New Posts time

Only 11 days late, better late than never though. My case for not wanting Who's Online to be set for 30 minutes.

Let's say I come to visit the MB, I see which threads have new posts, I look at them, and I leave. For 30 minutes, new posts are being made, and the MB thinks I'm here, but I'm not. At 30 minutes, all posts that currently exist, including tons I've never seen, are marked as old. When I come back later, there are tons of posts (30 minutes worth) I've never read, but the MB thinks I have. Is this how it works? I believe so. I may be mistaken. What I EXPECT to happen is that the MB should've recognized I was gone in 15 minutes or whatever, and started remembering the new posts since that point.

I have sometimes had the MB say I was idle to long and mark all posts as read before I read them, if I had a long post to type. So I read short threads first. If I'm in EoEO typing up something huge, I JUST LOOKED at the forum list, so I still have a vague idea of what's new and what isn't. On the other hand, with the scenario above, I have NO IDEA what's new and what isn't, because I haven't been here for a long time.

The whole point of Who's Online is to show who's online. If you're gone for 30 minutes, you aren't online. I used to look in Who's Online to see who was here so I could PM them and maybe get a response immediately. Now I have to go to look at everyone's activity, and watch them for 5 minutes and see if they're shown as looking at the same page all that time, and if so, they're probably gone but the MB thinks they aren't. Who's Online no longer serves the purpose of showing who's online. I had that problem in the past too with the 15 minutes, but nowhere near to this extent.

This is aside from the fact that our online members list is showing hundreds of members as being active at any given time, which is never true.

Judging by this thread, I'd say you're in the minority. I can't see any valid reason listed in that post, either. If you want to know when they were last online, check Who's Online, it tells you when they last clicked onto a page.

As for more people showing up, it's rarely over 100. That was Yahoo! Slurp having a different IP for every single place it went to. Inaccurate? Yes. But it would have been inaccurate no matter what was done. Even with 15 minutes, it's inaccurate. We could change it to five minutes for more accuracy but that's even less helpful.

Read the short threads first? That's saying that we should suit the problem instead of fixing it. Also, not everyone wants to browse every forum checking what threads are what length and which are new and which are old and so on. For people who view more than just the main forums (such as Jenova Rebirth, if I'm not mistaken), that's a hell of a lot of threads to keep up with.

If you can change Who's Online to show who was logged in during the last 15 minutes and still keep people's cookies for 30 minutes, that might solve both of our problems though.

Not enough people have posted here for us to say whether or not I'm in a minority; I count five people who expressed approval. You could be annoying the heck out of everyone and no one bothers reading / posting here. (Also, Sean counts as 10.) With 15 minutes, it was inaccurate, but much more accurate than 30. You're catching all the people who check the MB for a minute and leave. I'm not going to go into the mathematics of it, but I'm pretty sure doubling the time more than doubles the inaccuracy.

I say "check the short posts first" because how often does someone type something that takes more than 15 minutes? I do maybe once a month. Why are we changing the way everything works to suit something that is the exception to the rule? The vast majority of posts don't take 15 minutes to type.

All we've done is changed one problem into another problem; now I have to suit the current problem, whereas in the past there was no problem. I was happy before, and everyone else was happy enough not to complain about it for the past 5 years.

Let's remove the currently active user list and the user counts from the main index if we're keeping it like this, if I'm going to have to check people's last activity time anyways. It no longer serves any purpose to display that data.

Like I said, if we want to solve the problems, we need to find a way to make Who's Online show people who have been active in the last 15 minutes while still allowing people to keep their logins active for 30 minutes. Also, all of your problems still exist - you still have to check to see if someone is active even with 15 minutes as the active setting. If someone clicked on a link 14 minutes ago, let alone 2 minutes ago, they're just as 'gone' as they were 29 minutes ago. If you want to know if they're active, you have to check. I always checked when it was 15 minutes. It's the logical thing to do.

And yes, 15 minutes to 30 minutes makes a huge difference when you're reading an entire thread, let alone typing out a long reply. Maybe I just read slowly. Maybe you read fast or type fast. I know I type fast, but I still need to think quite some time about my post. :p

So far I've seen at least 6 (possibly 8) people voice approval for it and only 2 (possibly 4) against. While you are the big bosses and you do have more power and voice than me, I don't see why that should stop me from pointing out that, from the few people who do make the effort to visit this forum, a large majority of the more active posters are voicing approval.

