Issues with new forum

This is our main tax information forum which deals with topics concerning Canadians living and working in the U.S., U.S. citizens contemplating working in Canada, and all aspects of Canadian and U.S. income tax and related adminstrative issues.

Moderator: Mark T Serbinski CA CPA

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Norbert Schlenker
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Joined: Sun Nov 21, 2004 1:22 pm
Location: The Dry Side of the Wet Coast
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Issues with new forum

Post by Norbert Schlenker »

Congratulations on setting the forums on reasonably cheap and stable software.

It seems to me that many recent posts have disappeared. December 2005 looks remarkably thin. Can you confirm?
nelsona
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Joined: Wed Oct 27, 2004 2:33 pm
Location: Nowhere, man

Post by nelsona »

I don't think they've disappeared, :shock: I think the order of posts has gotten screwed up, so recent ones aren't necessarily on the front page.
nelsona non grata. Non pro. Please Search previous posts, no situation is unique as you might think. Happy Browsing :D
Mark T Serbinski CA CPA
Site Admin
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Post by Mark T Serbinski CA CPA »

We have taken care to preserve and convert all existing posts to the new forum. The new software allows for more flexibility in reviewing and posting.

Try changing the sort tabs on your browser.

Other hints..
- Adjust the time (in GMT) for your location. Eastern standard time is GMT -5.
- You can search for all posts by a particular person.
Mark
worryfreeinvestor
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Joined: Thu Mar 24, 2005 6:17 pm
Location: Seattle, WA

Post by worryfreeinvestor »

It looks like when you post a reply to a topic, it gets sorted by the date of the reply, not the original posting. Not sure if this is new or not.
Norbert Schlenker
Posts: 68
Joined: Sun Nov 21, 2004 1:22 pm
Location: The Dry Side of the Wet Coast
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Post by Norbert Schlenker »

Mark T Serbinski CA CPA wrote:We have taken care to preserve and convert all existing posts to the new forum. The new software allows for more flexibility in reviewing and posting.

Try changing the sort tabs on your browser.

Other hints..
- Adjust the time (in GMT) for your location. Eastern standard time is GMT -5.
- You can search for all posts by a particular person.
Thanks for the hints, Mark. I administer a phpBB forum so I've done a little looking around to see what went wrong with the loading. Here's the problem.

Every post has an id. Topics are sorted in descending sequence by the id of the most recent post in the topic. Because the old posts were inserted into the database out of chronological sequence, the topics containing them are all out of sequence too.

A simple two line modification to viewforum.php will take care of the problem. If you're interested, send me an email.
Adam - Admin
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Joined: Mon Jan 02, 2006 10:46 pm

Post by Adam - Admin »

I'm actually the one handling the technical aspects of managing the forums here. Took a little while to understand what you guys were talking about, but seems to me that effectively, what is happening is that the thread creation date is being taken as the last post date. Rather than modifying the forum software (which would just mask and not actually correct the problem), I will resequence the database. I will be busy for a couple of days, so don't expect this overnight.

In the mean time, the "search" function works fine, and all threads modified since the upgrade are unaffected.
Adam - Admin
Posts: 3
Joined: Mon Jan 02, 2006 10:46 pm

Post by Adam - Admin »

This is obviously the query that is causing problems;
$sql = "SELECT t.*, u.username, u.user_id, u2.username as user2, u2.user_id as id2, p.post_time, p.post_username
FROM " . TOPICS_TABLE . " t, " . USERS_TABLE . " u, " . POSTS_TABLE . " p, " . USERS_TABLE . " u2
WHERE t.forum_id = $forum_id
AND t.topic_poster = u.user_id
AND p.post_id = t.topic_last_post_id
AND p.poster_id = u2.user_id
AND t.topic_type = " . POST_ANNOUNCE . "
ORDER BY t.topic_last_post_id DESC ";
For anybody who is interested and doesn't know what this means... since the topic id's are out of sequence (topic_last_post_id), it will order them in that same order descending (DESC).

It definitely would be easier to adjust the query, but have to think about the future and realize that the forum will be upgraded again eventually (probably not to the same degree though), which would cause any modifications to be lost.

Thank you for pointing this out Norbert.
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