AltME groups: search

Given the trouble with the Mailing list as well (feedback), what 
about simply moving everything over to Gmail Groups?  All these problems 
have been solved by them already.  It has IMAP access, so you can 
still do ML archives.  And it is all free.  There are a few things 
about Gmail Groups I don't like (but I suspect all ML have the same 
problems), I simply don't like Email in the first place, so I'm biased.

I think a big move to Gmail would have many positive aspects:


-	Feedback problem is gone, since you can have multiple moderators 
that can check.
-	We have a centralized location for requests to AltME

-	We can make it public already, so you may be able to avoid some 
of the tools you have been using to do this.

-	We are working "with" other systems, as opposed to "invented here"

-	There are other services Gmail offers that might enhance the experience.

It seems to me that the process of retrieving a message is blocking, 
or otherwise synchronous. On a crappy connection that process may 
have to do some retransmits, or may be slowed down for other reasons. 
The solution is to make the retrieval of a message asynchronous, 
and then just sync during the local update once the message is retrieved.

I think it must be blocking as when I'm typing and a message is being 
downloaded, I have always noticed that keyboard input is slower.

I'm a world master here. Might be good to have another one who is 
around a lot though. Reichart is back, and he usually takes care 
of things pretty quickly when he's around.

Yes, I serve as back up for Gregg.


Henrik, if you are asking "who can people contact" as in send an 
Email, I don't know...  this is why I want  to unify the REBOL ML 
on Google Groups.  Then someone can post in the ML, and anyone who 
happens to see it can post it here.


The option is the way we do it now, which is if someone contacts 
anyone already in here, they tell us in Accounts, and we create an 
account because that person is vouching for them.

Does that answer your question?

Reichart, I guess it does. I just wanted to make a small guide on 
my blog to how to get in here as quickly and as painlessly as possible 
and who is reliable to contact about that. Currently the ML seems 
to be the main way in, while other post on reboltalk.com.

I propose: checklists to appear in the same list as users and groups. 
Then they can be sorted by most recently modified, turn red and be 
noticed.  *Then* the "Links" group could become a checklist, avoiding 
chat.

or


The "Links" group could be automatically scraped and the links put 
into a "Links" checklist.

Last night, for the second time...  When I connected to Altme Reichart's 
name was "none" his color was correct though.  


The first time this happened it was on a different computer and Reichart 
remained "none" for the duration of the install so I had to reinstall. 
 


Altme seems to have corrected itself somehow this time.  Reichart, 
you will be pleased to know that you are no longer "none"

This is not a bug...simply, I left this world, and rejoined...

I was running AltME under Wine 2+ years ago and it was working perfectly...

Interesting.  I tried to run Synapse under Xandros and it crashed.

Ports: Hi, I want to setup AltME in a way that it connects to a local 
port-forwarding proxy which than tunnels the connections.


What local ports does AltME use? And what are the remote IPs / Ports 
I need to use?

it may have been a DNS problem, because I was connected to the r3 
world the whole time and could send messages just fine. of course 
it's no fun if there is no one to respond. :-)

Robert, no docs but check  worlds/rebol3/config.txt  and prefs/prefs.txt

I got it back up. I have shortcuts that use the command line options 
to start the worlds. That doesn't work. I had to go into the UI and 
choose Start a World, then I could see them again.

My understanding is it uses port 5500 to check the world server and 
5400-5409 are dedicated for your world addresses, incoming and outgoing. 
 The AltME client itself simply uses your default internet ports, 
80, 8080.

It's not about running my own world. It's about connection to worlds. 
The thing is that this port 5500 seems to be an incoming port. And 
this one is routed wrong.

we talked a little bit about subgroups in the r3-alpha world: a group 
that holds subgroups, for particularly shortlived topics, like an 
event (last nights episode of XYZ TV show) or for short discussions 
of questions. this avoids mashing separate subtopics into one group 
and they wouldn't scroll out of view as quickly.

