• dfqdfqsdf (unregistered)

    Discourse sucks...

  • Miriam (unregistered)

    So ... this is a Perl script that builds a sed command? I guess that's kind of sort of funny.

  • faoileag (unregistered) in reply to Miriam
    Miriam:
    So ... this is a Perl script that builds a sed command? I guess that's kind of sort of funny.
    It can happen if you are new to Perl and, say, are migrating from bash skripting.

    To see the pattern used in internal scripts from a big ISP, though... hope it's not the one that's hosting my website :-)

  • faoileag (unregistered) in reply to Miriam
    Miriam posted in CS:
    BTW, just out of curiosity: what's keeping you from posting in Discourse? After all, it takes some manual action to get to CS if Discourse is the forum software of choice for an article...
  • (cs) in reply to faoileag
    faoileag:
    Miriam posted in CS:
    BTW, just out of curiosity: what's keeping you from posting in Discourse? After all, it takes some manual action to get to CS if Discourse is the forum software of choice for an article...
    Nothing is preventing it, except people's natural dislike of Discourse, and perhaps a certain amount of contrariness.

    Discourse, in my opinion, is the forum software of choice for sadists.

  • faoileag (unregistered) in reply to Steve The Cynic
    Steve The Cynic:
    Nothing is preventing it, except people's natural dislike of Discourse, and perhaps a certain amount of contrariness.
    Well, there is some sounding out taking place in Discourse re creating a subreddit...
  • Jim the Tool (unregistered)

    I can't comment using the Disgust system, because I refuse to enable JavaScript for this website. One reason is unicorns and shit like that.

  • Smug Unix User (unregistered)

    Did someone sneak the new comment system past QA?

  • anonymous (unregistered) in reply to faoileag
    faoileag:
    Miriam posted in CS:
    BTW, just out of curiosity: what's keeping you from posting in Discourse? After all, it takes some manual action to get to CS if Discourse is the forum software of choice for an article...
    No, it just requires the right amount of automation.
  • Your Name (unregistered) in reply to Steve The Cynic
    Steve The Cynic:
    faoileag:
    Miriam posted in CS:
    BTW, just out of curiosity: what's keeping you from posting in Discourse? After all, it takes some manual action to get to CS if Discourse is the forum software of choice for an article...
    Nothing is preventing it, except people's natural dislike of Discourse, and perhaps a certain amount of contrariness.

    Discourse, in my opinion, is the forum software of choice for sadists.

    Seriously, if they needed to replace CS with a modern forum software, what's wrong with Vanilla? Was it just "the founder is one of Alex's buddies" or something?

  • C-Derb (unregistered) in reply to faoileag
    faoileag:
    Miriam posted in CS:
    BTW, just out of curiosity: what's keeping you from posting in Discourse? After all, it takes some manual action to get to CS if Discourse is the forum software of choice for an article...
    I don't want to register for another system just to make comments. That's why.
  • the beholder (unregistered) in reply to faoileag
    faoileag:
    Miriam posted in CS:
    BTW, just out of curiosity: what's keeping you from posting in Discourse? After all, it takes some manual action to get to CS if Discourse is the forum software of choice for an article...
    I focus the URL box and replace "Articles" with "Comments". How hard is that? It feels much easier than creating an user to be able to post in Discurse.

    No matter how wonderful Alex thinks it is, Disgrace was never meant to cater to people who are: a) paranoid about creating accounts everywhere they go; b) submerged in so many accounts+passwords they have to remember that they won't create another unless it is absolutely necessary; or c) too lazy to bother, like me. and that will lose TDWTF a good deal of usual unlogged commenters.

    Granted, on CS I have to deal with Captchas. (Which are mostly on autocomplete by now.) But OTOH, I have the benefit of not having to deal with that ugly buggy poor excuse for a forum.

  • (disco)

    TRWTF is that the article page says "1 comment" but there are no comments here.

    I see that some comments were erased (at least the progress bar’s "4 of 2" bug is somewhat useful), but I guess the real problem is a missing "- 1" when calculating the comments count.

  • (disco) in reply to VinDuv

    If you comment that there are no comments, are you telling the truth?

