PM system?

[EveKnight75]

Someone came to the Reviews forum before, asking about how the PM system could be used to respond to reviewers. Apparently, s/he was confused and thought there was a PM system on the main archives.

Actually, having a PM system on the main site might not be such a bad idea. Members want to reply to each others' reviews, but aside from replying on your own review page and hoping that the reviewer sees it, there really is no way to contact another member to respond to a review because there's no way to view the e-mail address.

It's just a suggestion, and I don't consider it much of a priority. Still, it could be useful provided there's an ignore/block function. It would help prevent the clogging of review boards and it would be useful if a member wanted to send a private review or review response.

[SasUke PepSi aDvErTiZeMeNt]

I SOOOO TOTALLY AGREE! It's true of what you're saying because it's basically impossible for you to contact any reviewers unless you have to deal witht he hastle of emailing that reviewer!(If the email is known.) So that will be so much easier to thank reviewers that way! GREAT SUGGESTION!

Pepsi-chan

[Solaris]

It is a good idea.

If it is possible to tech it in, it might happen.

But it would have to be talked about by the techs to see if this can happen.

Beth

[Shirotaka]

This seems to me to go along the same lines as the blog discussion from a few weeks back.

My thoughts are it would be a bit of a bandwidth hog.. Perhaps the discussion should wait until the techs have cleaned their plates a little bit. ^^ They work so hard and they do so much.

On a side note, I think that would be a very very nice feature, just not top priority.

[Acal]

Awesome suggestion, but do already have this site which can do PMs

[DemonGoddess]

I'm pretty sure the plan is if you want to use pm functions, that we're encouraging you to join the forum to do so. Both programs have their own unique features which can and are used for the site overall.

[Guest Jaxxy]

Something very much like this has been under discussion between Manta and me for a little while, and I believe Manta, with xax's help, is seeing if we can do this whenever she/they find the time to focus on it. I'm not positive if or when it'll work, but I'm really excited about the possibility of having it.

Some good news is that, since we've upgraded the Forum software, the languages that the Archive and the Forum "speak" are now worlds more compatible. From my tower of non-tech-y-ness, I declare that this fact gives the Archive and the Forum more potential to cross over and possibly share some of the features that only one or the other has been capable of supporting til now.

What it comes down to is getting the Archive software what it needs before what we want it to have (which sux... I want my toys too). The Archive coding's a bit of a disaster project right now... but it's well in hand, all things considered. The main thing I like consider here is the talent in these guys' hands.

From what I've been told, tech's been pretty much up to its knees in deciphering a few years worth of coding patches (on patches... on cracks in yet more patches). One of the original coders did not even "comment out" his modifications -- meaning, the person left no explanation of why they did what (many things) they did -- so there's a big challenge right there.

Anyways, we need to replace these patches with actual repairs to get everything stable (sometimes just finding the mods/patches is more than half the battle). If we don't do that before we add too many more new things, we could endanger the stuff that's actually working.

Really, it might be possible to do this sooner than late. Sometimes a particular modification wouldn't be too attached to other coding and it turns out it can be easily implemented, if you're lucky enough.

So, that's what I know -- probably one of the techs'll see this topic and have to come out here and correct me.

[DemonGoddess]

Yes, fixing the archive is what's going on at present. However, it is actually being COMPLETELY rewritten while the repairs are ongoing. There are so many problems with it, that rewriting is quite frankly the BEST option available. Otherwise, what we're looking at is continuing to fix things, then having even more problems crop up and crop up and crop up....etc.

Aside from that, there is also the problem with the fact that the archive was written in versions of php at least 2 back from current, which means that there are obsolete function calls, and some very STICKY problems that the programming language itself was rewritten for to correct in the first place. So, you see, that's even more of a priority. Then, you have to look at the fact that the database queries that are written into the script are also written for a much earlier version of mysql. This means that queries that were set in the scripts originally when it was written, don't work the way they SHOULD now; as the QUERY structures for mysql have also changed a quite a bit. Nor do they work efficiently, which creates quite a stress on the hardware framework. Again, this creates many, many problems that are only going to be fixed with rewriting the thing entirely.

Y'see this is why when manta and I have discussed this very thing, of pm systems in place for it, she's being practical by saying "use the forum, it's already set up for it". A PM system is way ahead in time frame, and NOT a priority for the archive at present.