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Posts tagged with "community"

My Last Week

Friday, 23. March 2007, 12:13:00

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All good things come to an end, I guess, and now my role as Opera Community developer is no more.

While I have decided to move on to what I at least for now percieve as more challenging tasks, it is with certain regret that I have resigned my position at Opera Software. Developing the community these past couple of years has been very exciting and fun. The learning curve as our member mass increased and our servers collapsed has been steep, but as a result I've learned a tremendous amount of important database and server backend application skills. Unfortunately, I won't be using those skills in my new job though, considering I'm going from programming to more theoretical work assignments.

Having an MSc in Information Security it is with much anticipation and excitement (and some trepidation) I have agreed to a position as a theoretical cryptologist at the Norwegian National Security Authority. I look forward to the new challenges I will face, although I will most certainly miss being able to do mass-market stuff such as the Opera Community, where people will immediately tell you if you messed something up, or did something cool. Now, if I mess up, I'll only compromise national security P:


I still have a week left at Opera Software, which I will spend finishing up some community backend code, and to retroactively write some proper documentation of my past transgressions in Perl. It would be cool if those who come after will actually be able to maintain the community. P: Hopefully, you won't even notice I'm gone. :smile:

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Back from London

Thursday, 19. October 2006, 15:17:02

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This week Opera Software sent Espen and myself on a MySQL customer conference, to learn a thing or two about MySQL and talk with the gurus.

Especially a couple of presentations by MySQL sales engineer Ivan Zoratti regarding performance and horizontal scalability options was very interesting and highly relevant to the Opera Community, where he gaves us some ideas about where our current solution is lacking.

Currently we have scaled horizontally by adding more nodes to our database server farm. However, due to the relatively little amount of RAM and parallel processing power of our current nodes, the solution is far from optimal. We have therefore decided to rather scale our master node vertically, that is add a lot of proper hardware.

The performance aspects of Zoratti's talks taught us a lot though, and I'll employ some of those tricks as soon as I can. And while we are scaling vertically this time, we'll need to think seriously about horizontal scaling in the future, given our current growth.

After the conference, Opera was conincidentally holding the Opera Backstage event, so we went there and grabbed a few free beers, and also got the opportunity to briefly say hello to some of our revered community members :smile:

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Today Is Update Monday

Monday, 27. March 2006, 13:08:43

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Watch This!


With today's Opera Community update, we have launched a feature we are fairly excited about: Watches.

Watches are an extension of the now-retired "news" feature. The news feature would notify you whenever someone commented in your blog or photo albums. Watches on the other hand, will allow you to have similar tracking in both your own and other users' blogs and photo albums.

Think of watches as a community-wide tracker of seen and unseen content.

Currently we have these five watches available:
  • Watch a blog for new blog posts
  • Watch a blog post for new comments
  • Watch a user for new albums
  • Watch an album for comments to one of its images
  • Watch an image for new comments
The album watch takes precedence over the image watch (i.e., if you have a watch on an image, then later start watching the album the image is in, the image watch will be removed).

We plan to expand the watchable content to eventually cover most of the community (e.g., merge it with the subscription feature of the forums, add watches for new skins/widgets/wallpapers and comments for these).

Hopefully, you'll stop by the forum and tell us what's good and what's not good about the new feature once you've tried it out.

Tag Clouds


Another nifty feature is the tag cloud for blogs. You can find it in your archive page and a smaller one in the blog sidebar. Depending on the amount of blog posts you've posted, and how good you've been at using tags consistently and often, the tag cloud can look everything from fantastic to downright boring :wink:

In any case it does however give a nice overview of often-used tags (in bold and large text), and lesser used tags. It only shows the 50 most used tags, so if you have used more than 50 different tags, the lesser-used won't show.

New Designs


Apart from the Watch feature, I am very excited about our new one-column designs which Fred has made. I dig minimalistic interfaces, and thus the current blue-white I'm using suits me perfectly.

The designs are one-column designs, and slims down the page significantly.

The Front Page


You might also have noted that the front page is a bit different. We are now displaying blog posts which we think are cool there, along with news and happenings from the Community Blog.

Hopefully this will make for a more dynamic and alive front page.

Bug Fixes


I have finally taken it upon myself to fix the [code] tag, which has been broken for at least half a year. The code tag should now do what is expected: reproduce the tag content verbatim.

For too long, it hasn't, so I am expecting that a lot of workarounds people have spent time on figuring out will break---something I am truly sorry for. However it needed fixing.

As a part of a drive to make the Opera Community become more stable and enjoyable to use, we have behind the scenes totally rewamped our file upload systems. These include the photo album image uploads, file uploads, and skin/widget uploads. We have replaced a proprietary library with a widely-used standard library, making for more robust uploads. Hopefully this will relieve some of the issues people have had with image uploads, although I know it is not a silver bullet.

In the not too distant future we expect to have image uploads running on a dedicated box, where people can upload large ZIPs into an insertion queue. This way we should solve quite a lot of our current problems, and make the photo album service much more robust, efficient and user friendly.

