The Murphy Builders Site

Not a problem Ben, I don't take it as complaints. There are certainly a
number of short comings to the software, in fact there are some serious
problems that I've been dealing with for years... but the developer isn't
always able to duplicate the problems, so nothing gets done about it. I'm
sure most of you who use the web site have had times when you're browsing
messages, and the whole site just quite responding for 5 minutes or so then
starts working again. This is a problem with the secure connection
failing... it used to take the server down for hours, until I discovered the
problem and reset the server. But I finally managed to write a script that
checks so see if the secure web interface is working properly every
minute... and two failures in a row automatically reboot the server. I've
been sitting down here in the evening and heard the server reboot 2 or 3
times in an hour! They it might run for a week without a problem. This has
been a problem for years, and even when I've found the developers web site
hung the same way and told him, he hasn't been able to track down the
problem. Very frustrating.

I guess what I'm saying is, I will definately pass on the difficulties your
seeing... but these problems are not due to my configuration or
implementation. They are inherent problems in the software, which is beyond
my abilities to address. So all I can do is pass it on to the developer and
if we're lucky, maybe some of it will get fixed.

It's better than dealing with problems with Micro$oft, this is a fairly
small company, and I've worked extensively with them for many years. I am
often one of the people he goes to when he needs to beta test new features,
and a few of the features in this software were added specifically because
of request I have made. But there's still no guarantee that all the
problems we run into will ever be addressed.

One really nice method to allow you to search extensively is to download the
entire archive with a news reader, then you can search everything locally on
your own system. Much faster and more versitile than using the web
interface. Just point your client at news.dcsol.com and use the same
username/password that you use on the web site to connect.

Mike

----- Original Message -----
From: <bransom@dcsol.com>
To: <rebel-builders@dcsol.com>
Sent: Friday, September 29, 2006 4:39 PM
Subject: [rebel-builders] Re: searching question

indented below another, and this is a continuation of a thread. But
threads
are not maintained when the messages are posted via e-mail, the method
used
for most of the messages in the builders list, only when posted via the
web

Hmmm... Do you mean "posted via email" to be using my own email client
such
as thunderbird, eudora, outlook, etc? I've just been using the your
dcsol.com web interface, but might even prefer to just have everything
download to my mail client and reply from there. (then I could search by
whatever method, till the cows come home).

If you want to be able to browse through all the messages on the site,
then
you need to view them in Flat mode. This displays the message in order
based on the message number... so when you hit page down, it just starts
with the next message number and goes from there.

OK, yes, I see that in flat mode I can page down. However, each page fits
only a couple dozen messages, so there is a LOT of page down (or up) to
move back say 5 months, and as well, this is a lot of hits and bandwidth
just to get to message x of some date. I don't mean to be a pain, and I'd
just let this go by the way side, except that even in flat mode, I try a
search on a "From" ransom and still get the same gap -- no results found
more recent than Oct 2005. HOwever, I repeated your test, searching on
something in the Body, and there are no time gaps. So it looks like
searching on To or From produces a time gap in the data base. It will do
that as well, if To or From is combined with Subject or Body -- the result
can then be deceiving because it seems there are no hits for this ~12
month
gap, yet there really were posts -- just take away the From criteria and
there they are. Of course too, having to search on Body requires a Lot of
server load and client wait.

Hope to not sound like a complainer -- just that I've gotten the
impression
someone else on occassion does development work on the software you are
using, and perhaps pointing out these things will be useful eventually, or
better yet, result in someone telling me what I'm doing wrong.
Thanks again,
-Ben

As for not seeing recent messages using the search, I'm not sure what the
problem there would be. First, when using this search function, I search
the message body, I don't use the to, from, or subject, it's to easy to
miss
something because these fields are so narrow. And even if you get
somebody's e-mail address right when searching the from field, that may
not
have been their e-mail address 6 months ago. Also make sure you check
the
box to clear previous search cache, this ensures it's going out and
looking
at the current database again when performing your search. To test
things,
I just did a search for the word "grass" in the message body... I got 503
results from as recent as yesterday, and going back as far as May of
1998.

Hope this helps.

Mike

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