15 minutes was accurate enough that I could assume people were here and they usually were. Sometimes I missed people, but not often. 6 vs. 4 or even 8 vs. 2 isn't a statistically significant majority, let alone a large majority. We would have to have a larger sample size if we were looking for a good representation of what people believe.

But yeah, I think we should either put it back the way it was or let's remove it from the front page so people aren't misled into thinking it's accurate. Does it serve any purpose on the front page any longer?

EDIT: When I type "long" posts, it sometimes takes me an hour or more. I don't want you to set the idle timeout to an hour just to accomodate me though.

I'd be fine with putting it to a vote because I honestly think it's better for more people to stay logged in longer. And I still think that we can get it set to show the users logged in for the last 15 minutes only, even though people can stay logged in for 30. Surely that would be a better solution for all?

23 minutes.

This is where I find email notification of new threads very handy...when the thing works properly that is. I subscribe to all threads that I have any interest in and so I don't ever even check to see if there is a red folder marking new posts because I usually get notified right away with a pop-up window.

I like the 15 minutes from before because the 30 minutes that we have right now is so far off as far as who's online is concerned that it almost might as well not even be there, and I use Who's Online quite often.

I don't want to subscribe to every single thread that's made just to see where posts are made. Which again brings me to the seperate times for Who's Online and login times, which I think would solve all problems.

They way I THINK it works is that when you visit the MB and log in / are already logged in (via cookie) under some username, the MB starts a "session" for you. Remember in old versions of the MB, you'd always end up with links like index.php?s=0923485892345098435 ? It gave you a session ID, and that ID is used for lots of things, including who's online. I don't know if the MB still works like that since VB3 came out, but I would assume so, since it's a somewhat standard way of handling such things as user accounts and tracking who is currently viewing your site. You're likely talking heavy-duty hacking to alter anything having to do with session management. But if you can manage, more power to you. Admittedly I haven't even looked at the PHP, so I'm just guessing.

Using email to track posts is not something I would enjoy.

I will accept 23 minutes as a compromise.

I'll make a thread at vBulletin forums tomorrow to see if they can help me do it without hacking - if it requires file hacking then I'll probably go with the 23 minute option to save on hacking a file. I don't think we've actually changed the coding on any files yet, so it'd probably be better if we avoid that, yeah.

I agree with Unne and Sean. I don't even see how it'sreally a problem whether you get logged out or not. I've never had a problem with this. I check the date and time of the most recent post in threads I'm interested in reading to see if there are new posts regardless of the color of the folder. Increasing the login time to 30 minutes doesn't really offer much improvement and yet causes more problems. It probably also makes the server slower, having twice as many users to track.

You might not have had a problem, but giong by people's posts in this thread, other people (including myself) have. It's an annoyance. Just like you having to click into Who's Online to see a time is an annoyance, only we have to use memory and guesswork to try to figure out what new threads/posts are made, and all you have to do is click a link. I'd say our problem is more of an inconvenience than yours. Having to click onto Who's Online doesn't exactly take much effort. It doesn't make the server any slower (at least not anything that a human would notice) as people who were online 15 minutes ago obviously won't need any tracking, given that they aren't clicking links and therefore won't be sending any new information to the server.

EDIT: Keep in mind that I do actually have the same annoyance as you when it comes to Who's Online, only I already had it at 15 minutes. I still send people PM's expecting them to reply and then I would check Who's Online to find that they hadn't been active for ten minutes and the last page they looked at was the index - in other words, unless they had decided to research the forums index, they'd gone. I solved this 'problem' by checking Who's Online more often when sending PM's. But more importantly, I realised that it doesn't matter if I know if they're online or not, they're not going to reply any faster or slower. They'll reply when they're good and ready and me knowing if they're online or not won't make a difference. I send the PM anyway.

I vote 30 minutes. I always had the problem of taking too long to lurk, and my session would expire before I managed to browse all of the new posts. :p

Ever since the change, though, vB3 has been reporting threads which I have just posted in to have new posts, when I'm the last poster.

Yeah, I'm getting that too, although I get the feeling it might have something to do with the upgrade to the forums more than the timeout setting being changed. It only happens sometimes, though... we'll figure it out. I think.

EDIT: Thread at vBulletin regarding Who's Online issue.

EDIT: Thread at vBulletin regarding thread-reply-read issue.