AltME groups: search

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

although from my psychology studies they reckon 7 is a good limit

seeing as i have a little free time i'll go sketch out an 'I wish' 
Altme interface ;)

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

Just experience the same problem I had in January; the "exists, but 
not on-line" error. Fortunately, I posted the note here about how 
to fix it by starting the world from the menu in the app, not with 
a startup shortcut.

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.

current user info indicated:
1. is user online
2. when was user last on
3. are there new private messages from a user

current group info:
1. are there new messages

But it did take a few years for me to get used to the tiny red indication 
of a new private message

to be honest - im still trying to think of a simple, logical replacement 
for the mixing.. its a tough one

also - private messages currently do not store a conversation as 
a unit - but rather as a history - this could be place too look for 
ideas

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

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 would think it would work, probably only looking to see if a port 
is available.

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.

I don't agree. Why should it be lost? Imo there is a bug somewhere. 
It seems like in-memory-only database or what? I can understand time-out 
of the world, if not used for some time. But not loosing world name, 
when the world is apparently running. That simply can't be regarded 
being a solid service ....

I don't agree either, just stating a fact.  It's happened to me fairly 
regularly but I'm told there isn't a problem.

A big bug with Altme is that someone else has to opt you out of a 
public channel

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.

ICarii will take this information so he can build a better GUI :)

Sunanda, then there should probably be an option to show or hide 
private groups. I see the advantage for a private world owner to 
have several private groups he shares with different users. They 
then can't see eachother's groups, perhaps for business reasons. 
I used this once to talk to several different customers in the same 
world (until they appearently grew tired of AltME, sigh).

I think I figured out a problem with my registry.set file. It goes 
read-only sometimes after an AltME crash, which makes AltME impossible 
to start. I wonder what causes that. (I think there are multiple 
different causes why AltME suddenly won't start).

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.

Control C & V being so close to each other is also a problem me thinks

I think the answer to shortcuts is that it should NOT be part of 
the application, but rather the OS.  That the App should offer a 
"suggestion" list to the App/

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

If apps passed this up to OSes, then a person can bring thier shortcuts 
to any computer, or any computer connected to the web.

There could be also a way how to redefine shortcuts as it's for example 
in Total Commander.

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.

I need to get ALTME working behind a firewall - what ports do I need 
to allow traffic thru?

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.

There is a prototype AltME version on r3-alpha world, which allows 
larger uploads ...

Can I get a link to it as I don't think I have access to R3-alpha 
world.

Starting from shortcuts? Or has anything changed that could point 
them to a new working dir?

The upside is that the way AltMe works, the only thing you lose is 
a little bandwidth for a while. :-)

There was something good about this, I noticed that it also refreshed 
a few groups that were not refreshing before. Just a few of them.

There you go. A silver lining. :-)

The next time one of you think that you are not seeing updates in 
group, instead of posting a ".", please try something for me to see 
if this works.  Just change yoru max message setting, say from "100" 
to "500" or even "1,000".  I just noticed something that might explain 
this bug....

Cool, but others do, which is why they post a "."  Perhaps we can 
lock in on how to reproduce it.

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 
...

I really don't want to explain "how" things work... nor try to debug 
any product with customers.  However, all information you have about 
what was happening when you tried to log in is helpful...


There is a tendancy for doctors to act as doctors, even when they 
are the patient.

Yes, it is not a two way street.  

I appreciate all you have stated...

James, there is more being done with AltME...

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.

Why not a simple Rebol plugin form that auto-emails the details to 
the defined admins of this world?  Since it's a RT world, they could 
host?  ;-)

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?

AltME feature request.  Include the date/time as a second column 
a group was last updated.  Since we don't have the ability to synch 
what was read between each instance of AltME that we read, having 
the last date/time listed we could quickly select through the groups 
we have already visited in a previous session on another machine. 
 Although synching what was last accessed would be the ultimate fix. 
:-)

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?

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.

Correction it CANT be read in a suspend status but remains listed 
but greyed out.

Now another thing would be to make OPT outs persistent so that if 
someone recreates a group with the same name again later that the 
person is automatically opted out.

Yup...

Qtask has a "Hide project" concept like this.

The persistent opt out sounds good, but hard to support well.

support inline images , I communicate a bit with some senior citizens 
who *really* like to send images of everything they are building, 
if altme could perhaps have inline thumbnails linked to full images 
stored in the shared folder I could try to move them off email.

i have problems, Altme is trying to load things but is disconnected 
before it's finished so that it enter in a enternal loop, trying 
to reload same things each times.

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...

it's not the first time people described this syndrom.

Saying it never happened before so it doesn't come from Altme, he's 
a special way to resolve (or not) bugs.

he didn't say either. it's a mis-quote, or so he says himself.

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.

ask for a account  for r3-alpha thanks

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

I got it to work on a different port.

On windows you do not seem to need to declare the port like on linux.
Windows opens multiple worlds from the gui

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.

I going to be serving on a linux box and it seems you can just assign 
the port at start up.
altme -s "world name" -p 5401

Now trying to autostart at boot time but having a trouble...

su -lc '/.../altserve -s world -p port &' user > /dev/null

according ot altme guide
does not seem to launching...

I know the example is for altmeserve but I thought it would work 
for client as well

sorry, my issue was with re-creating a world.  I had multiple worlds 
hosted on the same machine at one time and I cheaped out and didn't 
register the world for $10 US per world.  When the worlds expired 
after 10 days of no usage (which never happened, but they expried 
anyway), I had to recreate the worlds, the order was important in 
that scenario.  Sorry for misleading you.