  • (disco) in reply to VinDuv
    VinDuv:
    TRWTF is that the article page says "1 comment" but there are no comments here.
    There is. PaulaBean wrote it. It seems that in Discourse you can't start a thread without an initial post, so the bot just posts "Discussion for the article: ..."
  • (disco)

    TRWTF is of course that the article had been online for at least 20 minutes before VinDuv came and nothing had been posted during that time.

    Not even over at CS.

  • (disco) in reply to VinDuv
    VinDuv:
    TRWTF is that the article page says "1 comment" but there are no comments here.
    The topic starter (@PaulaBean) counts as a post
    I see that some comments were erased

    Two system-generated spam to the effect of "this topic is invisible" 6 hours ago and "this topic is now visible" 1 hour ago, that aren't at all interesting, so were deleted for your viewing pleasure.

  • (disco) in reply to dhromed
    dhromed:
    If you comment that there are no comments, are you telling the truth?
    I always lie.

    More on topic, I’m surprised that this script uses use strict but fails to use system to run sed (running sed instead of using the built-in language features is also a WTF, but quite common in my experience).

  • (disco) in reply to VinDuv
    VinDuv:
    running `sed` instead of using the built-in language features is also a WTF,
    I confess I did that once as well, when I had just started with Perl (private script, no production code). Today I would consider it a rather huge WTF, though.
    VinDuv:
    but quite common in my experience
    I think it might be some sort of migratory pattern - if you transition from one language to another, if the other language supports features from the first one, you stick with those features for a while because they look more familiar to you. Like `sprintf` used in C++ code.
  • (disco) in reply to PJH
    PJH:
    Two system-generated spam to the effect of "this topic is invisible" 6 hours ago and "this topic is now visible" 1 hour ago, that aren't at all interesting, so were deleted for your viewing pleasure.
    Huh? How can those posts *ever* make sense? If the topic is invisible, you can't see the post saying that it is invisible. And if it *is* visible, a post stating that it is so is stating the bloody obvious.
  • (disco) in reply to faoileag
    faoileag:
    How can those posts ever make sense?

    Welcome to Discourse.

    faoileag:
    If the topic is invisible, you can't see the post saying that it is invisible. And if it is visible, a post stating that it is so is stating the bloody obvious.

    Well to be fair, admins certainly, and mods probably, can see them whatever state the topic is in to non-staff...

  • (disco) in reply to faoileag
    faoileag:
    I confess I did that once as well, when I had just started with Perl (private script, no production code). Today I would consider it a rather huge WTF, though.

    I think the best example I’ve seen of this anti-pattern was in a production Python program. This program started another process with the built-in subprocess module (no WTF here) and later tried to monitor if the spawned process was still alive.

    The sensible solution is to use the “process object” which is returned when starting a process, and call its poll() method. This program’s solution was to check if the string “someprogram” (the program name) was somewhere in the output of the following command: ps aux | grep someprogram | grep -v grep.

  • (disco) in reply to faoileag
    faoileag:
    Like `sprintf` used in C++ code.
    You mean instead of iostreams? Well, duh, iostreams are dog slow and harder to see what the output will look like than sprintf, which has a bleedin' picture of the output at the beginning.

    A better analogy might be using malloc and free in C++ code instead of new and delete, except in some very specific cases.

  • (disco) in reply to VinDuv
    VinDuv:
    This program started another process with the built-in `subprocess` module (no WTF here) and later tried to monitor if the spawned process was still alive.

    The sensible solution is to use the “process object” which is returned when starting a process, and call its poll() method.

    This program’s solution was to check if the string “someprogram” (the program name) was somewhere in the output of the following command: ps aux | grep someprogram | grep -v grep.

    Sounds just like the thing someone would do who didn't read the relevant documentation and all of a sudden needs to come up with a method to find out if the spawned process is still alive.

    And it can be a side effect of hiring someone as Python developer who perhaps only has a Perl background.

    I won't advocate against that (I have been in such a position quite a couple of times), but I would strongly advise regular code reviews in such cases.