Maybe make optional expirable groups that way if a post doesn't take 
place for some time in a respective expirable group that group will 
expire and clean itself up.

and apparently multiline messages don't work on this machine. strange.

wouldn't it be best to contact Reichart privately, and ask him, if 
the fix would be possible? Maybe there is some little bug somewhere, 
which would not take long to fix?

does AltME store information about window maximization somewhere? 
I have an annoying problem under OSX Leopard, when I switch my macbook 
between the internal 1280x800 screen and my external 1680x1050 screen 
where AltME sometimes decides that the window should be maximized 
at all times. When resizing the window, the content will be resized, 
but the window itself fills out the entire screen except for the 
menu and the dock. It does not fix itself until after a reboot, so 
I don't know if it's a bug in AltME or Leopard.

It would be a combination of the number of users, number of messages, 
bandwidth, and server resources.

Just thinking about the ALTME left side list pane.  I think instead 
of clicking each item such as "M" "Users" and "Status" that there 
should just be one button the top left that you can click and rotary 
thru the list screens.  The caption above the list pane tells you 
already which pane your viewing.  This allows you to add other options 
on the top of the list columns.  Just makes it more concise and user 
friendly in my opinion.

Although the converse of that, hidden features are sometimes not 
found by novice users.  Having them visible is always best and minimizes 
mousing around & clicks.  I like the idea of more items, but from 
a usability standpoint the feature should be more obvious.

:)  Just write the passwords on a post it and stick it on your tube. 
 But yes I agree.

If you change worlds too quickly, sometimes the password field doesn't 
get a chance to update before the link connection.  So the remembered 
value for the new world gets trampled and you have to resort to brain 
power and password typing.  :)

Do you have different passwords for each world? I use the same one 
on 5 worlds, swap frequently between them, and have never seen this 
bug.

I think it takes the currrent world password and applies it to the 
world you're changing to.

Any chance of getting an ALTME version that support MS proxy authentication. 
 I know that DOC Kimbel has a proxy authentication that works on 
large enterprise environments.  If it can work, I will go to EDS 
and see if they would support purchasing ALTME as a collaboration 
solution.

As you can see, I was having trouble as this new install populated 
lists: any time that I hit the enter key the post vanished but the 
list would not refresh by just going to another topic and returning 
to this altme topic.  Hence the 3 stutters in trying to report what 
may be a known issue as I was not sure if my post was in limbo or 
lost in the ethereal bit bucket

Cool, thanks.  Every report is filed, catalogued, grouped in a folder, 
placed in a bank box, collected in a wood crate, and placed along 
with thousands of similar crates….er, or, that was Raiders of the 
Lost Arc….ignore me…

.. and eventually.. one day... brave explorers will come and discover 
the secrets of the ancients..

I can't either.  Two work-arounds, assuminng you want to capture 
and save the post:


1. cut'n'paste it from the HTML archive -- though this may lose you 
some formatting and/or indenting:

http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/aga-display-posts.r?post=r3wp157x10054

Today I tried to run start two altme servers. I want to try to get 
some guys hooked. I would like to state, that I am semi experienced 
(still not guru) networking guy, and I do run wi-fi network with 
30+ routers for 420 customers, so not novice.

So what do I think AltME id doing wrong, or at least not making life 
to admins easy? There is no problem for me to to open ports on FW. 
This is not about opening ports only, but precisely speaking it is 
about setting DST-NAT to your target PC on internal network:


1) AltME records your internal IP adress when setting up your world. 
Don't even try to run it on different PC in your internal network. 
Even if you have all ports OK, this one thing will ruin all your 
efforts. Dunno if it adds to any kind of security, but in my eyes 
it is completly unnecessary obstacle. But maybe it is usefull when 
running altme servers fully on your local network, so that AltME 
"DNS" can direct your local clients to correct internal altme server. 
I can live easily with this one, but ...


2) Today I created new world. No matter how you try, it always registers 
AltME world on port 5400. There is no ability to set it differently.


