root log: April 2002

Profundity

Proximity|Proclivity

Divinity

• + Sped up adminbar, since it didn't need the extra call for linkNode. Cleaned up some ' vs. " usage there.
• + Sped up shownodelets. It's now two fewer node lookups per page load for non-editor/non-god users.
• + Fixed the ancient errors in The Nodeshell Hopper. Repeat after me. "Duh." It now also supports bracketized linking (it just strips them);

• + Small change to displayPage in Everything::HTML.pm
• + Change to htmlpage (dbtable)
• + Adjusted htmlpage display page
• + Adjusted htmlpage edit page
• + Adjusted ticker display page
• + Adjusted node xml page
• + Adjusted node xmltrue page
• + Adjusted writeup xml page

• + Merged wharfinger's suggested change in Altar of Sacrifice II to Altar of Sacrifice
• - Deleted Altar of Sacrifice II.

• + Everything Quote Server now randomly chooses between quotes in EQS and EQS II.

• + Updated Node Heaven
• + Added manipulation in for CE's in displayuserinfo
• + Gave CE's permission in Node Heaven Visitation
• + The CE's have died and gone to Node Heaven contain the documentation

• - showchatter

• + CRT: Category Manager: Manages and adds lists. You must rebuild after each addition with the build button. This caches it for speed and usability.
• + CRT: catdata: A Data::Dumper cache of the categories.
• + crtcatmenu: Code for generating an embedded category meny
• + crtentries: dbtable for holding the rescues;
• + crtcategories: dbtable for holding the categories.
• + CRT: Master List: The master list editor. Can only add right now. It's not final, so anything on the table is merely junk.
• + crtmemberlist: Generates a member list from activecrt
• + crtnavbar: Navigation menus for each of the "CRT: *" docs.
• + CRT: Group Manager: Group manager for crtleads to add to activecrt.

• - Removed The Content Rescue Team : Datacenter because it was a defunct beta.

• - Deleted iphunter, an empty restricted_superdoc
• + Changed newwriteups2 to fix a non-standard split statement, that was causing perl version differences on willowisp. It now uses a regexp for splitting, rather than the string (which had non-standard escape sequences).

• + Per bones' request, creating writeups now drags softlinks along as it should. Whoops. Changes to e2createnewnode. All themes.

• + Node Heaven's boring link should work for CE's in other people's node heaven's now. Thanks to TallRoo for the buglet.
• + Node Heaven and Everything's Best Killers (feeds from heaven) are working again. Nodes that were killed in the last week will not manifest themselves in heaven. Sorry for the inconvenience. This was traced back to a bug in the cron jobs. Thanks.
• + Magical Writeup Reparenter should no longer eat writeups. I pray. Restructured it a bit. I was forgetting to call updateNode() on the nodegroups to solidify the groupings. The deletions occured because even though we were setting the parent_e2node properly (which governs the display), we were not removing from the nodegroup (which governs the deletion). This should no longer happen. And if it does, um, back to the drawing board. Initial tests look solid.
• + Added a few changed to the core in HTML.pm in nodeName such that we now default to an e2node when displaying (instead of Duplicated Found). If we get to a situation where this no e2node, we go back there, but that is by far much more rare. Changes are signed and dated.
• + Overhauled usercheck to check for all types of nodes and such. It's now by far much more useful.

• + Addressed a wierd problem in HTML cache_store stuff in some natecode where we weren't taking into effect the displaytype when displaying guest user pages. In fact, it was completely ignored. Because the pages are static HTML dumps, we wouldn't actually output any correct behavior. IE: a displaytype of "asdasd" wouldn't toss a 500. A small change was made to HTML.pm that would work around that and short circuit the caching mechanism for new xml displaytypes.
• + Made a fix to xmlwriteup that would cause a newer version of mod_perl to die because we weren't explicitly loading Experience.pm

• + Fix to usercheck to fix a stray condition where in places like Honor Roll, there was only one extra node, but it was restricted, thus slipping past our checks and not displaying anything useful. We now bail out if there are no nodes that the user has permission to see. For the curious, Honor Roll is an editor debate nodetype.

• Recalibrated timesince

• Fixed a bug in the Personal Session XML Ticker where if you got new xp, the ticker would go all horkey. That's because I was silly and didn't pass the htmlcode arguments as a string, I passed them as a list. That should be giving valid xml now

• cliendev API change e2node displays have been updated to include other nodes of type. You /might/ get the superdoc for duplicates found.. a good example is wertperch. He (currently) has a room and a user named after him. This replaces the old usersuggest functionality.
  • + formxml_e2node (updated)
  • + xmlnodesuggest (brand new)
• clientdev API change writeups inside of e2nodes, inside of the <reputation> tag (if you've voted on that writeup), will now include "cast", the direction of your vote
  • + xmlwriteup (updated)
• + Small change to HTML.pm. Did a few code cleanups in the Page Cache fix, to suppress uninitialized warnings. Synced spectre and hillgiant

          my $dsp = $query->param('displaytype');
          $dsp ||= "display";
  
          if($dsp eq "display"){
  

• Made a fix to Universal Message XML Ticker so that people can't read Guest User's inbox. Thanks to fuzzie for reporting it.

