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

Hi Jim! I was wondering: would it be possible to add a little bit of code to the users.cgi, so that when I used a link like http://www.h2g2.com/users.cgi?user="97840", it would automatically be replaced with "online" or "offline" as appropriate for that researcher at that specific moment? Such a feature would be most valuable with, for example, pages such as "the H2G2-team" or "the Aces Homepage" ><> Love to hear from you, Greets, Skeleton (ACE)

It's not clear from your description exactly what you want to achieve here. Changes to users.cgi would not change anything that appeared on any other page. A link is a link, and doesn't actually get called until the link is clicked on.

It sounds like what you're after is a GuideML tag which shows the online/offline status of a particular user, which isn't a good idea because it increases the number of database hits each page requires, thus slowing down the whole service.

In case I've completely misunderstood your request, you'd better let me know exactly what you wanted to be able to do.

What I was looking for is, like you expected, an indicator that, when loading a page, shows immediately whether or not the referenced users are currently online. however, you're right, it would only work when clicked.

Having the page call a routine for every referenced user wouldn't be smart either, because, as you said, it would take even more time.

I guess you're right... I thought it would be a marvelous idea, but it's just plain silly. I've now made a complete and utter asshole of myself.

I wouldn't say that. They're all things which would be useful - all I've done is tell you the technical reasons why they're not necessarily useful when done that way.

However, what *would* be possible would be the ability for users.cgi to show who's online from a specified group. Since that script already does the necessary database lookup, it's no more difficult to tell it only to show certain users. Where it gets tricky is how do you specify who you're interested in. In the future, we intend to give you the ability to create your own groups of users, so it's probable that when we do this, we'll extend users.cgi so that it only shows members of your group online.

Don't know when this is likely to be, though...

I see what you mean!

The problems with putting THAT ability in users.cgi are huge, unless the database is expanded with a set of fields for each user:

1. a field to indicate whether the user in on the H2G2-team
2. a field to indicate whether the user is an ACE
3. a field to indicate whether the user has EVER recieved a message from someone else on his own introduction page.
4. a field that takes a list of Uxxxx numbers of people which the user may wish to monitor at all times.

Then the userlist system would need a parameter field that allows you to select: team-members, aces, unvisited people (practical for finding people in need of a greeting), your own selection of friends, OR the full list.

Maybe one should even consider incorporating these five buttons in the GOO around the upperleft corner of each page, so the user can easily select any of the buttons, which then pop up the correct list.
The unvisited-button might be made optional, only showing when you're an ACE or team-member

I don't see this happen very soon, actually. So here we will be able to agree with eachother

A simple thing that just fits in front of a users name on any page, and immediately shows online presence for that person, would be much easier to do, but we've already dismissed that because of the bad effect on overall speed.

Actually, making users.cgi look only at a particular group is quite easy. Once it can look at one group it can look at any group. It's how you keep track of lots of different groups of people that's the problem, but we need to do that for other features anyway, so it'll come in time.

Thanks for the ideas - we're always happy to hear your ideas about how to improve h2g2.

Yeah, I see what you're driving at: if a lot of people all have their own list of favorite users, and they're ALL running the online-users window simultaneously, the H2G2 engine will have quite a hard time keeping up with all those different requests, because it needs to read each list everytime before updating the window of that user.