Please refrain from posting comments that attack or insult people and focus on constructive criticism.

No messages intended to annoy or antagonize other people, or to hijack a thread.
No messages that are deliberately hostile, threatening, or insulting.

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When viewing previous posts from the account page, Message boards N posts. The posts no longer have alternating backgrounds.
Having a better separator, perhaps like the one between posts in a thread, would be helpful.

I hope this site stays as it is and doesn't get mucked around with any more. Einstein is reasonably fine now, but Seti is a mess. I had to download color-that-site to make it usable. If I wish to use Beta I will have to do the same there I suppose.

Apparently this is all part of a Boinc wide project to make the forums better for hand held devices. Not all the world uses them, there are many of us that stay with proper computers and get disadvantaged in the process. Why should the minority take precedence?

But it is useful to feed back tips on enhancements or bugs, whether they get acted upon is another matter of course.

I would say Einstein is a WIP, but I haven't seen any changes in a while. So I guess they are happy with how it is now. Having the task counts sure would be nice...

I found the previous SETI@home layout to be more user friendly on my mobile devices. As it had static nav bars with direct links. Instead of one with dropdowns. It was also rather nice having them at the top and bottom of the page. Especially when reading long posts. Now it is required to scroll back to the top if I want to go navigate elsewhere.

Now it is required to scroll back to the top if I want to go navigate elsewhere.

While I agree that's irritating, there's an easier thing here... click on for instance "The Lounge", or "Cafe Seti" , or "Number Crunching", or "Message boards" to get out of there in a jiffy. That link combo can be found in the lower left corner under "Post to thread".

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I'd invite David to compare two pages.

BOINC Forum advanced search
SETI Forum advanced search

Here, it's pretty clear what to do: fill in the boxes and click the button.

Seti's page is less successful.

1) The left-hand column background has greater contrast with the page background. Final row looks odd.
2) The search button face colour is the same as the left column background colour.
3) There's another button with a much more inviting 'click me' face colour...

Since all search parameters are cleared when you step back from the BOINC home page (been there, clicked that), you have to start filling in your 'advanced search' all over again.

Now it is required to scroll back to the top if I want to go navigate elsewhere.

While I agree that's irritating, there's an easier thing here... click on for instance "The Lounge", or "Cafe Seti" , or "Number Crunching", or "Message boards" to get out of there in a jiffy. That link combo can be found in the lower left corner under "Post to thread".

I have bookmarks for most of the places I want to navigate on the site now. It's typically fewer clicks than hitting the message boards link and then picking where I wanted to actually go from the nav bar.

I'd invite David to look at the message on the Seti@home front page

We changed the SETI@home web site to use Twitter Bootstrap, a CSS toolkit. This makes the site usable on small displays, and lets us use color schemes developed by other people (this one is called Darkly).

This supposes that there were other options of colour schemes. Why didn't they try 3 or 4 out then ask people which they preferred? Simple answer, they don't care what their users think, only what they want. People are starting to walk out in protest, Myself and another one in a team forum for starters. Yes we can get over it by using color-this-site, but we shouldn't have had to should we?

The timing and strategy behind all of this couldn't have been more haphazardly carried out and planned if you tried. DA writes a paper effectively saying Seti has wasted its time, done nothing with its collected data, and found nothing. That will have lost a few people already. Those that were considering staying will look at the new site and think nope, that's it, I've had enough, I'm off.

You just can't get the staff these days.

Honestly I think the stats not being exported for a few weeks probably lost more users than the site change.
At least I saw more people complaining about it.

Info that people here can pass on for the person(s) wondering why the https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/sah_status.html shows no 'Account' under Project and when logged in there's no Name and Log Out showing on the right: this has to do with the server status page being an HTML page instead of a PHP page. Apparently HTML runs this code differently, so that's still being looked into.

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For the past days I have been writing and rewriting this post. If this makes it, you're reading version 7. I'll be using the word 'you' a lot in this post, if you feel spoken to - good. But it isn't anyone I single out in this post. Just you.

Ever since David added Bootstrap to first the BOINC forums, then Seti Beta and then Seti Main has he been under attack by some of you. As if your wife has left you for him, taken the cats with her, taken all your beer money and your beer, made your house burn down, wrap your car around a fence pole, made the sky fall and on top of that he has hurt you personally with pins and needles. And for what? For a forum code change!

