Interview with Shawn Hogan (Digital Point)

[digitalpoint]

Yes, but how much of that becomes public for others to view and look up? (I like to keep my data internal and private from other people's viewing)

Nothing what-so-ever... I can't even see people's data as an administrator unless I wanted to go digging directly in the DB (I have far more interesting/important things to be doing with my time... hell, I barely check my OWN data in the system... maybe like once a week).

Also, I wasn't suggesting you should use it (especially if you have no need for it)... just pointing out one of the things that we have that's very popular outside of the forum.

 

[DRE]

Well here you go... 100,000 registered users using this one tool to track historical rankings for millions of keywords (their own sites and their competitors), and it pre-dates the forum: http://tools.digitalpoint.com/tracker

The popularity of it was one of the reasons we NEEDED a forum (needed a support venue).

Maybe... not sure if such a woman exists though. But if so, great!

Man you'll be amazed!!! You've probably already met her and didn't notice because you weren't paying attention. That's how life is sometimes.

 

[DRE]

Woah! That's super nifty. (I want )

I don't think he'll ever release it. If he did it would be the most useful moderation tool on xenforo though.

 

[Lucas]

...

You're a beast, I'm serious (in a damn good way). I wish we had more people like you, because of everything. Kudos to you man.

 

[ManagerJosh]

Let's make Shawn an honorary XF Dev

 

[Slavik]

Do...want...that...importer...

 

[digitalpoint]

Do...want...that...importer...

I'll probably hand it over for someone to take it over/clean it up when I'm done with it. Also, it's making certain assumptions about things, so wouldn't work great for some people. For example it assumes you are going into a clean install, so it simply retains all primary keys (much faster than renumbering everything and cross referencing everything back to the new IDs). It also does some on the fly usergroup remapping which of course is going to be specific to my user groups. It assumes you are using UTF-8 as your content type charset on the vB4 side, etc. It assumes you are in a *nix box and your PHP has the PCNTL PHP extensions compiled in (it uses it to multi-thread the export process by forking itself into child processes).

But if nothing else, it should give someone a start to make a more universal, really fast importer.

 

[Slavik]

I'll probably hand it over for someone to take it over/clean it up when I'm done with it. Also, it's making certain assumptions about things, so wouldn't work great for some people. For example it assumes you are going into a clean install, so it simply retains all primary keys (much faster than renumbering everything and cross referencing everything back to the new IDs). It also does some on the fly usergroup remapping which of course is going to be specific to my user groups. It assumes you are using UTF-8 as your content type charset on the vB4 side, etc. But if nothing else, it should give someone a start to make a more universal, really fast importer.

Im just looking down your list of addons, theres some real neat stuff in there that as you said, hopefully one day you will release.

How do you handle your post edit table by the way? Just curious more than anything else. Eg ive seen 2 monthods used in current addons, the one I use makes a new column in the xf_post table... the other adds a new table alltogether.

 

[digitalpoint]

Oh yeah, the importer is also barfing out some stuff that is specific to my install... Thread best answers, user notes, directory entries/categories, virtual forums, watched forums, avatars and attachments wouldn't work without some tweaking since I store them in the database (and I'm bypassing the datawriters for the import process). Custom user field IDs aren't being evaluated (mapping is hard coded, etc.) The whole thing was mainly because *I* need it... so making it even slightly slower by doing on the fly evaluations isn't something I opted for (plus it's more work).

Im just looking down your list of addons, theres some real neat stuff in there that as you said, hopefully one day you will release.

How do you handle your post edit table by the way? Just curious more than anything else. Eg ive seen 2 monthods used in current addons, the one I use makes a new column in the xf_post table... the other adds a new table alltogether.

To be honest, I haven't even touched the post edit history yet (it's one of the last things I'll do). But I'll probably do it by adding a column to the post table just for sake of speed.

On a semi-related side-note, I started building a CLI search index rebuilder. Seems to work okay so far. Since I'm going to have a multi-node Elastic Search setup, I may set it up to offload chunks of indexing to different nodes/servers to speed up the indexing process further (I'm shooting for sub-10 minute to index 18M posts).

I started making our own portal system last night (I looked at XenPorta, and it's really nice, but does a lot of stuff I don't need and seemed like the custom stuff I would want it to do would take me about as long to just build the simple portal I wanted from scratch). With some luck, I can get that done before lunch today... hopefully.

 

[Slavik]

To be honest, I haven't even touched the post edit history yet (it's one of the last things I'll do). But I'll probably do it by adding a column to the post table just for sake of speed.

Thought so

The more I look at that list... I just have questions about so many of them lol.

Hurry up already

The one thing I still require is a rotation system for my ad's, so every week a new one gets bumped to the top and the top one moved to the bottom etc....

Whats the difference between "account security" and your two factor authentication?

What does email rollback do

/slaps wrist...

 

[digitalpoint]

Account security is a bunch of little things... for example users can see the IPs we've logged from their account, when we last saw it, how many times, etc...

Email rollback is a system that allows us to rollback the user's email (and reset their password) to a previous email they had. If the user ever changed their email, it shows a "Email Change History" link on their user profile in AdminCP...

That shows old/new email, the IP/geolocation of the person that changed it as well as an option to roll it back to that email/reset their password. This is typically used when a user account is "stolen" and we would otherwise have no way to know who the real owner is or what their old email actually was (we also have problems with people trying to take over accounts by asking us to reset their password when the account isn't actually theirs). Of course it depends on having a user change log (which I built).

 

[Andy.N]

I started making our own portal system last night (I looked at XenPorta, and it's really nice, but does a lot of stuff I don't need and seemed like the custom stuff I would want it to do would take me about as long to just build the simple portal I wanted from scratch). With some luck, I can get that done before lunch today... hopefully.

You what?????
Expect to see screenshots by dinner today

 

[gordy]

Whoa, massive quote! #15 (prime example of attachment strip quoting for 1.2 PLEASE!)

I hope you all get DP'd by a goblin.

LOL!

(at least until WE get to use them too)..

Commendable, an add-on maker who eats his own dogfood.

 

[digitalpoint]

You what?????
Expect to see screenshots by dinner today

It's more or less working... need to make a few other content types for it (I just have one for threads and YouTube videos right now)... but the additional content types is super easy (just a template per type).

I started making the admin interface last night before I went to bed... shows the list of items, but the add/edit/delete stuff doesn't work yet.

As you can see, I really didn't need anything fancy...

 

[DRE]

16 million messages, wow

 

[digitalpoint]

16 million messages, wow

Lol... not from me testing... imported (see stats on my site at bottom): http://forums.digitalpoint.com/

 

[MOZ]

Wow! Jawdrop after reading a lot of the stuff and seeing the addon list.

 

[Slavik]

Ah sod it, just go down each of your addons and explain what they do / how they do it differently from default / other addons


*kidding... but i wouldn't say no to a good read*

 

[MilesDB]

I started making our own portal system last night (I looked at XenPorta, and it's really nice, but does a lot of stuff I don't need and seemed like the custom stuff I would want it to do would take me about as long to just build the simple portal I wanted from scratch). With some luck, I can get that done before lunch today... hopefully.

Are planning to release your new portal system?

Quoting you to express me. Please do not RM us!!

I do hope it comes out before *too* long

 

[0xym0r0n]

Yeah I thought my 247 users online all at once was a fair amount XD
Sites like ditalpoint brings me back to reality and help set a goal lol!

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