Topic: Small improvement regarding activity / "Show others your online status" (Read 997 times)

Time flies 
IIRC it was around that time that I started working on it, though the dark theme CSS was probably the only piece of work made public.

That one's cool too, works like this could serve as a good starting point!

Do you mean about this work?

Dark theme for Bitcointalk(CSS only). It's ten years ago.

0x256 user has that one custom your bitcointalk header and profile page [css only]

I might be a bit late to the party but congrats and thanks for the patch!

IMO it would be best to start a thread about this. Many years ago I started working on something similar.
I think replacing the images with CSS is a good start!

A very good update I must say, now, users of the forum just got their ability to complete online privacy bumped up, and kudos to powerglove for his tremendous efforts and contributions to making sure the forum is enhanced, updated and upgraded to keep it; not just running smoothly, but also to ensure satisfaction of users at all times.

This is a long awaited update, even though I believe that many of us previously did not use the "show others your online status" alot, and also, not very many of us were aware of that flaw, but I am happy that it's all fixed now, and users can now come online without others knowing if they are online or not.

I recently came across a thread that also detailed the same forum activity update efficiently with a image for proof.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/--5500584

                                                                         

It probably will not be tens of thousands of bitcoins, but PowerGlove is already receiving payment for the work he does, which for a long time he did for free/fun:

- Jay -

Riiiight? I'm sure if that were to be the rewarding system here, other developers will be falling over themselves to come up with something new.

This is a nice feature and it shows the forum is taking privacy of it's users a notch higher. Good job, guys.

I think the SMF software bitcointalk is using has been customized with so many modules that implementing a new theme will loss a lot of features we have now. It will require collecting all the features, documenting and backup the codes of the features those were added then think about implementing a new theme. It's good to see many are trying their best.

Nice to see the real anonymity coming to the forum gradually.  But the 74hours has elapsed and the person is still not active then the inscription should like "days back", "weeks back, "Months ago" and so on. It is a nice feature added to the forum because of it creation of anonymity of the user last activeness in the forum.

Another patch made by PowerGlove for the forum. When I see it myself after I visit the forum that there's a word on the profile that says "Recently" then I understand right away that it is a status for that we will see from anyone's forum profile that goes offline either by closing the browser or logging out from the forum. I have something to ask about how long does the status "Recently" will show until it changed to time?. Just asking about it due to curiousity and maybe someone else also want to know about it.

Either with help from us (Bitcointalk forum members by sharing our suggestions, pain points and opinions to you) or not is that I am sure that you can come up with something on your own and we'll surely share it with you if ever we have any suggestions or opinions.

I aslo dont get it why this maybe is useful , you can still look at the post history if an User is active or not.
I also agree that this makes it more difficult to find the bad boys for some cases if they know about that feature.
Its good that we see some improvements on the Forum and thanks to PowerGlove for that , but was that needed ?

Dear @theymos and @PowerGlove

What's your opinion about changing html/css tables with CSS Flexbox or Grid?
I am not a developer (but wanna become one), I created this demo when I was learning html/css and javascript.
Look at this: https://jaybates19.github.io/bitcointalk/

I rebuilt Bitcointalk's design with my own code. I used CSS gradients instead of images (that Bitcointalk uses right now). I used a combination of Flexbox and CSS grid (mostly flexbox) instead of very old-fashioned HTML tables. Added a small button and with the help of some js, I implemented Dark and Light mode toggler.

With small modifications, the design is faster, responsive and also with dark mode. Is it easy for you guys to make small changes to Bitcointalk's current design? I don't know how SMF templates are written, so I don't know how easy or hard it is to modify but I'm asking you if that's possible and not too hard or time-consuming for you.

Mission accomplished. Congratulation PowerGlove. I am looking forward to more improvement of the forum features.

Yep, I've thought about that problem on-and-off for a long time now: I think an API will emerge at some point; it makes sense from too many points of view for it not to.

Yep, session-expiry is on my list (it's actually something that I've touched very recently).

Here's one (I've waited a few hours before posting to trigger it again, but I'll only know if it was long enough when I click Post):
It's probably not a bug but a feature, but I've seen this far too many times. I often leave a tab open and come back to it hours later. Sometimes it takes me days, in that case I don't mind the error. A couple more hours would be appreciated.