  • Miriam (unregistered) in reply to the beholder
    the beholder:
    faoileag:
    Miriam posted in CS:
    BTW, just out of curiosity: what's keeping you from posting in Discourse? After all, it takes some manual action to get to CS if Discourse is the forum software of choice for an article...
    I focus the URL box and replace "Articles" with "Comments". How hard is that? It feels much easier than creating an user to be able to post in Discurse.

    No matter how wonderful Alex thinks it is, Disgrace was never meant to cater to people who are: a) paranoid about creating accounts everywhere they go; b) submerged in so many accounts+passwords they have to remember that they won't create another unless it is absolutely necessary; or c) too lazy to bother, like me. and that will lose TDWTF a good deal of usual unlogged commenters.

    Granted, on CS I have to deal with Captchas. (Which are mostly on autocomplete by now.) But OTOH, I have the benefit of not having to deal with that ugly buggy poor excuse for a forum.

    Not to forget, they are really painless captchas! They don't use flash or have absurdly distorted letters.

    I, personally, am generally really really reluctant to create accounts anywhere at all. Which is probably the main reason I don't have an account neither on CS nor on Discourse for this site.

  • (disco) in reply to faoileag
    faoileag:
    Like sprintf used in C++ code.

    sprintf can be used for substituting into localized message. Iostreams can't unless you write the template machinery (e.g. boost::format) on top of them.

  • (disco)

    Could someone please explain what this script is trying to accomplish and/or what the implied WTF is?

    All I got from the script was that it picks up a configuration file, picks a random time between 18 and 24 hours, then uses sed to stick that time in the conf file for the environment variable "run-interval". I don't know what run-interval is used for, but if it needs to be changed to a random value between 18 and 24 hours, how else would you do that except by some post-install script? Or are they implying the wtf-ery is that updates shouldn't touch conf, that changes like that should be handled by a login script or something?

  • (disco) in reply to AwesomeRick
    AwesomeRick:
    Could someone please explain what this script is trying to accomplish and/or what the implied WTF is?

    It appears to be a one-off script that's executed at the end of the installation process that modifies the config file.

    The modification, and what appears to be TWTF, is that the run-interval is (essentially) random at install time.

    AwesomeRick:
    Or are they implying the wtf-ery is that updates shouldn't touch conf, that changes like that should be handled by a login script or something?

    The WTF I think is that part of the config appears to be determined by a random number generator. At install time. Rather than asking/telling the uesr installing it to change it, or using a sensible default.

  • (disco)

    I thought the WTF was that it is a poor way to implement load balancing

  • anonymous (unregistered) in reply to the beholder
    the beholder:
    faoileag:
    Miriam posted in CS:
    BTW, just out of curiosity: what's keeping you from posting in Discourse? After all, it takes some manual action to get to CS if Discourse is the forum software of choice for an article...
    I focus the URL box and replace "Articles" with "Comments". How hard is that? It feels much easier than creating an user to be able to post in Discurse.
    Since I already had a GreaseMonkey userscript for TDWTF, it was pretty simple to have it alter the href on the comments links.
  • Stuart (unregistered) in reply to the beholder
    the beholder:
    No matter how wonderful Alex thinks it is, Disgrace was never meant to cater to people who are: a) paranoid about creating accounts everywhere they go; b) submerged in so many accounts+passwords they have to remember that they won't create another unless it is absolutely necessary; or c) too lazy to bother, like me.

    d) semi computer literate.

    I have an account on another forum that runs Dicsource. I still can't quite work out what it is meant to do and how to do a lot of things I have done on hundreds of forums over the last 15 years. Threads seem to have some sort of quad state, I assume there is new or no new posts. Beyond that no idea what the others are. IT also doesn't seem to have a simple way to 'mark all posts read', which is important as I would imagine most users don't visit too often due to it being rather difficult to use.

    I'm sure I could find most of the answers on the internet somewhere, why reinvent the wheel though. I'd complain on the forum if I knew how, and didn't have to create an account.

