Author: Martin
Date: 02-09-10 03:41
Nofaith Dan, wise friend and good sir, I received your email the other day but I've been in the hospital (nothing too serious) and haven't been able to reply till now. I've chosen to reply here in case others might have comments to contribute, such as Vicki's above.
First, the URL issue appeared (past tense) to have been magically fixed, but now I think I understand what was happening and why it now appears to be fixed. Allow me to explain the background (Warning: dreadfully boring tedium follows!)
Here's what I saw for several days when I returned here after my Nobel Prize post but before the last week or so (it might have also been a problem when I posted my Nobel thread, but I didn't check).
I wanted to post a link to another post here on this board. To determine the URL of that post, I used two different standard techniques: I either navigated to the post and copied the URL from Firefox's address bar, or I pulled down the right-click context menu and chose "Copy Link Location". The problem was that the URLs I gathered either way included a sub-anchor in the URL (for other readers, a sub-anchor normally provides a way to address a location further into a web page rather than just pointing to the top).
The URL for the first response (Ryan's) to my OP of the Nobel Prize thread read (past tense) as follows when I started posting this message (I've removed the http preface part so that it isn't processed by the Phorum software):
Quote:
2thinkforums.org/phorum3/read.php?f=1&i=23337&t=23329#reply_23337
The pound sign and what follows is a sub-anchor and it makes creating a formatted link in at least this version of Phorum's bbcode difficult or perhaps impossible (well, I couldn't come up with a work-around, anyway). I even tried it with an HTML-formatted link, but the pound sign seemed to make both HTML and bbcode choke. It seems to me that I came up with a work-around in years past, but I don't recall how I did it.
Note, Dan, that I recognize that the specific sub-anchor in that particular URL is redundant and that a formatted link without it would work perfectly. But if memory serves (and I must admit that it very well might not), at the time I sent you the email, the URLs for specific posts were not redundant and looked something like this:
Quote:
2thinkforums.org/phorum3/read.php?f=1&t=23329#reply_23337
As such, I couldn't create a formatted link that would properly get past Phorum's bbcode processor because the sub-anchor was required.
Again, I could be mis-remembering that, though.
But what I've just discovered this very minute is that the URLs are formatted differently if you're using the "Threaded View". With Threaded View, the sub-anchors seem to be gone from the URLs. That makes intuitive sense now that I think about it. In the non-threaded view, I guess it makes a kind of sense that Phorum would utilize sub-anchors to address specific replies, treating an entire thread like a single web page.
So, on that point: Mystery Solved.
I'd still like to know how to create formatted bbcode links that address URLs with sub-anchors for future reference, but as long as I remain in Threaded View, that's no longer absolutely necessary in order to point to specific posts/replies here.
Now, as for the search problems I've been having, I asked Vicki if she could find my posts that referenced "Jerry Fodor" and so forth using the Phorum search feature. Her reply was inadvertently misleading, because she told me that she did find those posts, whereas I simply could not, which was extremely vexing and puzzling. Only in her most recent reply did she add the vital clue that she only found them in the archives! I was operating under the assumption that she found them with the standard search function (i.e., here), whereas I now know she couldn't find them there either.
But at the time I sent you that email, that same search function wouldn't even return my very recent Nobel Prize posts! It returned zero hits for any post by "Martin" anywhere in the entire history of the database, even while I was looking right at some of them!
That isn't a memory flaw! It could find nothing I wrote at all in return from a search query of "Martin", "Author", "Search This Forum", "All Words", "All Dates" (all other options off). I got the same result from the same search query but with "Subject" and "Message Bodies" checked too. It found a few posts that included the name "Martin" in the message body, but none of them were written by me. That was the case for about a week.
However, now the search function does find and return my posts (I stopped looking after I found posts from 2007). I have no idea what might have changed, though. Perhaps a portion of the database was taken offline by the hosting provider and was restored after my queries? That would be my best guess, but it's just a stab in the dark.
To summarize, then, everything now seems to be working correctly. The only lingering technical question is how one can create a formatted link to a URL that contains sub-anchors.
There is another issue I'd like your input on, however. What's the funding situation for the board? The home page shows an unfulfilled fund drive from 2006! It simply isn't right that you bear the burden of paying for the hosting and all the rest! WE need to pay our own way!
So how about starting a new fund drive, with the appeal and status thermometer on the top of the forum's page instead of on a separate page?
The time isn't ideal for a big contribution from myself until the 18'th, but I propose that we get the ball rolling now. Your wonderful generosity in funding this board yourself for so long is a real tribute to your honor, Dan, but we need to either pay up or shut up!
Respectfully,
- Martin
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Those who prize eloquence+rationality+analytic skill above politeness, Martin's our Allen Iverson. We put up with the other shit 'cause it's worth it; I didn't come to have a cup of tea. --BrianDC
Post Edited (02-09-10 06:13)
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