3) Even if you start altme -s "my-world" -p 5401, it will not help 
you, and it still opens the world on port 5400 (at least that is 
what I saw with netstat -an), which is imo a bug


4) even if you change \servers\my-world\info, still no luck. When 
you go to http://www.altme.com/cgi-bin/lookup.cgiand you type-in 
your world name, you still can see, that AltME.com has registered 
5400 port, but not e.g. 5401


5) even if you run your altme -s "my-world" -p 5401, and even if 
you send your client to 5401 port by changing \worlds\my-world\config.txt, 
you still has no lack. It is apparent, that no matter how your client 
is instructed, it takes info from altme.com for granted, and overrides 
your local settings, which can be proven by 6)


6) Running two worlds - my-world on 5400 and my-world1 on 5401 (names 
obfuscated here), I found out, that Altme client does not care of 
Altme server name at all. That can be proven by typing my-world1 
and using account from my-world, you are succesfully logged in to 
my-world, instead of my-world1, as client obtains port 5400 instead 
of 5401


I have one and only one question - how can I change my world port 
number on altme.com, or in other worlds - how do I REGISTER world 
on different than 5400 port? :-)

Thanks eventually and sorry, if I miss some important steps, but 
I tried to follow docs, which should be sufficient enough me thinks 
:-)

I had lots of problems with this in the past as well as I was trying 
to setup some test worlds to hook some people.  I created the worlds 
consecutively with no other worlds running and ran into the same 
problem of them all being associate with 5400.

I finally gave up and resolved myself to only host one world.  Seems 
to have remedied the problem, although I still have occasional world 
name drops.  The other problem I had is it would not allow me to 
connect to my world, and when 'restarting' the world, it would say 
my world name is in use, thus forcing me to change my world-name 
and asking my users to do the same when trying to connect.  Luckily 
it was just for family, so they did it without complaining.

Something weird corrupted my AltME login to this world. I had to 
delete the file "state" and let AltMe recreate it. This happened 
right after the new AltME update. 

Before I deleted it, it was logging me in but keeps giving me an 
internal error about state path being none while I am already logged 
in. I sent the error to feedsback 3 times.
Deleting the "state" file fixed it for me.

Yes, I agree that is needed.  I'd also like to see a way to re-assign 
a world name after it is dropped and no longer 'reserved' or associated 
to my IP, but don't know if this is possible, since it seems to have 
lost my IP... maybe this is an ISP thing when IS recycles IPs since 
I have a Dynamic IP... probably the answer.

Ingo <I'm not talking about these 3 lines for this exact problem, 
but about understanding enough to find the same info for another 
post>

Apologies for delay in replying.
***

The URL for the web archive has this parameter for the post in question:
    post=r3wp157x10054
And the two lines of code are:

   core-chat: reduce load/all %157.set
   text: last core-chat/10055

As you can see, the GROUP-ID is 157

and the POST-ID is 10054 -- but add 1 for the REBOL code as the file 
has a header line.
***
To get the GROUP-ID either RIGHT-CLICK the group name in ALTME.
Or find the group name in the Web archive:

  http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/aga-groups-index.r?world=r3wp
  
Does that demystify it?
As Reichart implies -- it's easy when you know how :-)

What exactly can cause "AltME Error: Registray cannot load dataset 
files: 2" during startup? I'm getting it so many times on various 
machines, I'm starting to think it's a bug in AltME rather than data 
file corruption by something else. Whenever it happens when I'm trying 
to log into a specific world, it's "jinxed" and I can't log into 
it anymore on that machine. It does not help to just delete the whole 
dir, redownload AltME and start from scratch.

I was wondering that. However I don't know what could be permission 
denied, if I simply delete the entire AltME dir and reinstall it 
from scratch and the problem still persists.

Anyone ever seen a "Too Many Recent Servers" error when attempting 
to start a world? And is the limit 5 or 3 worlds running on a single 
PC?

Altme has always struggled to show me the latest messages in some 
groups...That's the reason why some people have used "." a lot to 
force a group-specific resync.

I've just noticed some red groups that have updated themselves for 
post in March this year and December last year.

I guess that's good that they arrived without further prodding from 
me.

But apologies if you're still awaiting some replies from me: I may 
never have seen yiur post.

I havne't seen it, but I recall the available server ports on one 
machine to be 5400 and believe it to only go to 5405, but could be 
wrong.

Brock, yes that's what I thought.  I'm wondering if the problem is 
that I requested "Too many Servers" from the Altme world-creator 
itself. I'm talking about starting worlds that I have consistently 
used for years and one more (to make four) that is new.