• clientdev API change Added softlock/forbiddance info to the e2node output. It's in the <nodelock> tag.

• Huge ekw performance fix - Okay, we finally have the ekw performance fix that we've needed in. For those of you just tuning in, ekw used to be slow because of two page loads:
  • Your page
  • Your ekw stylesheet
  Now normally images and css sheets and images all get cached and called over and over again from the cache with no ill effects. However, due to caching rules, browsers would never cache the stylesheet because the url was in the form: http://everything2.com/?node_id=1100984&displaytype=raw. This was really not a very good thing for the user, all things considered.
  
  Several solutions were proposed, the most beneficial of which was to generate static files (m_turner being a strong proponent of that, and I thank him). Since that would be a big messy pain in the ass (who /really/ needs filehandles anyway?), we've gone and done the next best thing. We've faked it! Your spiffy css file at /ekwcss/username.css doesn't really exist! Through some Apache regular expression mojo, we point it to a script that executes in it's place. It has the benefits of:
  • Keeping your filename unique
  • Retrieving user information without using ?'s or whatever to find the node
  The regexp looks something like this:

  ScriptAliasMatch ^/ekwcss/(.*)?\.css$ /var/www/ekwcss.pl
  

  Yes, that's right, anything.css. Try it. NOT A BUG, k? However, this approach wasn't without it's technical challenge. Into HTML.pm (and synced across the webservers) is now a mod_perlpsuedoInit function that works exactly like mod_perlInit, except it does not call handleUserRequest(), and thus allows us to do our own CGI stuff (such as bypass everything and just print your css text).
  
  It's a good workaround for now, and hopefully ekw users will notice it immediately. If you are having problems with it, use shift-refresh to reget your .css file with your pageload and off you go. /msg me if there are any problems iwth it.
  • + made a debugging addition to ekw styledef that I decided to keep
• Per fuzzie, fixes to:
  • + xml exports. The session ticker was wrong.
  • + softlink. Made it so that you always get softlinks, regardless of your VARS pref. Added in a no_softlinks URL override.
  • + nodelockreason. Nodelock reason now doesn't return the '<big>' tags on forbiddance info
• clientdev API change Again per fuzzie's sourceforge bug, scratch pads now take an additional parameter, "scratch" that asks for the person's scratch pad you want to view. Links are also now parsed by default. Add the standard "links_noparse" to leave them unparsed.
  • + Scratch Pad XML Ticker updated.
• Whacked Cool Nodes XML Ticker as it was a stale beta.
• Added XML ticker support to Node Heaven in the form of Node Heaven XML Ticker. You can only view your own nodes through node heaven. We do not export editorial or god powers through the tickers. There are several items of note in the ticker:
  • It behaves exactly as does the universal message xml ticker. You can let the ticker sort the titles for you (alphabetically be default), or by choosing to add nosort=1, then it will give them to you in whatever order mysql wants to cough them up.
  • To view the doctext for a particular deleted writeup add visitnode_id=(NODE ID HERE) to the url to view it. Should only work on your own nodes.
  • All of the information that you could normally get through node heaven is there.
  The changes that were made to the system were:
  • + Created Node Heaven XML Ticker
  • + Updated xml exports, so that we now export it through our e2caps ticker.
  Note that the interfaces in these tickers are beta until the clients are stable, but realistically, they are not likely to change much.
• Per fuzzie's sourceforge bug, we now export whether a writeup has been marked for destruction by a simple marked="0" or marked="1" portion in the writeup
  • + Changed xmlwriteup. Ended up stealing code from voteit.
• Clients now respect softlocking and forbiddances. Regardless of how you submit the info. This patches a long time quiet security bug.
  • + Very careful changes to writeup maintainence create. Also did some optimizations ( by commenting out fttask crap). It's working fine after that.
• Created Other Users XML Ticker II, a more complete, better, more XMLy Other Users XML Ticker. It takes two possible arguments:
  • nosort, same as all the others
  • in_room, to limit it to a particular room. Remember room zero is outside.
  A few things to note about the ticker. The first is that it's sorted by xp, but is not gaurenteed to be numerically accurate. The experience column is cached by the cron job that does the update, so it could be off within a span of five minutes or so. Nothing major. It will however, look exactly like the nodelet Other Users.