In the coming weeks we will be working on optimising and stabilising our current hardware and software architectures, hoping to give you folks a better user experience around here.

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The New Opera Community Forums -- The Definitive Guide

Sunday, 13. November 2005, 17:04:31

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Introduction

While we are proud of our new forum software, we do understand that it can be relatively difficult to understand. We know that some of this is attributed to features hidden or not properly explained in the user interface. We are working to resolve this, however Opera Software is an extremely busy place to work in at the moment, and I hope you can understand that bugfixing My Opera sometimes have lower priority than other mountains of work. However, please do continue making suggestions and bug reports in the feedback forum!

I will in this blog post try to explain how some of the new forum features work (or are supposed to work :wink: ).

Group Forums

Introducing Groups

As you most probably have already noticed, the new Community has a group feature. Groups are small sub-communities anyone can establish. Each group has its own blog, photo album, links page, etc, however perhaps most importantly; each group can have its own forums with unlimited subforums. Needless to say, we hope that some of these will thrive and become large communities in their own right, and we certainly encourage groups and discussions not directly related to the Opera browser.

Now, within each group's forums, there is a special forum submenu, just below the group's regular menu. It contains some functionality which applies to the group's forum. The menu contains entries like "My Settings", "My Subscriptions", "Unread Posts", etc. All of these, except "My Settings" which are community-global forum settings, are specific for the current group's forum. Also the group's search engine is specific for that group's forum.

Each group's moderator can control whether the group's forums are members-only, or an all-access area.

To be able to easier recognise that you are in fact visiting a group, the design and menus change from those of the main community site. To go from a group back to the main community, click the link which says "Opera Community" usually located at the very top of the page.

The Special /community/ Forums

The forums which deal with Opera as a company and its products and services, are located on the main community site, not in a group. This forum also has a forum submenu and search engine which is similar to the equivalent functions within groups. However, that is not all there is to it.

The main community's forums will also include all groups which you are a member of. By default, this means The Lounge. In other words, when you list the unread posts in the main community forums, it will list unread posts in the main Opera-related forums along with unread posts from the Lounge forums.

So if you are particularly interested in or participated active in a group's discussions, make sure you are a member of the group, and it will aggregate into the main community forums. Or you can access the forums specifically via it's group.

Conversely, if you are tired of having off-topic chatter pollute the Opera-related forums, simply cancel your membership in the Lounge via the "My Groups" section of the user preferences.

To sum up, there are two ways to access a group's forum if you are a member: either via the main community forums, or via the group itself.

Special Searches

Below are descriptions of some of the special searches (with exception of "Unread Posts" which is specially crafted) hotlinked to on the forum submenu.

Unread Posts

The "Unread Posts" is in many ways equal to our old forum software's "new posts". It lists topics having posts which you haven't yet read, ordered by the time of the topics' last post. Use this to track new content in the forums.

Today's Posts

"Today's Posts" is similar to "Unread Posts", however will show a list of topics which has had one or several new posts within the last 24 hours.

Unanswered Posts

"Unanswered Posts" shows topics with no replies. It is our hope that this will help prevent good questions or people in need of help from getting lost in the shuffle of a busy forum.

My Active Topics

"My Active Topics" is inspired by the "Active threads" feature in Opera's News and Mail reader. It will list topics in which you have posted within the last week. Use this to track whether or not discussions you have partaken or are partaking in have gotten new answers (the envelope icon will be yellow in the case of new content).

Tracking of Read Topics

The forum software uses an exact method for tracking which posts you have read or not. It is accurate down to a topic page level. I.e., if you open a topic page, it is assumed that you have read all the posts on that page.

This way, you can trust that when the envelope in topic listings are yellow, clicking it will take you exactly to the first unread post in the topic.

Friends

To encourage use of the community's friend functionality, we have tried to include useful friend features into the forums. Currently, topics a friend has posted in appear in forum listing with a green indicator icon. Particular forum posts a friend has posted are also displayed with a green background, so that you can easily scroll through the topic to find a friend's posts.

Additionally, the main community forum front page lists four recent posts by your friends.

To add someone as your friend, go to the user's about-page and click the link to add her or him to your friends list.

Subscriptions

Our forum software support topic subscriptions, that is, a notification when someone adds a post to a topic. However, do note that email notification are not enabled by default. This is because subscriptions are easily tracked via the "My Subscriptions" link in the forum submenu. Within "My Subscriptions" you can easily enable email notification by clicking the button towards the bottom of the page.

One detail which may be a bit confusing about the topic subscriptions, is that it uses a differnet read/unread system than detailed above. I.e., if you click "Mark all as read", topics you haven't specifically read are still marked as unread in the "My Subscriptions" screen.

Also note that even though there may be several unread posts in a topic, you will only get an email notification for the first of them. Subsequent posts will not trigger a notification, unless you have read the post which triggered the first notification. If you are uncertain, all topics with a yellow envelope icon in the "My Subscriptions" listing, is still unread and you will not get further email notifications before having read the topic.

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