World: r3wp

ok ... how is that?

Well that's better then. What if I sign up to AltME and log onto 
a group that I never have seen before, does it download the historical 
messages? What if I haven't signed in for a year and there are 100,000+ 
messages in the group since then, does AltME download them?

Don't it have to get the messages from your server?

Doesn't

I don't have an AltME server, just the client.

Do we really have the full sets locally at all time?

Altme *always* downloads everything (except for the dot bug, that 
is)

the message setting just says how many messages are *displayed*

if you don't believe me, try resyncing this world from scratch - 
it'll take a very long time :)

Interesting ... I had all groups set to read (so not red ;-) 

Now with Thors dotting some groups turn up with unread messages from 
15-oct-2005 (that was in Rebol Enhancements).

Makes me wonder how many groups have not been properly synchronized 
without me noticing.

Here is a trick in syncing. There is a chat folder that has all the 
chat messages for each group are kept. Inside that folder is a file 
called chat55. If you delete a line entry from that file, the group 
that corresponds with that line will be resycnc like it was never 
been there before.

Warning! Do the above trick on your own risk.

Edgar -- I cam think of two drawbacks to that suggested forced resyn 
method:

1. the files themselves contain the request: " DO NOT MODIFY!" in 
their header, so perhaps Altme can forsee bad consequences if we 
do

2. the resync problem appears to mainly affect those on dial up connections. 
Possibly, that means the issue is related to Altme timing out a slow 
request. So there is the likelihood that resyncing a large group 
completely will simply fail midway.

I did try a variant of your suggestion: I renamed one of the *.set 
files to *.txt (the request does not say "DO NOT DELETE OR RENAME!")
It didn't work.
I ended up with an empry group.

I supposed I shoudl have dotted it to see if it'd've resynced.....But 
that was the problem we're trying to solve :-)

It's pretty hard to solve a problem when you lack the source.

From Reichart's comments, it sounds hard to solve even with the source 
:-)

How about a manual re-sync button?

Under MacOSX, it's a little difficult to have AltME window fill the 
whole screen, but I found a solution. By "the whole screen", I actually 
don't mean full-screen, because MacOSX has the screen-bar at top, 
and below that is the window bar with the 3 buttons. In the altme/prefs/ 
directory is a file named "window". In there is found 3 parameters 
offset, size and maxed. To make the AltME window be as large as possible 
on a 1024x768 resolution, I set these 3 parameters to:
offset: 0x44
size: 1024x724
maxed: false

Only problem is, that the window resizer is covering the scroll-down 
button in the "New message" area at the bottom.

Sunanda, I tried what I just said above and it works.

But you are probably right that it downloads the whole group so it 
may still fail before getting all messages in the group. I have broadband 
so it was not a perfect test.

Sometimes, when working in a world, ones status remains at "logon". 
This problem seems to occur on Linux but not on Windows

That is, when I'm working on Linux. People on Windows do see a wrong 
status for me

Actually, I've seen my status remain at "logon" a few times already, 
so it doesn't only occur in Linux. I'm running WinXP.

Also while you were in that world, doing stuff?

But I'm noy sure if that's what others see...

Yup. But at that time I wasn't doing anything - just browsing the 
posts from one of the groups.

We are trying a bunch of Modem attacks again on the Dot  issue.

Bug: Im missing "mark all groups as read"

as its still no feature Im trying via the bug report ;-)

It is in our log.

Reichart: How about a simple filter on the "." , so they don't display 
if not posted by the current user?

not a solution to the problem, but save everyone else the side effects.

Allen....you smart!  We did something like this in Qtask just recently. 
 (not ".", but dups).

on the 'dot bug': It seems to me there must be set some short timeout 
during the data transfer. I remember I had this problem when on analog 
modem few years ago too. I guess it looks like Altme is missing handling 
of the situation when timeout on port occure (or something like that) 
and the logic reamin in state the sync was completed succefully. 
Just wild quess.

(ie. the timeout is not long enough for slower connections)

Sometimes I also see the "logon" status on some people who are actually 
chat with me.

ok... it looks like file sharing has not been enabled here for fear 
of it becoming too big (i.e. imagine a new user syncing, there are 
already various MB to download, if you had file sharing it could 
really become too big)

what do you all think? should we enable it, and maybe delete files 
regularly? do you have any idea?

Can you not save files to the file share without forcing a sync?

big

 files are not synced by default. however, think about a thousand 
 small files (i.e. rebol scripts)

I'm thinking of just making it manual.

You don;t get any files until you ask for them.

Better.

Yes, sounds good.

Reichart, are you considering a one type synch of that file or an 
option to allow auto-resynch's if the file changes?

with an ability for the user to list what files are auto-synched 
and the date the file was last updated so they can turn it off if 
they choose.

Over time, things will get more specific.  But we want to keep things 
as simple as poosible.

I got this when simply sending a message:

Server reported error in chat because of: User does not exist