Wedge

This is exactly what I mean. There is no circumstance where this number is actually meaningful. Incidentally the same deal applies to the stats page too - and why it shouldn't be tracked at all there either.

The whole 'used to be active' deal is a problem and having it on the full stats is just as much of a problem. In fact, probably worse because you're going to be fixated on that crap rather than dealing with the important stuff, more like the number of posts being made. That's a meaningful, trackable and accurate figure to work from because it's absolute (either you have posts or you don't)... but the whole online thing is tricky because bots frequently send multiple 'users', followed by the fact that you are guaranteed to have search engines you don't know about (there are dozens who've been through here lately that no-one had even heard of)... and it's just a waste of time. Lies, damn lies and statistics.

As for that space (not) after the parentheses... don't even go there :lol:

@Nao: Why bother? It's not a stat that is meaningful. Dropping the line entirely means saving queries and stuff.

@Hristo: No, that is not what I said. I said the line specifically on the info centre, I even quoted which line I meant.

Mind you, while we're on the subject, the entire concept of 'most online' is a meaningless figure that makes no sense and cannot possibly be accurate and should be excluded.

I would note that XenForo not only doesn't have that figure, doesn't even track it historically and no-one asks for it that I can find.

See, here's the thing. Those people who don't care about the visitor count aren't going to care that it's gone, and those people who do actually care aren't going to use it anyway because they're going to integrate Google Analytics and/or Piwik or similar.

So, long story short, as part of what I'm doing out here in the US, I'm building a website for it and it's an SMF install[1] with a ported WP theme[2]

And so while I'm gutting SMF's shonky old markup (and dear god it is, I forgot how far we came with it), I got to thinking. Yes, really, all this build up for a small point.[3]

On the board index we have:
Most Online Today: 25. Most Online Ever: 98 (July 7th, 2012, 08:52 AM)

or similar. I want it gone. I see no reason to keep the maximum number of people online today (which is guests + members + bots), nor do I see a need to keep the most online ever stat. They only serve as a 'we were this busy at > this < time'. Which if the record was set some time ago, could be a problem.[4]

I just see no reason to keep it. It's logic we don't need, queries we can save on the board index, etc.

1.	Needs stability, I won't be able to babysit it all the time, nor will the people taking it on after I'm done be as technically minded as I am so maintenance needs to be easy.
2.	Porting a WP theme was easier when I stopped trying to look at the PHP. There's no licence issue here because I'm not distributing the result. GPLv2 is awesome in that respect.
3.	It's a bit of a liberty for my 14kth post but what are you going to do about it? In response to the comment about displaying it as 14k, I have no problem with that. When you're < 1000 posts, each post matters. When you get to the thousands, nothing nearer than the hundreds mark even matters. 13.9k to 14k matters. 13k to 13.1k is an indication of progress, in a way that 13099 to 13100 isn't. I'd be quite happy to see post counts formatted that way in main display.
4.	Especially if your figures happen to be: Most Online Today: 1,555. Most Online Ever: 3,726 (January 18, 2008, 10:00:17 PM)

I don't bother. I just tell it to use the mail queue and check it appears in there as it should ;)

Ah, yes, the overly self important breed... usually a sort of theoretically-minded OCD perfectionist.

That points to the scheduled task then, of which I know I changed the semantics recently for calling (changes in DB table)

I'm a bit of all of them.

Some of what I do is duct-tape code. Usually that's stuff buried deep in the bowels where neither extreme performance nor extreme portability (smallness) are required. Usually it is functional and rugged enough to not break unless other things are already broken, but it won't necessarily be pretty or 'nice'. But since it's internal-guts code, it doesn't have to be pretty, nice, fast or tiny. Reliability is the prime consideration in those cases, and we all know duct tape fixes any damn problem.

Some of it is OCD perfection. Usually this is more an aspect of design rather than implementation. To me, the design of the warning system falls into this category, even if some of the code is duct-tape ish. This is the stuff I *like* to make happen, where it is beautiful on the outside and beautiful on the inside. Practicality and sanity tend to discourage *too* much of this for me.

Some of what I do is anti-programming. I like code reuse as much as the next person, and if I can reshape something to reuse existing code, so be it. I'm also not entirely against reusing other peoples' work if the licence and conditions are favourable (because invariably they know their specific subject better than I do, e.g. the draggable thing I'm using for the boards and categories list is very clever and while I could have written it given time, caffeine and some moral support, they made what is likely a better job of it because they know jQuery UI better than I do, for example)

Some of what I do is half-assed. Usually that's because it's the first draft, where functional rather than beautiful is the goal. A bunch of UI stuff I've done is firmly in this category - it's good enough to be useful but not good enough to be 'perfect' and has rough edges. I don't sit down and design UIs to perfection, I tend to leave that to people better qualified. But I provide the bits underneath that do work (see the other categories)

Probably a little more of what I do is the theoretical category. I spend a lot of time figuring out what people are trying to do and the best way(s) to make that happen. Though for me it's 80/20 thinking/coding and I try and aim for the 'One True Way' aspect perhaps a little too much.

But yeah, all of the above.

Well, crap.

Wait, handleMultiple isn't for periodical notification, is it? I thought it was for if you had multiple notifications to the same thing (e.g. multiple notifications for likes on the same post)