An additional idea for the Forum

[Kyrax]

Alright, thanks !

[Stamga]

That's gonna be a pretty cool & useful feature...

[sweetfunny]

Sorry i haven't been back, i'm not well and on the verge of deciding if i should take myself to hospital. To be honest i think i should be there, but i'm scared of what will happen.

Anyhow i have done this and i can activate it this second but before i do, there's two ways this can be done both with up sides and down sides.

The first way is like Mozillazine, and display the info in the signature area.

This will require adding a table to MySql to store the useragents. Looking to the future, this table will get large and it will require one extra database query to look that info up on each pageload and doing a SELECT from 'useragents' on a table with a million records and pulling 10 entries from it (one for each post in the thread) will incur some overhead. Also when upgrading vB in the future, care must be taken with any DB schema changes.

I know Chrome has had some resource spikes, so the other way is insert it in the already existing post table, this will incur zero overhead and no extra queries because this happens already when a post is displayed. Also the database needs no changes. The downside is, if a user edits their post they are editing the contents of the post table and so the useragent info is available to edit as well.

So what does Chrome and everyone else think? I do think the sensible way is the second option, going forward it will be pain free and won't slow pageloads as the forum gets larger. There's really no reason for users to intentionally go back and edit their posts to change the useragent when the info is there to help.

The other thing is, printing the exact useragent will result in something like this:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.11) Gecko/2009060215 Firefox/3.0.11 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

That's mine because i'm using Firefox right now. I'm thinking a lot of the string isn't really needed, i could rewrite it to:

Posted with: Firefox 3.0.11

So that's the other thing i could do to keep it simple, but that's just an option.

So before i click the "Do it" button and send the change live, what does everything think?

[Luc VN]

My two cent:
This extra feature should not be at the cost of speed or require extra resources.
I like the truncated string although other info like operating system should be retained too...

PS: I hope that you get better soon!

[Waha]

I'd think it could be in the post table in a different column, so that it wouldn't be part of the post text, and wouldn't be available to editing. O.o And still be no overhead.

[Kyrax]

Sorry i haven't been back, i'm not well and on the verge of deciding if i should take myself to hospital. To be honest i think i should be there, but i'm scared of what will happen.

.. Take care of yourself !

At first I thought it would be better to link the user to a browser. However, a single user might change browser overtime so putting this information in the post table seems to make more sense.

[PeterR]

My 2 cents:

A needed and wonderful idea! For this, I think a quick and dirty solution is best. We could "what if" this issue forever and there is little to be gained by creating new SQL table or adding a new field. It simply does not justify the extra work. If it were me, I would

1. Simply grab either user_agent string from PHP or from JavaScript, whichever is easier to edit based on the entry form itself, and append it in the end of the text field upon the final submit()/database entry.
2. Set the font size to 1 (no reason to make it big as normal text)
3. Include the whole string, since it does have OS info as well, which could be useful.

[pcki11]

if each post is a simple string, then there is an option to make useragent not editable.
if we insert <hr> tag (for example) before the useragent line, then when editing we could truncate the post just up to the <hr>.
on the other hand, if somebody is posting some code containing <hr>, would it actually be <hr>? or is it something like & # 60;hr& # 62;? if the first one is right, then my idea is useless =D

ps. couldnt post this: & # 60; without blanks even in [ code ], so i guess my idea isnt so useless after all =)

[Luc VN]

Thanks for reviving this thread
Could SweetFunny have a look at this?

[Waha]

Don't see why it can't just be its own column and we can avoid all the post data mess..not that hard to add a new column to a table and put a check in for null data for backwards compatibility..
Or heck just put the new column in the user table and get it from there when generating the post.