  • Sole Reason for Visiting (unregistered) in reply to Steve The Cynic
    Steve The Cynic:
    faoileag:
    Miriam posted in CS:
    BTW, just out of curiosity: what's keeping you from posting in Discourse? After all, it takes some manual action to get to CS if Discourse is the forum software of choice for an article...
    Nothing is preventing it, except people's natural dislike of Discourse, and perhaps a certain amount of contrariness.

    Discourse, in my opinion, is the forum software of choice for -sadists- masochists with a bizarre fetish for the sort of "civilized discussion" that only ever makes an appearance on 'Masterpiece Theater" during some interminable costume drama based on a 19th Century novel.

    FTFY. Of course, there's no need to discount the possibility of sado-masochism. I suspect Alex is in the best position to have a perspective on this.

    I don't want to register for another system just to make comments. That's why.

    Indeed. One small measure of the "success" of this train-wreck is that quite a lot of people, like me, search diligently for the link to the actual comments, not the "We want you to log in before commenting, but we are going to put so many pointless impediments in your way that you will give up, despite your best efforts" comments on Discourse.

    Seriously. This is a multiple serial month-long WTF, and it's actually obscured a couple of real WTF posts of the sort we used to know and love.

    If Mutt and Jeff are serious about proselytizing their product, fine.

    Just, please, not here.

  • nisl (unregistered) in reply to Sole Reason for Visiting
    Sole Reason for Visiting:
    Seriously. This is a multiple serial month-long WTF, and it's actually obscured a couple of real WTF posts of the sort we used to know and love.

    If Mutt and Jeff are serious about proselytizing their product, fine.

    Just, please, not here.

    I'm still hoping for an entire Error'd article just about Discurse. ;-)

  • Friedrice The Great (unregistered) in reply to faoileag
    faoileag:
    Steve The Cynic:
    Nothing is preventing it, except people's natural dislike of Discourse, and perhaps a certain amount of contrariness.
    Well, there is some sounding out taking place in Discourse re creating a subreddit...
    Can't access Reddit from work, so that's no good.
  • (disco)

    Reminds me of this:

    http://serverfault.com/questions/348493/why-does-the-iis-worker-process-recycle-every-29-hours-and-not-every-24-hours

  • (disco) in reply to faoileag
    faoileag:
    Sounds just like the thing someone would do who didn't read the relevant documentation and all of a sudden needs to come up with a method to find out if the spawned process is still alive.

    And it can be a side effect of hiring someone as Python developer who perhaps only has a Perl background.

    I won't advocate against that (I have been in such a position quite a couple of times), but I would strongly advise regular code reviews in such cases.

    I'm tempted to have a Python developer review my Python code that is a rewrite of Perl code, just to see how WTF-ey it is. I usually see WTFs in my own code after going back later when I've learned a lot more about the language. It's one of those things...if you don't see places to improve your old code, then that means that you haven't learned anything and gotten better in the meantime.

  • Mookie (unregistered)

    I am just against change, goddamit!

  • Spencer (unregistered) in reply to nisl
    Sole Reason for Visiting:
    Seriously. This is a multiple serial month-long WTF, and it's actually obscured a couple of real WTF posts of the sort we used to know and love.

    Hmm, might take more Hanzo over more Discourse

    nisl:
    I'm still hoping for an entire Error'd article just about Discurse. ;-)

    We should submit some then. Although, that requires us to use Discourse, which I think most here are loathe to do

    Captcha: Using Discourse causes many of us to immitto a continuous high-pitched whine

  • Vogon (unregistered)

    Discourse.

  • Vogon (unregistered) in reply to Vogon
    Vogon:
    Discourse.
    (Just to clarify, that posting was poetry. This posting isn't.)
  • (disco) in reply to PJH
    PJH:
    Welcome to Discourse.

    It's about topic history transparency, when you close / open topics or hide / show we inject those messages so people understand the pauses in conversation.

  • abbas (unregistered) in reply to Vogon
    Vogon:
    Vogon:
    Discourse.
    (Just to clarify, that posting was poetry. This posting isn't.)
    So it *IS* true, what they say about Vogon poetry. Well played, sir.
  • CigarDoug (unregistered) in reply to Vogon
    Vogon:
    Discourse.
    "The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. Discourse." - Linda Richman

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