This section is only for discussing issues pertaining to the PerlMonks web site itself.
For example, asking about how things work, or offering ideas on how the site could be made better.
Hi. My recent posting titled "Passing argument by reference (for a scalar)" has an author Anonymous Monk which should be me, jmClifford. I am unsure of how this occurred ?? The responses are excellent. :-)
This weekend, i'm in the process of upgrading the server on which chatterbot runs to Ubuntu 24.04. Depending on how this goes, chatterbot might be unavailable for a few hours. This will also affect last hour of cb.
The process generally involves upgrading the OS as well as multiple local Perl installations an their respective slew of CPAN modules. (Different services on my server run on different users, each having their own Perl installation).
chatterbot now logs access times and errors whenever it accesses the Monastery anyway, see pm server stats. Useful to see if the monastery is having more technical issues than usual. (There might be a bug pertaining to actually logging the errors encountered, still working on it).
Thanks to chatterbot, chat has now all the tools needed to resolve any intellectual conflict 😉:
Command
What does it do
!coin
Flips a coin ("heads" or "tails")
!d6
Rolls a standard six sided die for those complicated multiple choice questions.
!d20
Rolls a 20 sided D&D die. Attack, defense, extra-complicated multiple choice forms, you name it.
!8ball
Simulated Magic 8 Ball. Can answer any yes/no question.
Answers to this commands include a fake ID, so chatterbot can post the same answer multiple times consecutively. For example, when multiple coin tosses are requested in short order in a "best out of three" solution. Just ignore the ID.
suggestion: Instead of a long list of links on the header of each page maybe just have a link to "page with cool stuff" that lists and has a bit of annotation about each of the links.
hate to bring this up gain ... this site is distressingly slow. you can't argue about that. besides my personal preferences people don't want to wait. something should be done.
In order to constructively use surplus votes, I've been going back through older Meditations. The "older entries" links stop at 300. Is there a good reason for that? I was keen to continue necro-reacting past 2019.
In the help page Display of Node Reputation, at the bottom it has links to check/uncheck "Show reputation spread" in User Settings, but these don't seem to work.
It seems they could be replaced with something like /?node_id=1072;setnodetension=on and /?node_id=1072;setnodetension=off as these work.
Normally, when the site redirects you to a 'default' page, it is The Monastery Gates.
If you'd rather have it go to a different page, visit your User Settings and enter the node ID in the 'Preferred Default Page' field.
Currently, this is only respected in the Log In page.
The plan is to have it respected in other places as well.
When someone is getting used to RATs they may put the legend at the top for easier reference. However, once they no longer need it they may want to move it to the bottom so that the node list isn't pushed down. When you do this it puts the legend above the "I've check all of these" button, but it would seem better if the legend was below "I've check all of these" so it's less likely need to scroll down and probably less distance to move the mouse to get to it.
just a small change, but maybe hard to implement, of a behaviour I find a bit annoying.
actual behaviour If I go from page A to page B and then I vote for some node the page refresh afeter hitting the stumbit buttom. So if I use the Back button of the browser I find myself still in page B
desired behaviour I vote for some node in page B and if I go back in history with the browser I land in A
We discused a bit in the chat this morning and I realized that here (thankfully and hopefully) JS is almost restricted for security reasons. But anyway there are two possible approaches:
make the vote something inline within the page as suggested by an uberwise monk, so that clicking the voting button does not reload the page via a submit button but records the vote
use the OnSubmit (or whatever is called) to remove the page from browser history
Do you thing it is something worth to implement?
L*
There are no rules, there are no thumbs..
Reinvent the wheel, then learn The Wheel; may be one day you reinvent one of THE WHEELS.
I realize it would take longer but it would be nice if you could search nodes by regular expression. Also it would be good to have a link to something like Using Super Search on the Super Search page or an updated help page with more details about how the search actually works.
UPDATE: These two nodes are also relevant Patterns in PerlMonks Searches and Exact words in super search, however, it's still not entirely clear to me what the 'separate strings with' option does, since the search matches substrings.
I have updated chatterbot to disable self-referencing Karma (chatterbot will quip that he dropped your vote into the recycling bin or something similar). It's not 100% foolproof, but it's better than before.
I have also fixed a timezone bug in the CBStats "special nodes" section that watches for Paco to return. This might or might not break when switching between daylight savings and standard time.
If you have noticed any other bugs, just send me a private message.
