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Things I learned after getting users

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Re: Things I learned after getting users

#121

Post by freetonik »

dahwolf wrote: post #30

"this is mostly because i relied on a SQL ORM which in short is a tool that makes writing SQL easier to pick up and faster to develop. the biggest downside is that it might execute 50 queries to your database to get a list of information, when it probably only needs 1, which will cause slowdown." I appreciate this honesty. Listen to this old man's advise: learn SQL properly. It's not that hard. Focus on it for a few…

In my limited experience, the best thing about ORM isn't the querying, but the mapping to objects. This is why I really like ActiveRecord's `find_by_sql`[1], which allows to write a raw SQL query and get an array of objects.

[1]: https://guides.rubyonrails.org/v3.2/active_record_querying.h...

Re: Things I learned after getting users

#122

Post by nicbou »

layer8 wrote: post #36
nicbou wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me too, but I still added a table of contents button on my long, structured articles. It's very helpful in my opinion.

Wikipedia does this now, and I find it annoying, in particular the changing “current section” highlighting, and the fact that it hides when the browser window is a bit narrower. I’d rather press Home to get to the TOC again when it scrolled off.

I don't see it on my phone. Do you mean the desktop table of contents? I have one of those too. I use it all the time on other websites.

I think it's a really good feature, but the Wikipedia implementation needs work.

Re: Things I learned after getting users

#123

Post by nicbou »

retox wrote: post #94
layer8 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia does this now, and I find it annoying, in particular the changing “current section” highlighting, and the fact that it hides when the browser window is a bit narrower. I’d rather press Home to get to the TOC again when it scrolled off.

Agreed, seeing something changing out of the corner of my eye is very off-putting.

Hm, I can see where the criticism comes from. Is there a way to keep this feature that would make it more acceptable?

Re: Things I learned after getting users

#124

Post by chrismorgan »

dhosek wrote: post #2

Man, on the abuse front—it’s amazing the lengths that people will go through to put spam on the web. There are apparently canned solutions for pushing stuff to any Mediawiki site, although I found that a really stupid captcha¹ was enough to bring that down almost to zero, but early on with rejectionwiki, I had the same sort of chronic abuser things happening that are described in the article. ⸻ 1. Basically a set of…

(Ooh, three-em dash. Fancy! I use two-em dash very occasionally in prose, and —⁂— as a section and footnote divider, but haven’t found anywhere I really wanted to use three-em dash, though I did still add a Compose key binding for it.)

Re: Things I learned after getting users

#125

Post by alam2000 »

mcstempel wrote: post #41

> this worked for a little bit longer, but he proceeded to get on a VPN, and then another when i blocked that IP, then another when i blocked that IP, etc, etc. Beyond VPNs, I've even seen attackers leverage residential IP networks which makes VPN detection ineffective as well [1]. If you ever need a more permanent identifier to ban users on, consider using a device/browser fingerprinting tool [2]. It helps avoid the…

[dead]

Re: Things I learned after getting users

#126

Post by petervandijck »

dahwolf wrote: post #30

"this is mostly because i relied on a SQL ORM which in short is a tool that makes writing SQL easier to pick up and faster to develop. the biggest downside is that it might execute 50 queries to your database to get a list of information, when it probably only needs 1, which will cause slowdown." I appreciate this honesty. Listen to this old man's advise: learn SQL properly. It's not that hard. Focus on it for a few…

Learn SQL and use the ORM is usually the correct answer. Let it print out the SQL queries and how long they take (ORMs do that out of the box), then check for indexes and other standard issues. If there’s some unusual complex query to be written, sure, write that by hand.

Re: Things I learned after getting users

#127

Post by hderms »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #29

Yes, there are numerous automated and human-powered nuisance traffic streams. 1. CMS sites are constant maintenance, as most are an endless supply of issues. However, some have content caching to reduce the SQL workload. 2. Delayed registration with CAPTCHA and a brief explanation of why you are there. Quiet banning IP filter applied to list to boot pending users who enter emails that bonce or fail to authenticate. 3…

Hey there! Thanks for your comment. What do you specifically mean by rescale/watermark/scrub content to protect users from themselves?

Re: Things I learned after getting users

#128

Post by hermitcrab »

OJFord wrote: post #73
hermitcrab wrote: post #8

>listen to your users. they might have better ideas than you! So true. My products have improved greatly from listening to (some!) user feedback.

And if you're going to do it, make it easy. Many sites have missed out on my thoughtful (not to say I'm 'right', but that even if they don't want to do it it's considered and reasoned) feedback simply because the process although offered requires a login (i.e. sign-up) or because the last time I tried I got some dumb email back thanking me for my question it's not really possible but I can work around it by (x y z th…

I always reply to feedback. Seems only polite.

Re: Things I learned after getting users

#129

Post by eythian »

cousin_it wrote: post #3

> some users have suggested pretty smart features that i've since implemented, like this back-to-top button to quickly get back to the top of the page To me all position:fixed elements (headers, footers, this back-to-top button, etc) feel like a kind of annoying dirt on the screen. Their absence is a big part of why I love the web 1.0 aesthetic.

I have this in a bookmarklet:

https://github.com/t-mart/kill-sticky

Re: Things I learned after getting users

#130

Post by godshatter »

diceduckmonk wrote: post #91

> someone is going to abuse your site Would gating access with Google Sign-in, or Facebook sign-in, etc, be sufficient for rate limiting bad actors?

Google and Facebook both have too much data about me already, why would I voluntarily give them more? This isn't probably that common of an attitude, though.
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