listing members

before i owned my xterra, i had a subaru wrx wagon and was a member of nasioc.com

they have a neat little feature which lists all the members at the top of each forum that they're browsing. it's kinda cool to go to the say, off topic forum, look up at the top, and see a list of all the xoc members that are browsing that forum.

what do you think?

We have that disabled because it puts too much strain on the server.

Most of the "bragging" features of this board are disabled because they are pointless. Just like the Xterra, everything you need, nothing you don't.

I can tell you that on an average day there are about 250 people browsing XOC at our peak hours, and it's always the same people

What are the peak hours?
Just curious.

The good, the bad, the ugly,... and a car salesman.

It's gotta be 10pm-3am.

I'm always amazed who else is living after midnight.

Why don't we have a nice member search function? Some link taking us to a page with all the names and info.

Because it's another useless feature.

Damn it! I came in here specifically to use that very feature. We used to have it. Guess it's been a looooooooong time since I popped in around here.

Hi Ian, still keeping the masses in line I see.

Trying
What's with all the FOG's popping up here lately ?

I think the new commercial is rekindling their appreciation of this site.

Actually, a member list (not who's online) feature would come in handy now and then. It's no fun trying to PM or email someone spontaneously when the only sure-fire way to do it is to root around randomly and find a post by that person or hope that his/her name or handle is somehow referenced in the contents of a post to search for. You can't search by handle, only by member number, which again can't be found without finding a post by that person. Rare that it comes up, but frustrating when it does. Either searching by member name or having a list of members would solve it.

Brent

not to highjack the thread but as a newbie not only to the world of Xterras but also to the world of offroading there are a lot of terms used here I did not know what they meant. After using the search feature (alot) I have begun to understand some of the terms. What about doing a brief glossary for the new comers. Hopefully this will kill some of the overly asked questions and help people learm to ask questions in the right forms also. Just an idea from a new persons eyes.

Brent, if you find someone who you may wish to PM in the future, simply add them to your Buddy List, then you can contact them whenever you feel like it.

A sound idea, but I'm supposed to know in advance who I might decide to PM later?

How would you find them otherwise ?
If there was a searchable member list, and you didn't know who you were looking for, how would you find them ? Scroll through 10,000 records trying to remember their name ?

You stated It's no fun trying to PM or email someone spontaneously when the only sure-fire way to do it is to root around randomly and find a post by that person or hope that his/her name or handle is somehow referenced in the contents of a post to search for.

The same thing will happen with a member list, you will have to root around randomly through 400 pages looking for that someone.

Even as the admin, I have never found the need for a member list, I use the tools the board has, and they work well.

Talking about PM's....
I have noticed that once you PM someone about a certain something, you can't send another message until that person replies. Of course you can, but you'd have to, as was already pointed out, search for the person in random posts, and then start up a new topic. I don't know, but it's a little annoying.

Plus we should have a section just for the crazy nutso's who are still up at 3am in the morn, like me. Ahhh, drunken thursday-college nights.

You can't send another message in the same PM, because that would split the thread (which one would they reply too?). It works like email. When you send email, you can't tack something on to the email in your friends inbox halfway across the country.

Like I said. Add them to your buddy list. Do it the first time you PM them. Maybe you'll never use it again, maybe you will.

I'm not sure why you guys are making things so difficult for yourselves.

Buddy list…? *looks around a little bit* Holy shit I never noticed that!

Cripes Ian, don't be dense.

If I wanted to send Walt a private message or an email right now to ask him if it was OK for me to put up an old video clip of his 2WD Xterra getting 4 feet of air under the front tires shortly before he traded it in, how do you suggest I go about it?

If there were a nice alphabetized/searchable list of users like this:
http://www.nissanoffroad.net/messageboard/members.asp
it would be a cinch. As it stands here, the only way for me to do so is to click the PM or email link above one of his posts, or click the PM or email link in his profile.
To do either currently requires me to find one of his posts somewhere on the board. Finding one of his posts is a crapshoot because you can only search for a member's posts specifically by member number, which just happens to be only available by finding one of his posts or viewing his profile. See the conundrum?
My only remaining option is to randomly search for posts that have "walt" somewhere in the post body, either if he's thoughtful enough to "sign" his posts with his name/handle like I do, or if someone else replies to his post and addresses him in the process, but I'd also find dead-end threads like this one with no-good hits.

So yes, a member list isn't useless by any means. That, or the ability to search for a user's posts by name rather than member number.

Capiche?

Brent, why don't you just go over to NOR and stay there. Maybe if you weren't such a post whore, you wouldn't have to worry about things like your inability to use the buddy list.

And when I say post whore, I mean post whore.

Look at my stats for the month...

BTW, UBB doesn't offer a memberlist due to the nature of the board. There is no database, it's all flat file design, so searching by name would involve opening, searching and closing almost 10,000 files.

With Brent doing that every 5 minutes our server would soon topple over, so you won't be seeing one until I change the forum software, and I don't know when that will be.