Is there a known problem changing server types for a world going 
from a linux box to a windows box?

I moved a world from linux to windows and I'm getting this error: 
	AltME Error: Registry: cannot load dataset files: 2

Graham needs a prize for being AltME's top public poster since AltME 
REBOL world has been in existence!


See http://www.rebol.org/aga-display-stats.r?world=r3wp&year=2005
thru to year 2008!

Nice going! -- though you are off to a slow start for 2009: not yet 
on the Prolific posters leader board:
http://www.rebol.org/aga-display-stats.r?world=r3wp&year=2009

Graham thought he would adopt a new years resolution, create an online 
persona that is nice to qtask and altme.

is it just me, or my persona, that has found Altme inaccessible a 
few times today ?

Possible, if you think it happened, it is as good as having happened. 
 But one could also say....

- A router went down
- Bandwidth was limited between NZ and the world.
- The software gremlins don't like you, or you, or the other you.

IS ther a way to change the permissions to a shared file/folder after 
its been uploaded. I set it up for 'myself' not realizing it would 
not be available on other computeres I signed onto. I should have 
made it abvailable to my user name I guess.

I've been using Altme for a project with a guy who is very non-tech. 
He did not know how to drag a window. Anyway, it is working out great. 
We are using File sharing to re-format a bunch of text files and 
with the abilty to add comments and check lists its saving a lot 
of time over traditional Email. He is still not really up to speed 
so once he is it wil really shine. And with the abiltty to just add 
new members where they can read any old messages to see where we 
are and what we have been doing.


I regret not using it for my Appraisal business. My partner and I 
had to email files back and forth all the time. And sometimes we 
needed to get files from one another but one of us was away or not 
at our computer. If we used Altme we would never have had that problem.

That is one example Gregg.  But even in regards manual controls.


As best as I can tell the only system I perceive as working is a 
benevolent human dictator or benevolent fascist group (moderators). 
  And most people won't even notice them, a few people will notice 
them and appreciate them, and a very small group of people will dispraise 
them and it could become violent if pulled into the real world.  
And that models the whole thing for me : )


In this world (unrelated to AltME), we have mostly taken the position 
that we can work most things out, or push/pull people into other 
group.  It is not 100%, but as I'm fond of saying, nothing is.


I little patience, tolerance, ignoring, what ever you want to call 
it, goes a long way everywhere...

but altme lacks a way of allowing the community to censure a recidivist

how about this ... each person has a starting level of karma/reputation 
or whatever.  As they post, others rate their posts and add to their 
karma.

Now anyone can use their karma to subtract from someone's karma ... 
so if you feel someone is out of line, you can take points from them, 
but you also lose the same amount of points.  If anyone loses too 
many points in a day or week or whatever, they are not allowed to 
post for a time period.

Beer pressure works. You made a typo.

Beer pressure does work.... that is how I ask contractors to do things. 
 I call them over, and as I ask them to make changes, I pull out 
the ice from the bag, pull all the beer out of the boxes, and put 
it all in the cooler.  But the time I'm done talking it is all set 
up, and by the time they are done working, the beer is ice cold!


Graham, yes, great idea.  This is a model we have used in game rooms. 
 


It would be interesting in this context to see how people help each 
other.  I suspect it "might" be a zero sum game.  There are people 
that regardless of the facts simply help the underdog.    It is why 
so many hard criminals attract women from the outside.  


I have not seen anything like this though in Qtask.  I think the 
fact that you upload your picture makes you a little more "accountable", 
and that a moderator can kick you out.  Slashdot's system works pretty 
well, it might be fun to play with that more too.

Indubitably, beer makes a great tool for a modern man. :-)

Right, that would be a drinking game : )

Oh a change of heart - good to hear.

Wow, just looked and my account here was created in November 21 2002, 
 Can't believe it has been that long.  Looks like a lot of us have 
been around here that long.

Rebolish : humor !

With a "rebolcentral.org" domain name, I was surprised to fall on 
this "Jesus walk on water" page.
Maybe "Rebol walk on the IT water" ??

Looks more like done by someone, who can not let pass up any chance 
to grab a dime from a fool.(

Many donate, but that is besides the point.

I own a lot of domain names, and many we simply forward to "somewhere". 
 Personal stuff I tend to forward to JWOW.


The big question is, do we keep this domain.  I will release if no 
one wants to use it.  Otherwise I will pay to keep it and donate 
it to anyone here who has a good use for it (and WILL use it).

It was intended for a user based REBOL site for teaching etc from 
my recollection ...

It was intended to be a single place that would simply list all known 
REBOL resources.

a single place with all rebol resources
 does not explain why it's called "rebolcentral"?

What exactly is rebolcentral? A regular hosted account?  Or do you 
have shell access and can run daemons etc?

Right now it is a name.

JesusWalksOnWater.com does not sound like a name for a central rebol 
repository.
Maybe I do not get the joke.

I think RebolCentral is a great domain name to point to a centrally 
hosted open source repository

Anton, there is no content on rebolcentral.org ... so Reichart just 
forwards it to jesuswalks as a joke.

Nothing new or original.  Not a joke either - he uses the link for 
defamation.

Graham, not a joke, simply a process.  To call it a joke implies 
forethought

Graham, not a joke.  It is simply grouped by process.  A joke would 
imply there was forethought, then it could be a good or bad joke. 
 Since it is not a joke in the first place, it can't be good, or 
bad.


But, sure am glad that the real question on the table, the name itself, 
is being skipped here...would hate for anyone to actually address 
something of substance, but hey, look a shiny object LOL