The BOINC forums that some of you never liked that much anyway. phpBB was better. There were always too many forums here, people couldn't remember where they'd posted their question! There were plenty of other (open source) (freeware) alternatives that should be changed over to. Why the need to continue to develop the BOINC forum code? That took valuable resources away from more stringent problems, like the client and manager.

And even now David is attacked by some of you wondering why he's not developing the client and manager further, but instead is throwing resources at the forum code. And instead of asking him why he does that, you're putting all kinds of reasons out, making do as if what you post is the truth, as if you're well-informed.

Over the past couple of years, ever since the mobile handheld devices got in swing, have there been people asking for the forums to be adjusted so they can be read on these handheld devices. We have probably all seen what happens here, when you loaded the previous forums into a browser on a (small) Android device: you'd see the whole forums, but you'd have to zoom in to see anything. And this for each and every page thereafter. Yes, it worked, but it was tedious.

With Bootstrap the size is more normalized, and immdiately from page load, no matter what device you're on. You may have to adjust it slightly, depending on browser, but that's mostly to have it snap in view and that depends on preferences in that browser.

That it was put on Seti Main so quickly after these forums and Seti Beta is because of the huge amount of traffic that goes over those pages. If it were rolled out just here, I would be the one testing this, most the rest of you would complain and not much else. And no, of course David isn't going to ask you for your permission if he can go ahead and do some of these changes, just as he won't ask you if it's all right with you to inject the newest security measures. So why the requirement that you should be asked? Are you paying for the server, the electricity, the maintenance? Are you the owner of the server? If no to all that, then why the demand that you be asked before changes can be made, and throw tantrum after tantrum about it that you aren't?

There are things happening in the background that you have no knowledge of and that isn't coming out of the obscurity any time soon, things that I can only hint to but not fully disclose about. It's all to do with the leaving of Rom Walton, which has thrown a lot of stuff in disarray. The result of this is that the development of the PC client is at the moment at a total standstill, and until the stuff in disarray has been untangled, I wouldn't expect any changes in that.

Yes, there are volunteers jumping into that gap, but they cannot pick up everything immediately. We may have found a developer for Android. Linux is outsourced to the package maintainers and some of the volunteers who build clients via a PPA. Mac OS X development is still done by Charlie, but since he's not paid for any of this work, it's in his free time. He has his normal work go before any BOINC development.

Which leaves Windows development, and here we're lacking knowledge, know-how, good documentation. If you feel it's up your street, contact David about it. He'll fill you in on all the exact requirements.

I did ask for the beta client to be released as recommended, and have seen David put this forward earlier, to see if anyone else had a problem with that. So far none have.

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Thanks for the info Jord, appreciated.

Just one question if I may:

With the forum going from light to dark & back to light again, any idea as to why S@H not followed suit?

With the forum going from light to dark & back to light again, any idea as to why S@H not followed suit?

As far as I know, David follows what's being said in the thread in the News forum over there. So if people there say they find it too dark, he'll make it lighter. Too light, making it darker. He's also getting quite some input through email - not just from me but also from plenty of others who know how to find him.

As I understand it, most development is now happening through there, so once a more solid version is found, the fixed code can be put on here as well. But do know that these forums are a hack of the normal forums used on projects, so some things working over there may not work over here. (Although that's usually to do with credits and such)

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... Which leaves Windows development, and here we're lacking knowledge, know-how, good documentation. If you feel it's up your street, contact David about it. He'll fill you in on all the exact requirements.

I did ask for the beta client to be released as recommended, and have seen David put this forward earlier, to see if anyone else had a problem with that. So far none have.

Well said, Jord. I didn't see this until I had completed and sent my email to the boinc_dev mailing list: I think we're on the same page, but I was very deliberate in saying that these issues - including funding any additional personnel that may be necessary - should be considered and actioned by the Project Management Committee as a whole, not by David as an individual. And if anybody counters that they don't have that remit, then they should be re-constituted so that they do.

Edit: These re my own views on this, I haven't asked anyone if they are the only truth.

Info that people here can pass on for the person(s) wondering why the https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/sah_status.html shows no 'Account' under Project and when logged in there's no Name and Log Out showing on the right: this has to do with the server status page being an HTML page instead of a PHP page.