You've given me another thought though, maybe my own machine is causing 
this to happen(?) At this point I can only run two of the three existing 
worlds and never the newest one. Hmmm.

It is also placed in your config files on local machine - however, 
no matter how you try, if you registered new world without old ones 
running, altme registers it to existing port and then you will face 
strange situation, when your client is choosing to new world, but 
is connected to another one ...

Yeah, it is. That's probably why it doesn't work. And worse, now 
one of my old worlds can't be started. I guess I'll have to wait 
until the others die.

Does copy and paste not work on AltME running under Linux?

Double-clicking on a link doesn't open a webapge in your browser 
either....and you can't even copy the URL to paste it in the browser.

Some observations for Reichart on making ALTME more viral.

1.  Host all worlds for free but unsecured.
2.  Tier packages
3.  Enable one click access from external sites to ALTME worlds
4.  Ads Tier


1)  Regarding #1 - I think if you host all ALTME worlds for free 
that people will sign up quickly.  What would drive someone to fork 
over the cash is going to be traffic.  I can bet that once someone 
starts getting traffic to their world and generating content they 
are going to want to keep it.  ALTME owns the content of the worlds 
until someone secures it with payment for the hosting account.  (Major 
incentive that rewards growth).


2) Make product tiers that  target hosting accounts towards gaining 
income and visibility for their hosted safeworlds.


3) Think of going to a website and it says something like JOIN the 
DISCUSSION and then says click here and has a small ALTME logo that 
launches you into ALTME and then takes you directly to the particular 
safeworld.  and if someone doesn't it have it - it takes you to ALTME 
download link.  Almost all other messaging mediums have this capability.


4) This is an excellent idea to compliment number 2.  One tier that 
can be offers for additional costs would allow ADVERTISEMENTS within 
the safeworld framework.  For example, consider many online forums 
generate revunue from Google Adsense by placement of ads in their 
content.  ALTME could offer this type of capability as well.  This 
is really an area where I think that REBOL can get great exposure. 
 If advertisements are required to be put forward in REBOL code this 
means that Google would have to have REBOL programmers develop delivery 
content to interface with ALTME.  I have no doubt in my mind that 
they would do it.  ALTME can boast that it has www.rebol.com as a 
marketing partner and REBOL.com according to marketleap.com is a 
"contender" class website showing that ALTME can get the word out 
if it really wants to.

It _is_ possible to copy/paste in linux, but altme mangles the two 
different paste buffers, so ...

you have to copy by using ctrl+c, and to insert the text in any other 
app than altme, use middle mouse click.
Works for me on ubuntu 7.10

Does anyone know where the world is stored in MS Vista when you have 
UAC on ?  I've searched my hard drive and can't find it

AltME should change the default install directory and not choose 
the Programs directory in Vista.

You may need to tweak Search (and these options are buried deep enough 
that I can't remember) to include non-indexed data.

And I like this one; from wikipedia User_Access_Control
---

However, David Cross, a product unit manager at Microsoft, stated 
during the RSA Conference 2008 that UAC was in fact designed to "annoy 
users", and force independent software vendors to make their programs 
more secure so that UAC prompts would not be triggered.
---

Smart company;  annoy a billion people to get 1000 to play nice with 
Microsoft.  I say we get out the torches and chase down Dr. Frankenstein. 
 :)

That may be from the security alternate data stream. Get AOD from 
http://tp.lc.ehu.es/jma/win95.htmland see.

I think i am so used to looking for a textbox next to a search button 
that i totally overlooked it.  Perhaps that is something to consider 
- new users to altme who have come from a web background will be 
expecting a textbox where they can type something in and then press 
search.  Having it 'hidden' behind a button may cause confusion for 
some of us ;)

what's the logic in segregating some buttons top right and some top 
left??

quite possibly - although i would have a main bar across the top 
with world/setting options and pane/message related stuff built into 
the message pane to show a clear linkiing

wip ;)  http://rebol.mustard.co.nz/mockup-v1.pngdone with draw 
and a little bit of R3

is it logical to group altme users and groups inside the same control 
as they are different entities and things such as status do not seem 
to apply equally?  I understand that they are treated as 'personal/private' 
chat groups but the users seem to fill a dual role here.

indeed - so did black and white tv ;)

ive always seen altme as a merge between email and forums - or IRC 
with history

Pekr, do you know if it was running under port 5400 or not?  Was 
it your ownly world you had running?  If so, you should be able to 
register the same name and all will be well again.  This happens 
to me many times per year.  It's more complicated if you have more 
servers as you have to re-create them in the order of the port they 
were using.

ok, risked it, and re-registered - yes, it was on port 5400. I was 
worried, as I renamed Master account, but all what was needed was 
to shut-it down, start altme, start reregistering the world, and 
I am done ....

