h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

* offers and *

Is there a way to delete more than one conversation at a time? I get quite a queue of them from ACEing (up to 8 a day)and leave them on 48 hours before deleting in case of a reply but it means that those personal conversations i want to keep track of can end up way back in the depths of several 'older postings' clicks. I know they are brought to the front when a post is made to them but even so .......

Mort

By deleting you hopefully mean 'unsubscribing' (I've already had to correct SEF once today). There is no easy way to mass-unsubscribe. Both power-unsubscribe (all threads in a forum), and a subscription manager are on the feature suggestions list.

HTH & HAND

spelugx -- <./>guru</.>

Sorry - at the moment you have to do it one at a time. You could try using Shift-Click to open the 'unsubscribe' in a separate window, so you keep the list of conversations open all the time.

"By deleting you hopefully mean 'unsubscribing'"

Have i just been told off?! I am only a mere mortal

thanks both of you .......

*returns to 'unsubscribing' from conversations*

Hmph! - except some of us know that they _can_ be deleted ... and where they then go ...

Some Researchers can't get to the site regularly, and if they come back in three days and you don't see the reply because you've unsubscribed it's all been a bit of a waste of time. Maybe you could leave it a little longer? After all, if they don't reply, the conversation will drop beneath all yout active conversations.

That's a good point.

What about people who join up on a weekend because that is when they mostly use the internet, it could be 7 days until they get back here.

I noticed this thread on the info page, sorry if I am intruding on secret ACEing business or anything.

I think it may already be far too late to say that, Mina.
Actually I agree though. My ACEing ones are the ones I never remove from the list just in case.

However, I have wished I had somewhere separate to keep them. In email programs you get to sort things into different folders. If I did something like that by moving just the thread pointers/links into an article they would lose their functionality. Has no-one suggested having dividers in the real conversation list?

Can't really be secret <./>aceing</.> business since its posted to the <./>gurus</.> anyways! Each volunteer group also has a private mailing list for the _really_ top secret things .

spelugx

How about a second identity for monitoring your ACEing? You post ACE message as yourself, then subscribe to that thread in your ACE monitoring identity - much like U295 works.

OK so it is a bit clunky as a solution, but better this than having to plough through screeds of recent conversations on the off chance of a message back from a newbie.

I never unsubscribe from anything, because i like to know everything i have posted to. If i unsubscribed i wouldn't be able to find a post years later, which i something i often find myself doing. There are conversations i ignore, but there are still there on the list.

Tango

That's certainly a workable idea, GD, especially one with no PS for people to use. However, remember that I'm into saving logins and U#s! The A#s are being used up at an appalling rate.

Someone calculated when we would run out of U-numbers at the current rate, and it was in the 1000s of years... I don't think that is really a problem.

Tango

2^32 isn't it? Giving enough U numbers for 80% of the World's population!

Ok, SEF lets do some maths to workout exactly what percentage of u and a numbers are currently in use. Firstly lets assume Jim is using 32bit signed integers (pretty good assumption, see wrap around u numbers). So this means that the total space available is a pretty small 2^31-1 (they're one not zero-based) = 2_147_483_647. Only 2 billion or so.

Looking at the info page article number A991389 has just been created. Turning this into the integer stored in the db we get 99138 (only 5-digits). So we find that a tiny 0.00462% of the available name space for articles has been used. Your fears seem unfounded here.

Looking at newusers user number U221635 has just registered. Now user numbers are in fact being used up faster than A numbers since they have no checksum and have already reached 6-digits. As a percentage we get, the slightly larger, 0.01032%.

Lets assume the last forum created is the one associated with the last entry created, so we get F117447. Doing the math again we find that the percentage is 0.00547%.

So you need to be most fearful of using up the u numbers too fast, especially since each user uses up an a-number for their intro _and_ two forums once they've activated things.

Of course when we go to 64-bit numbers, we are just proponeing the enevitable day when we run out U, A, and F-numbers.

spelugx

It turned out to be a signed not unsigned quantity. So it is 2^31 U#s. Divide that by 10 for A#s.

SEF, the checksum isn't actually stored in the database since its pathetically easy to recompute. You can even do it using just mental arithmetic, try doing _that_ for MD5.

Oh no! Only 200 million pages to read. What am I going to do for entertainment when I've finished reading that lot next week...

I'm beginning to think you guys don't realise this is just one huge wind-up on my part! and the one I normally never use

Well know you know what it feels like...


(obligatory smiley included to prevent unnecessary flammage)