Ya know Ian, if you had simply said that this board doesn't offer the ability to have a list of users earlier, I wouldn't have continued to demonstrate how it could be useful and you might not have found another excuse to try and insult me. Calling me a post whore, telling me to fuck off, or otherwise trying to dig at me without provocation just makes me laugh.
Hell Ian, you've still got over 2000 more posts here than I do. Get back to calling me a post whore when I overtake you eh?

Just the fact that you exist is provocation enough. You are the most annoying parasite I have ever seen on a board. You live just to be the first person to reply to a post on 10 different boards. You post nothing but what you can find online, or look up in a service manual.

I think I will ban you when you hit 10,000 posts, then you can spend more time waiting for NOR or XF to load their huge pages on their horribly slow servers, so you can talk shit about XOC with all your friends (who hate you just as much as I do).

I didn't make the list.

Funny I feel like I'm spending too much time here. :p

Yeah, the other boards are SO slow compared to XOC... Bullshit, they all serve pages pretty darn quick, and I'm the type to notice. Hell, the NOR board even reports how fast the page was generated at the bottom of every page (not that I pay attention, and I'm sure you'll call it a gimmick that only slows it down more). The times I've seen issues now and then with the speed of other sites is either due to their hosting or glitches with the software, but in general when they're running smoothly they're doing the trick fast enough to satisfy anyone that isn't sitting there with a freakin' stopwatch looking for a half-second difference in average page load.

Hell Ian, perhaps a poll for the masses might be fun:

Poll: OffroadX - stay or go?

* Where's the question? Ban the bastard!
* I wouldn't miss him, and maybe Ian wouldn't be so cranky without him under his skin and the board would be better off all around.
* No opinion.
* I wish he wouldn't be such a smug know-it-all post whore, but I can live with him.
* I got no beef with the guy, and I find him to be an asset despite his personality. Booting him would be a mistake.

?
Brent

Two old women arguing aint got nothing on Ian and Brent

I quit hanging out at the other sites because I got tired of all the crap they have on the pages. What does NOR's load time bug add to site? Really do you care? I'd prefer if the kept their sites lean. It was their choice to turn on all the bells and whistles and my choice to stop visiting.

My biggest gripe is photos in signatures and avatars under names. It does absolutley nothing for the site but cluttler up the page and make threads slow to load and difficult to read. Do you really care to see a scanned in 4"x6" photo of a stock truck someone is a little too proud of everytime they post. Do you know what my truck looks like? Do I shove it in front of you ever time I post? From what I recall yours is a stock height blue on lego wheels and 32" BFG MT's with a TJM front bumper with no winch. I definitely don't need to see that every time you post.

N4W's "Advanced Features" are total crap when it comes to looking for new posts since last visit. Which is the main way I surf. There should always be a "What's New Since Your Last Visit" button near the top. It should show all threads board wide. Ian's not perfect with this one either. One of my only gripes with XOC is the New Topics button is only what's new since midnight mountain time. Not since last visit and it's never included supporting members or admistration areas for those with permission to those areas.

Both N4W and NOR need help on coming up with consistent color chioces. At least Plushfab uses a consistent color schemes site wide. I find NOR's forum unreadable. The dark blue background and yellow text looks like an old RGB monitor and I find it hard to read. Dark Text on a light background is much easier than light text on a dark background. Is the color scheme user adjustable (which I've seen)? Scratch that it shouldn't be. The site should have the balls to force their preference on readers, but those preference shouldn't be just plain ugly and painful to use.

Do you get mine point? In my opinion NOR and N4W are too much of a pain in the ass to use, so I don't. It's that simple.

Brent, open the Active Topics page at NOR...

http://www.nissanoffroad.net/messageboard/active.asp

...then view the properties.

Today it's 632,002 bytes. That's over half a fucking meg. XOC's Active Topics page is 8,087 bytes.

Open the main page on NOR, 144,178 bytes. Here it's 9,671 bytes.

XF is almost as bloated but it's running the slug known as PHPNuke on a 486 with a dial-up line (with the copyrights illegally removed so BP can claim he wrote it himself).

Leave the web development to web developers.

You would go about e-mailing me seeing as I did the video.. but hey..
shrug

"KICK HIS ASS, C-BASS."

I thought Nuke was pretty cool.

Until I started trying to build with it.

Good God, what a headache. Nothing makes sense, there are WAAAAAAAAY too many tables, and it's abysmally slow. The content management is nice, but still leaves a lot to be desired. I figured it would be easier than building a site since I'm no web developer by any means, but I'm starting to wish I'd just bought a book on PHP or something and slowly built something from the ground up.

But, for the most part, it works; it's just not in any hurry to do so.

So.. yeah.

It has the standard feature-itis that plagues so much open source software these days. Everyone wants their cool little bit, but when you put it all together it's just a mess.

Just looking at http://phpnuke.org/ makes me close the browser. Too much information, too little structure.

I tried to use osCommerce for a site too, but when I looked at what 12 programmers had done to it, all thinking different things, I wrote my own.

To many chefs...

ahh..To many chiefs.
Brought to you by your friendly neighborhood Indian

Tsi-La-Gi

:rolleyes: No... I love this board - quick to judge and hpersensitive

(not that I haven't done either myself - just said it's what I love about this board )

Chefs..Chiefs, it was a 50/50 shot.