Added a feature for posting thanks for helpful posts
 

Lots of people are always posting really helpful/thoughtful/useful things, so I decided to add a little thumbup feature for the site! Let me know if you love it/hate it :)

:thumbup:

Hehe... I love this feature on one of the other forums I go to. Hence the reason I suggested it to one of you guys not long ago. :P

Yeah, I had already planned on it when you suggested it. Feel free to make more suggestions :p

But... will you already have planned on them, making my suggesting them a futile effort?

How do we test this conundrum?

I've not planned much I'ven't said publicly at this point

So, can we make the site just that extra 2 inches on each side wider? I mean... there is alot of real estate wasted there...

Or even use it for advertisements that I'll certainly use flashblock or some similar program on... I mean... wasted space is just so... wasted?

Yeah, I want to make it full width but darin has been opposed. I'll bug him about it in the future.

Too bad he's busy starving since all the blocked ads don't feed him

That almost made me wince with a bad feeling. I don't click ads on webpages anyway, I just block them because many of them make noises or flash or some other annoying thing, and always eat up cache in my browser.

When you get 100 tabs open like I do, in 2 windows, that tends to kill your memory, so I just started blocking them all, since, in my case, they were a waste of space.

Why would someone be opposed to going fullscreen? That intrigues me, other than to save that space for ad revenue.

It's easier to control the layout of your content when you know exactly how much room you'll have regardless of screen size.

Anyway, most of our ads here are based on impressions, not clicks, so blocking does actually make a difference.

Poor starving darin!

How does that work? I'm not sure I understand it?

In that case, I won't block them. I don't think I currently have any blocked from this site, I just mentally ignore them, for the few times I see them.

Yes, mentally ignoring happens after you visit a site like 5 times.

Basically, we get paid a set rate per thousand impressions, which isn't very good. Despite being a pretty well-trafficked site, we don't have a million ads and don't make much money. Darin and I really spend lots of time on it, and we'd like to have it make the money of a full time job so we can continue to treat it like that without having to work 80 hours a week with secondary jobs to pay the bills, but it's hard! It would be nice not to have things break at 1am and work normal hours too, but now I'm just whining!

So does "impression" refer to the page with the ad being seen?

That's the only way I can view it in my head... I don't really see how they'd know if someone saw the ad or not, unless there is like a trackback code in the pages we're visiting, or it's based on cookies or whatnot.

I guess I'd rather you not explain it, it might bring up a security issue in my head that I would then have to address imperatively and promptly on my own system, and I'd rather not have to play with Vista anymore. I hate this OS, but it's wifey's computer.

So I guess my question is: If I spam reload on a page, will that make more "impressions" for the sponsoring ad?

Yes, spam reloading would do that, but it's not necessarily helpful because most ads have a certain limit for how often they show up for a certain area/unique user/etc.

*shrug* won't write that script then... just trying to help :evil:

Yeah, fraud is no good :)

Christ -

I think it's a lowest-common-denominator issue. Today the "minimum" resolution is probably 1024*768, so 800x600 will always fit inside that. Also, for the recent super-mini laptops (webtops?!?), 800x480 can be the maximum resolution (like the 7" ASES Eee PC). Soooooooo, Ecomodder is 800 pixels wide.

That's my theory,

CarloSW2

That makes sense, but isn't there a tidbit in coding about "resize for screen resolution"?

I thought I saw something about that in HTML once upon a time, a piece of script or code that would (as the page loaded) check resolution and adjust it's width and height to compensate for it. Maybe it was a XML thing for Explorer, though, I don't remember.

EDIT: My mysterious friend Jay says it's a Java script, but might be able to be done in PHP as well, not sure about other setups, including forum software and BB's.

Haha, I usually use an old version of Linux which blocks (or fails to load) lots of stuff, even when Flashblock, Adblock and RIP are disabled. For example, it often doesn't show pictures in posts (which pi$$es me off, since I have to find the photo's url in the page source), but it probably blocks more ads than I know about. I've been meaning to upgrade for the second year now, but I'm so lazy and so used to what I have, and have so much junk on the disk that I should clean up first...

I wonder if those ad blocking gizmos don't load the ads, or load them and hide them? In the second case the server side shouldn't notice that the ad is blocked, unless there is feedback.

I've been waiting for this for sooooooo looooong. On a DIY site like EcoModder.com this is a MUST!!! Thanky thanky thanky :)

Now I have to go through all of the helpful threads I've almost memorized and add some thanks.

The way the programs work is that they don't load the blocked content at all, so it does speed things up that way. Just like the no script extension for FF does by just not running any scripts (including ads)

I made an exception for EcoModder.com in AdBlock Plus and turns out I have been missing out on ads :/ With the new income Darin will probably be on the Bahamas by this time next year ;)

He's actually off the boat now, eating catfood out of a can with his fingers :)

I thank EVERYONE!!!!!!!! ;)

kind of a silly feature.

Kind of, but all it can really do is be nice and it doesn't detract in any way so I figure it fits out philosophy here.

I thank you for your input. No, seriously.

In fact, I intend to thank you until it hurts!!!

Any way we can put a link in the Thanks/Thanked by texts that shows a post view of whichever one you click on?

Thanks - Clicking this will show a list of the people's posts that the user has marked "thanks" for.

Thanked - Clicking this will show a list of the posts that this user has posted for which other users have given thanks, with those users names listed as they are now.

In the past I've though of how smart that would be, but it's not my code and that's not supported just now. The issue with that would be that it would include storing lots more data where right now we just have a simple little counter that doesn't really affect page load times or database fillage, etc :p

I dunno about load times, I use prefetch... LOL. Everything loads in the background while I'm on the page, then when I click the link, it flushes and loads everything on that page.

You're the bane of website admins everywhere who wonders why their bandwidth and computing cycles are eaten up so quickly!

"bane" as in banal?

As in, Bane - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I don't use it on this site:P

I only use prefetch when I'm doing research on something, because it's a hell of a lot faster to load pages with wasted clock cycles than to wait, especially if you're doing it on dial up. (I'm not, but I have before.)

Bane is a Modern English word meaning "that which causes ruin or woe", from the Old English bana ("slayer", "murderer"), from the Proto-Germanic *banon, cognate with *banja ("wound").

Seinfeld, anyone? Kenny Banja. (banya)

Is there truthfully where his name comes from? Seinfeld is the best.

I can't say for sure, but knowing Jerry and the way he comes up with his material, I wouldn't think to doubt it one bit.

How can you tell who thanked you ?
Someone thanked me, and I have no idea what for. Hmmm.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Their name gets listed below your post!

Thanks Neil.
What I should have asked, was how to find which post has the tank you.
Some one thanked me, and I'm not sure which post it was on.
Rather than go through each and every post I have on this site, I just wanted to see if I had missed something obvious for finding it.

No, that was why I suggested the linking ability.

Sorry, Cd, I have yet to see the feature implemented this way, and we're no different (yet.)

Ben, could you maybe write a note to the author of the script asking for an extension that includes that feature, or something similar?

Click on the user's name, click "view user's profile", click the "statistics" tab above the comment box, first box in that view shows one link to an archive of posts that person has given thanks for, and another link for posts they've been thanked for.

Just found this tonight.

Hmm, I had that line in my head while watching District 9 this week. Finally, I know what you were talking about ;)