In response to a request in this topic, I’ve created a mod to move reply comments from the current page to the reply target’s page. Download here. I plan to do one more enhancement so people can know who they are replying since, as it is, replies seem to just be a random comment out of nowhere that makes no sense which is the case in Myspace and other sites that do this.
Author Archive for DAT
I was looking through the profile comments section of the code when I was modifying the profile comments for this mod http://www.boonex.org/2007/12/27/restrict-comments-only-to-friends/. What I found was a major innefficiency the way it is implemented in function getComments() in BxBaseProfileView.php . The replies are recursively retrieved in the database. This means that for every reply, it does an SQL query on that reply. If a user has many comment replies, this could be a major hit on the database. I suggest, this portion be re-written to do one query for all the user’s comments then recurse through the resulting array. This brings the number of queries down from potentially many to just one.
We should change this for 6.1
I made a modification to Dolphin 6 to only allow those who are friends to add comments to user profiles. This makes it more like Myspace and Facebook and reduces spam comments. Anyone is free to use it:
What other mods do people want?
Found this site called Britster while surfing Dolphin sites. It’s has a modified join form that really looks nice. It has descriptions of the fields and has an introduction to the site on the left side, plus users can upload their primary photo right on the first page.
http://www.britster.com/join_form.php
On our Dolphin site, we’ve put a left column description on our join form plus an option to choose birthday privacy.
http://www.tripstir.com/join_form.php
Hopefully 6.1 will have these features.
I’ve been working on making some changes to Dolphin to add more social networking features and I am happy to share them with others. The first one is a mod to count the number of views for each member’s profile page.
You can download it on this page. It’s very simple but I might add a couple of more features later. Feel free to take it.
1. On the join form, if it is spit in two pages, the button on the first page should say “next” not “join”. It should only say “join” on the last page of the join form.
2. It would be nice if the Administrator could add some text on the top of each join form page so that users can get an introduction to what they are joining. For intance, my join form has two pages. Page 1 is required fields. Page 2 is optional fields. On page 1, I put an introduction to the site. On page 2, I put “The fields on this page are optional.”
I’ve been testing out Dolphin on a live beta for my site for a little while now and it seems to be a good script, but there are many things that can still improve. I’ll do a short review of what can improve here and will do a longer review on my blog On-line Buzz.
1. The blogs. For the most part, the blogs are decent but they lack some features compared to a blog like Wordpress (used on this site). First, when adding a new post, there is no “save” button. Wordpress has a “save” and a “publish” button. Second, there is no blogroll, which would be nice. Third, there is no friendly url feature like this www.mydolphinsite.com/usersblog. Fourth, it would be nice to allow users to skin their blog at least a little bit. There are several other deficiencies, but these are the major ones for now.
2. Orca. To me this is the weakest link in the software. Sometimes the back button doesn’t work, even on Boonex own expertzzz forum. Often I seen strange characters like the screenshot I attached. Plus it appears to be slower than the other parts of the software. It seems like the devs are forcing AJAX to work, but if it does’t work right, just use normal html. No reason to use AJAX just for the sake of using AJAX. The forum also doesn’t have basic things like counting topic views, and number of replies on the forum index. See any phpBB or vBulletin forum for an example.
Overall, Dolphin is good but still can use much improvement. I hope you consider some of these comments useful.
Currently the rating/voting in profiles, videos, music, etc is anonymous and not tied to members. Are you planning to have an option to only allow the voting by members like in Youtube? This is better than anonymous voting since you can see what each member voted for the item and it reduces abuse of people voting multiple times. I know it currently checks for ip but that’s too easy to get around. Maybe make an option to allow anonymous or registered only voting?
I have a suggestion on future releases. Instead of adding many new features in 6.1, why not add a few things at a time for 6.0004, 6.0005, etc? Becasue many big changes usually means many big problems as we saw from 5.6 to 6.0. If we just add a few features and release it, then we know the problems can be isolated to the few changes. We can test it and see what works and what doesn’t. Of course, big rewrites still need to be in big releases such as 6.1 but smaller things can be added to 6.0004, 6.0005, etc.
For those having trouble with the admin login issue, it’s easy to fix.
[open]
install/index.php
[find]
function installFinish( $errorMessage = '' )
{
global $aConf, $confFirst, $aDbConf, $aGeneral;
global $reversalDirectories, $reversalFiles;
[after, add]
$sAdminName = $_REQUEST['admin_username'];
$sAdminPassword = $_REQUEST['admin_password'];
You have to do this before installing the first time.
I wouldn’t normally ask for feature requests since I’d rather see a stable build than have one with a lot of half-working features, but user privacy is important and it looks like there isn’t many choices yet. Here are some privacy items to consider. Users should be able to set who can view the following:
1. Set profile privacy. Visible by public/members only/friends only
2. Set birthday privacy. Visible by public/members only/friends only/self only
3. Set comments privacy. Visible by public/members only/friends only
Thanks
I’m testing boonex.us and found slow performance. Is it upgraded to 6.0 final? I have a fast connection/fast computer and can load other social networks such as Facebook/Myspace/Bebo quickly. Examples of slow performance:
1. Upon loading the front page, the layout loads quickly, but it continues to try to load pictures and takes several seconds. For a front page, this is too slow. Check out Bebo.com. They have almost the same information in their front page as Dolphin and they load very fast. Yes, Bebo is a big company with fast servers but just an example.
2. When loading UNOBOONEX’s profile, it loads fast first, but it continues to try to load more stuff, profile comments I think. This takes several seconds.
Many Internet users today are impatient. If the site doesn’t meet their needs, they will delete their account and we Dolphin administrators will lose members to rivals or we will need to maintain expensive servers just for a few hunderd users which means we will lose lots of money. Many features are great but if it causes site slowdown, it’s not good. Please look at resource usage and scaling. Thanks.
Dolphin 6 has many features which looks good, but there is a big problem. It seems to use a lot of resources. I go to the boonex.us site and it takes a while to load UNIBOONEX’s profile. I have a fast connection and a good computer.
If the system uses too many resources, I’m afraid all the Dolphin based communities will fail after a few hundered users. People will be inpatient and just leave. The Admin will be forced to buy fast dedicated servers just to maintain speed for a few hundred users which is not economically feasible.
More features are great, but please make sure the code is optimized. Minimize the SQL queries and use AJAX carefully. AJAX can be a big resource hog.
Dolphin 6 looks good. Hopefully it will scale well too.
Make Meaning Or Die