume, unless you use "0" as your page size. Which is one reason why it is paged.

No, the problem was isolated to one post and simply stopped everything after that from displaying. I know what the problem with the post was and fixed it, but still have to work out how it got in there in the first place.

There were some very good suggestions I'll be implementing, some that we've already discussed and planned, and some that sound good but would actually be very annoying.

For example, the reason that refresh doesn't take you to the next new post (it only moves the scroll bar and shows how many comments that try retrieved) is that it can happen automatically. If you were in the middle of reading a previous comment and suddenly the window scrolled to the bottom, you would be mightily and rightly well pissed. However, I might be able to have it jump there only if manually refreshed.

And it isn't really "refresh" - that's the difference. I shouldn't label it that way. It's really "Get New."

There are plans to give more control to the auto-rate, but it's a performance thing. It's really not there for active conversation (click the NOW counter button whenever you want) but for when comments are trickling in and you just want to see them come while you're working on another window. If every lurker on every blog that was using FortyToo hit the server every five seconds (even when no new comments were available) it would eventually slow things down.

So what I'm planning is a "smart" timer, that adjusts itself to how fast comments are arriving. That will be a while coming.

What else? Let's see ... Preview is indeed broken. I must have done something on the last update that upset it. And when you go to Text mode there are no scrollbars - that's a side-effect of opening the initial Flash window with no bars, they can't be turned on once the window is open. But I do have a way around it, I'll implement it tomorrow. Copy/Paste will come eventually, but it's kind of a big deal with the Flash Text/Graphics Engine. Some of you may remember that when PDF first came out, you couldn't copy/paste with Acrobat Reader either. It's a similar issue. The question is, will I get around to doing the complex code involved before Adobe updates the platform to make it easier? Probably. I'm faster than they are.

Thanks again everyone, hope you enjoyed your night out from the Trolls and we'll all talk again soon.

--dirk gently, sociopathetic