Brock - I wonder if following trick would work - imo Altme checks 
for already running worlds. So - if you know what port you need, 
you simply open REBOL console and open particular ports. E.g. you 
know that you world Test was running at 5402, so you can open tcp://:5400, 
open tcp://:5401, then there is a chance altme would run it on 5402 
as needed ...

I believe if you don't pay for your world to be registered to you 
that it is not in there records and is prone to being lost.  I for 
one choose 'Risk it' if my world name is closed due to inactivity. 
 My problem has been that I have never had this world inactive for 
more than a couple of days, yet it is inactivated atleast a couple 
of times a year.

Then you wouldn't accidentally opt yourself out of a group and not 
be able to get back in again.

And an opposite problem exists.

Anyone new joining has no way to even know what private groups exist, 
so they have no way of telling if they should request membership.

So if a group has been made private simply so a few current members 
can opt out of it (it has happened) that has the side-effect of hiding 
the group from all future members.

I've been using Emacs for several months now, and like it alot. I 
wish I would have switched to Emacs years ago. There is one problem, 
however. Without even thinking about it I hit Cnt-x Cnt-s to save. 
That deletes the message I've been preparing to send in AltME.  But 
I just realized I can hit Cnt-v and get it all back.

Louis, we had a discussion about Ctrl-X clearing the field a while 
back for VID3. So far I managed to keep it out and I hope it stays 
out. :-) Not good usability, IMHO.

Thus, you can bring up a standard program on the OS, and simply say 
AltME/input field "Cut" = Control + X

This looks like a bug.  Select a world which is offline .. eg. r2-beta, 
and after it can't connect, click on "return to world".  It quits 
instead.

Anyone know a way around the file size limitation in ALTME?  i tried 
to upload a large file and got a message that there was a limitation 
in this version of ALTME.

Something really weird happened to my AltMe instalations. 

Rebol3 and R3-Alpha opened as if it was the first time. It is downloading 
every messages again. Does anybody know what could cause this?

If you go to files and browse to upload, is the base dir the same 
as it always has been?

so we recreated the world, and the good thing is, that it mapped 
correctly onto existing user and group settings.

This used to happen to me on a very regular basis when I was running 
more than one world.  Seems to have stabilized for me now though. 
 IIf you are running multiple worlds, you will only be able to get 
it registered to the proper port if you re-register the world while 
the other ports are in use..   For example if your world was sitting 
on the third port that gets assigned, you would need to have your 
first and second worlds running when you re-register, otherwise it 
will re-register you to the first port and you'll be hand-cuffed.

One thing is clear - our world was not available, wifi node was down. 
So at that time, there might be some check, and the rest depends 
on engine at Safeworlds. It is just that upon the description, the 
world name should be reserved for 10 days, while it was not even 
24 hours. But it was not a problem to renew. We just re-registered 
the world, and it mapped to the data of our world, without any problem 
...

So you don't want to debug with customers, yet you expect information? 
:-) Well, everything was said already. Our world was not available 
for something like 24 hours or less. When I was trying to connect 
to the world, I got message "the world does not exist". Then I checked 
via altme.com/check.html, and the site confirmed the name is available, 
hence expired. I guess I can't do more on my side ....

Repeat of a post I made here almost a year ago.....And it is still 
not obvious how a newcomer joins this world. It's a huge blindspot 
in the otherwise welcoming REBOL community:

There is no simple, obvious, method of joining this world....