• + Other Users XML Ticker II created
• + xml exports, added otherusers export

Young Whippersnapper
A Bit More Flexible     A Bit Wiser
Old Geezer

I, and some others create these root logs so:

• the general E2 populace can see some of what is happening behind the scenes
• we (the root log authors, and edevites) know what is going on ... you can fit much more in a writeup than in a /msg

If you like boring coding history, you can start at the first root log and work your way forwards.

April 3, 2002

• somehow drill (e2node) forgot all its children (its group field was wiped); the result was none of the 'drill' writeups displayed there; this was fixed by finding all nodes of type 'writeup' that had a title starting with 'drill ', and putting them back into the group
• made groupeditor (htmlcode) also show the node_id of each member

April 4, 2002

• cleaned up displayUserInfo (htmlcode) a bit

April 13, 2002

• added mini-info and sample for most HTML tags at E2 FAQ: HTML (superdoc)
• SQL Prompt (restricted_superdoc) - added numbering and option to use <code> tags instead of <pre> tags for query results
• stopped Message Inbox from escaping & one too many times, which caused entities to show as they were typed, instead of the character they were supposed to be

April 14, 2002

• createnewnode (htmlcode) fixed to not complain when there is no lastnode_id given
• updated the killing floor II and massacre (opcode) so the writeup killer can check a box to have the killer's name also shown in Klaproth's message
• made the patch display in edev (usergroup) a table, and show new patches first (the old way showed new patches last)

April 15, 2002

• modified displayWriteupInfo (htmlcode) to have "<a name="blah">" anchor tags before each writeup; this could be used for: outside sites can link to an e2node, but jump to a specific writeup; or, a new link style that may (or may not) be implemented at a later time

April 16, 2002

• modified Gigantic Code Lister (restricted_superdoc) and showChoiceFunc (htmlcode) to have a pref. to hide the display of the htmlcodes (the GCL lets admins view some of E2's Perl modules without having to login to the web server; htmlcodes can be seen (and edited) from the web anyway, and found via various other sources, like List Nodes of Type, so listing them there just slows things down)
• removed the starting \s* in front of the search for highlight tags at showcollabtext (htmlcode), since: 1) the spaces in front wouldn't be valid HTML, and 2) the HTML screen would have stripped out those wrong tags by then
• cleaned up titlebar (htmlcode) somewhat
• added /mgs and /smg typo check in message (opcode)

April 17, 2002

• editors now see how long ago a user was on, next to each writeup's author's name
• updated timesince (htmlcode) to have an abbreviated display (such as 'hr' instead of 'hours')
• updated displayUserInfo (htmlcode) to use sendPrivateMessage (htmlcode) and allow sending of longer messages

April 18, 2002

• Oops; a long message (over 255 chars) is split into smaller parts; however, each part has the same timestamp. All the private message displays only ask for the messages, based in time order. But since all parts are the same time, the database can just return the messages in whatever order it feels like. This usually results in long messages being scrambled when viewing them. The good news is that is easy to fix the display by just doing a secondary sort by message_id, since that will be unique.
• To fix the above problem, added ", message_id" to the sort part of the SQL query in showmessages (htmlcode) (this shows the private messages in the chatterbox nodelet).

April 20, 2002

• added the same secondary sort to private message XML ticker and Message Inbox
• updated nodetype display page (htmlpage) to link to a search of that nodetype in List Nodes of Type (superdoc)
• did something to List Nodes of Type, although I forget what (D'oh!)

April 21, 2002

• to the patch table (viewable at patch (dbtable)), added fields 'curstatus' (which will take a node of type status), assigned_to (which will be who is working on applying the patch), and purpose (which is the purpose of the patch)
• updated patch display page (htmlpage) and edev (usergroup) to show the extra patch information
• moved from options from user settings to Writeup Settings
• updated Writeup Settings to have an option for those level 1 and 2 to add the blab box in writeups

April 24, 2002

• added a pref. to not show softlinks (softlink (htmlcode), user settings (superdoc))

April 29, 2002

• fixed htmlcodes displayWriteupInfo and displayUserInfo to escape < and > on sender display (those 2 characters were already escaped for the recipient's display, just not the sender's display) (thanks to RoguePoet and avalyn for bringing these to my attention)
• updated sendPrivateMessage (htmlcode) - main change is long messages no longer break in the middle of a word; for other changes, see the help displaytype at that node

April 30, 2002

• rischi and call pointed out that sendPrivateMessage (htmlcode) sometimes chopped the end of the message off; this was due to the last part not being sent; fixed
• fixed another stupid mistake in sendPrivateMessage that rischi and I saw that prevented the list of recipients from showing (there was a backwards if test)
• created settype (htmlcode); currently display of current setting works, but changing it doesn't work
• updated patch display page (htmlpage) to allow display/changing of patch's status

Young Whippersnapper
A Bit More Flexible     A Bit Wiser
Old Geezer