Skip to the First New Reply

Hi, Dave

Being a bit slow on the uptake, I just noticed that I can visit a long thread and hit "Skip to the First New Reply" to head to the bottom without scrolling. This is yet another of those nifty things you've offered to make our visits so much easier!

I also noticed that some of the forums don't have this feature... is there a reason or is it an oversight?... or does it appear on threads after a certain length?..I'm computer illiterate, so please forgive any Buck Rogers capabilities I may be giving this!

Weezin, well - I'm not Dave, but I think I understand the feature to work like this:

If there is a new reply on a thread (not a reply you created, but from someone else) the "skip to first new reply" shows up. If you visit a thread where there are no new replies (whether it's a new thread, or you posted the last reply, or you are revisiting a thread that has no new replies since the last time), the "skip" link doesn't show up.

It is really nice, especially for lengthy threads :)

Thanks, Go_vols. I'll check that out next time. I noticed its absence on one of the Parking Lot threads which is quite lengthy and thought it was not added to the new forum.

Vols has it right. It only shows up on threads if there are posts since the last time you visited that thread.

I figured ... what's the use of the link if there's nothing to link to?

dave

Thanks, Dave. While I'm here, I wanted to thank you for all the hard work you do to keep the Garden in good order. You keep things running so smoothly, that it is easy to overlook the complexity of what you do... like watching Eric Clapton play guitar and thinking, "That looks so easy". Well, we all know that you and Go_vols work very hard to keep the Garden weeded and to make sure we've all got a chair and a cold drink, and we all are so grateful!

Thanks, Weez. It's continues to be a lot of fun for us on this end of the site. :)

dave

Well, I've had more interest from DGForums than any computing I have ever done.
Spent years constructing machines for myself in the usual upgrading fashion, and felt quite pleased with my knowledge and ability, but DG has got me working for sure. I have never visited such a complex, - (rather than complicated), site. How that man manages all this is quite something. Guidance is good; layout is good; but the sheer weight of it all is almost top-heavy.
I would love to know of a web site that explains how such a show is set up and kept on the rails.

Peter.

Peter,

It's really quite simple, actually. Dave's Garden runs the Linux operating system, and uses Apache to serve the documents.

The data itself is stored in a MySQL database, and the programming language used to manipulate the data is all in php (http://www.php.net ).

Dave's Garden is just a bunch of data, all stashed in a massive 2 gigabyte database called 'gardening'. So, for example, there is a table of data called 'forums'.

In that table, there are columns like this:

+------------+

| Field      |

+------------+

| forumname  |

| poster     |

| subject    |

| body       |

| replies    |

| date       |

| ppid       |

| pid        |

| threaddate |

| viewed     |

| imageid    |

+------------+

Each post that is made, the script simply inserts the stuff into the database. The thread date is the latest date of that thread (the pid is the thread id), and each time a reply is made, the threaddate is updated to the local system time.

Then, when the user hits the thread, it simply looks at the last time the user hit that thread (that's the thread_hits table) and then checks to see if any replies have a date greater than that.

If yes, it sets an a name tag, links it from the top, and the feature is made.

Dave's Garden has 131 such tables of information. The journals have 6 tables, forums rely on about 4 tables in all, the plants database has about 10 tables, and so forth.

I didn't sit down and make DG in one day. It just kind of grew and grew as I added on to it day after day. It's become quite massive, and I believe it would take me several weeks to re-write all this code if I ever wanted to. I just checked and we're up to over 70,000 lines of programming language!

It's been a very fun project, and I've learned a lot about web application development by putting this thing together.

Dave