....If you discover it via the REBOL.net archive, there is no info 
at all about joining
http://www.rebol.net/altweb/rebol3/


....If you find it via the REBOL.org archive, there is a note in 
the Help page about requesting membership via the Mailing List.....So 
first, you got to join the ML and it has to be working that day :-(

Let's come up with something better guys!


My opening suggestion.....membership can be requested by sending 
an email to a specific gmail account that the Admins here monitor.

I already suggested it directly to Carl in the past, and he agreed. 
Small note of how to join would be sufficient. One really has to 
wonder, why such simple thing was not sorted out ...

One other possibility......We could have a "request membership" form 
on REBOL.org.
That'd explain the need to download the client from Altme.com.

And it'd send an email to an Admin requesting the person be let in.


So all we need is an Admin who is willing to be the recipient of 
that email.
Any takers?

How is the world lookup working in detail in AltME. I'm asking, because 
I have a problem at work, where they run behind a firewall, and they 
use a ip-range from the outside into the firewall.


My guess is, that the AltME client ask the World Name server, where 
a certain world is located, and the server respond with a IP-number. 
So when a world is created, the world name is stored at the name 
server together with the IP number. And the IP number is read in 
the messages sent over the network. So for me to tell the network 
manager at work, what ports for what IP numbers to open in the firewall, 
I could call a site like
http://www.myip.dk/

with a browser from the server, where the AltME world is created. 
And this should be the IP number, for which the ports (5400-5409) 
should be open for incoming trafic.

Is this correct?

I can also take account requests via email, but am also happy to 
share the wealth and let Petr do that if he wants. :-)

I currently have AltME configured to show 1000 posts and when I go 
to the !QM group then I see a serious of posts from user "none" it 
is clear that this user is actually Reichart and all posts he made 
to that group prior to 21-Apr-07 4:31 PM show up as being posted 
as "none"  Does anyone else see this?

Remember that R left this world .. and so all his posts became none. 
 He rejoined under the same nick.

A suggestion for handling group  termination would be to have an 
option for a group to be retired and then it goes into like a suspend 
status where it can't be read but remains listed in a greyed out 
manner and if someone decides to restore it before the expiration 
period then it becomes restored.  If someone wants to retire it again 
it goes through the same process.  Another thing is to make OPT out 
groups persistent.

Was it just me, or did this world and most of REBOL.net have an outage 
for the last few hours?

i wonder why disconnections discard all changes. Missing some atomicity 
in updates here.

If the whole loaded things  is not commited at once then it's trying 
to redo again and again.
what a mess...

Sometimes one person sees something no one else sees.  When that 
happens, we have to start local and work our way out.

Given that AltME has not changed, and no one else is seeing this 
problem, we need to consider that something odd happened on your 
system, right?

Sunanda: the server was upgraded to 1GB ram. (This was not planned. 
Richard was unable to connect to it, so he went to restart the server, 
and decided to take the chance to upgrade the ram. When he got there, 
he noticed the server was not really down, but he decided to upgrade 
it anyway.)

I was just looking it up and it looks like at the least Pekr was 
correct that it was a reference to 640KB or RAM whether a misquote 
or not.  ;-)

For those who like stats:


110 different people made just over 35,000 posts on this world in 
2008. That's nearly five meg of raw text communication.

Is that growth or shrinkage?

Well, for 2007, we also had 110 active posters, and they made nearly 
45,000 posts. So that's shrinkage in volume, and no growth in population.

Other worlds (which have specialised in R3 development and testing) 
have more than taken up the slack in volumes. I don't have numbers 
for all of them, because I am  not a member of them all.

Small print: I can only count the posts I can see.

The totals include the private groups which I am a member, but not 
those for which I am not.

The totals do not count any private messaging between myself and 
other world members.

I tried and got a "server is already running" message.

Just beware, if you open the worlds in a different order, they will 
use the first available port, so for example if the first world you 
created isn't running, and you start the second world you created, 
the second world will look for the first port, however, the world 
server knows it should have been assigned to the second port.  (excuse 
me not using the port numbers to avoid confusion, but I couldn't 
recall if the first port was 5000, or 5500).  If the server isn't 
using the port is was created on, it won't be recognized by the world 
server.

IN short, order matters, and your servers won't open if they don't 
open with the right port being available.