To make this a little clearer, the forums are based on PHP code. You're logged in via a PHP page, not via an HTML page. When you look at the HTML page for the status page, you're not logged in here, because it is an HTML page. If there were an Account or Join option here, it would be for that HTML page, not for the PHP pages. You don't join Seti via an HTML page, but via a PHP page.

You should see the Seti Server Status page as a separate entity from the rest of the forums. If the project were to use the server_status.php page (that's normal for BOINC), it would have the links there (Seti switches to sah_status.html automatically, so they must have caught this internally, switching to the correct page). But see https://setiweb.ssl.berkeley.edu/beta/server_status.php, for those logged in, you probably have Account under Project - for those not logged in, they do not.

Yes, PHP is a scripting language that runs on HTML. But that doesn't mean that links from PHP pages can switch to internal HTML pages without problems, even if they are on the same domain. They are essentially two different pages, with their own permissions.

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Simply said, HTML is the code that the browser can do something with. Everything that you see in your browser on these pages is hypertext markup language (HTML). The script code that PHP uses is not visible to the browser, so before sending the page to the browser, the server strips out the script code, executes it, and puts in its place the results of executing that code. PHP code will run from HTML pages but only when put in special <php> tags.

An index.html is not the same as an index.php, although either can be redirected to the other. But they are not the same page.
The same goes for the forums_index.php and the sah_status.html pages, if the last would've been sah_status.php there wouldn't have been any problems. But just because the extension on the latter is .html makes it a different page, according to HTML.

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That's absolutely fine as a general statement of theory, but unfortunately there's a fly - a big fly - in SETI's specific ointment.

The SETI-specific sah-status page starts life as sah_status.php. Yup, a PHP page script [edit for clarity]. (that's the log of SVN changes, and your browser may object to the link because it's not HTTPS). Jeff only committed the Breakthrough Listen / v8 changes in October (r3543). From there, I was able to work out why the Haveland Graphs for v8 were broken: it's a duplicated $avalue (php variable name) on line 224, which should be $bvalue.

I wrote to David the day after the 'new look' changes started, and asked him to fix the XML output version while he was working on the file, and got a nice little note back: "I incorporated your change; works now. Thanks. -- David". And it did work, and has gone on working ever since. But: (and this is the strange thing) - the typo is still present, unfixed, in that SVN file. So, there must be another, operational, copy somewhere else, which I haven't found yet. That page must still run the php code, otherwise also available in XML wouldn't work.

There must be a good reason why they run PHP to generate an HTML page, and only show us the HTML result: perhaps it simplifies keeping it going during maintenance. But it shouldn't be beyond the wit of a programmer to expose the raw page as PHP, so the navigation remains consistent across the site.

I wonder if recalling the contents of the page are done through a CGI script, as that apparently doesn't work well from PHP.

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Thinking some more, I wonder whether it may be an optimisation. PHP is an interpreted (and fairly simple-minded) programming language like BASIC, which is designed to run on servers and interface with databases - so it's often used on shopping sites.

It might simply be too slow to look up all those tape progress bars and daemon status traffic-lights every time a user loads or refreshes the page: running the code once every 10 minutes, and redirecting the outputs to static HTML and XML files, may simply reduce the server load and result in shorter loading times.

Chris, if I may, PHP is a scripting language that the web server understands.

Browser asks for a page (file)
Server looks up the file and sees that it has a PHP script in it
Server runs the PHP script (program) That script brings together database output, static files, other program output, etc.
The output of the PHP script is a unique HTML page
The web sever sends your browser that unique HTML page.
The browser displays it to you.

The PHP script might bring in say the result that your credit card was charged and display the authorization number from your bank. A static page can't do that.

In practice very few people hand code a PHP page, mostly they use web page design programs and then perhaps do a hand tweak say to move it from a test machine to a production machine.

I'm guessing on the status page, that there is a script that automatically runs every X seconds (chron job) and generates an HTML page which is saved as a file. The web page we get via normal static HTML is that file, which gets replaces every so often. That is why is locks up at times and displays old data. The script that generates it stops working. That script, in this case, doesn't even have to be a PHP script.

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More changes, but this time not for the better. Unreadable on my phone. Single column text? Nope.

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So how do live streaming webcams work?

First you pay the webcam girl ...

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