#1, 2, 3, ... 99 on my pain list: have a basic API so that we don't need to scrape e.g. user profiles continuously all the time and instead could just pull recent changes... would be easier on the site, on scrapers, and wouldn't break any time the UI changes. Obviously authenticated and throttled and whatnot.

Ah, jeez. I knew I shouldn't have taken the money...



(In all seriousness, I'm always interested in hearing people's suggestions and learning about pain points that I haven't experienced myself. So if you or anyone else have ideas about what things should be on my list, there's no harm in letting me know, either by PM or by starting/bumping a Meta topic. I've found that tackling things in priority-order isn't really an efficient way for me to work, so I appreciate having a mixture of tasks that I can put my shoulder to semi-randomly.)

With or without that information, I don't know much more about you. Certainly not more than what you have already said about yourself in some earlier discussions. (You as an example) Or maybe I'm missing something.
It would make more sense for privacy to have the option to hide the username.

Privacy in general.

It is. But so is anything else related to privacy.

Can someone explain why it is exactly useful to hide your "last time online" status?
This only makes the argument easier for those who are hiding from someone, so now they can, without the possibility of verification, claim that they did not see something because they were offline. Great for scammers.

No bozo, I'm referring to the million dollars in bitcoin (at a few hundred dollars each) that Theymos spent on four people, at the rate of $100,000 USD a month.   Liars should have a good memory. 

Congratulations! That's well-deserved.

Does that mean I no longer have to feel guilty (Lol. As if I didn't ) if I suggest more things that need patching?

If the parsed value is "(Recently)" you can handle it in some custom way.

Or if the parsed value is not in the expected datatype, you can handle the problem in a particular way. You can do the same for any other input received from any third party.


If you are referring to the bitcoin theymos received years ago, the USD value of that bitcoin was only a few hundred dollars, probably well below the FMV of the time necessary to run the forum plus the operating costs. He happened to keep that money in bitcoin and see massive capital gains.

Anyone else, yourself included could have just as easily bought a few hundred dollars worth of bitcoin at the time, and would have seen similar gains if you held on for all these years.

They will have been active between the last time you looked at the profile and the current time. Unless you are constantly refreshing their profile, you won't have an exact time.

Also, if profiles are refreshed too frequently, or if what you are describing is being used to pinpoint the date/time of last activity too frequently, the last active date can be cached, so it will only ever update every x amount of time.

Good for you!

Congrats! You deserve it. Some serious brainpower on display in your patches and the forum is lucky to have you here. Kudos to you good ser.

I think I managed to unbreak it.


LOL I thought the same thing. Too much work though. I do check for last post and last sent merit to update the last active date, which is what anyone could see anyway with a few extra clicks.

It is clear now, and you deserve to be paid for all the technical efforts you are putting in to keep this forum up to date.

The developments are very important as they keep the forum current with the new features in global forums and provide someone who is willing to help out and always brings suggestions and good ideas just for the benefit of this forum.
Well-done PowerGlove.

Super job yet again PowerGlove and it's great you're getting paid for your efforts now.

Go to Account Related Settings. Toggle off Show others your online status, enter your password and click on change profile. There are no rank restrictions to limiting who can know when you are online.

Nice update from PowerGlove yet again.
It would be interesting to have full privacy option of showing Unkown Last Activity, is someone choose to select that for some reason.

I suspected this could happen as soon as I read the introduction post.
Similar thing happened with recent patch that broke BPIP extension quote function in closed topics.

It's well deserved after fixing bugs and constantly improving forum software.
I feel much more optimistic about bitcointalk future now.

I'd like to correct a misconception that I keep bumping into before it becomes too widespread:

While most of the patches I've posted to date were done on a free-time/voluntary basis, theymos and I did recently come to an arrangement, and I am now paid for the work I do on Bitcointalk.

Oh, too bad! Enhhh, but you just don't wanna make everyone needy of learning a programming language and basic coding skills - flooding meta with every form of patches you'd ever think of - should it ever be incentived.
Maybe we could try to make a separate topic about it? "If everyone speaks in one language", Theymos may listen.
Edit:
okk.... I have a problem with the "long long time" thing.  It looks too clumsy and may most probably not contain a single line of word on our profile.

All good man, no apology necessary!   Should be an easy workaround (once I get my development machine in order), although with potentially ~3 days of inaccuracy. I'm not sure what you would consider a more robust way to process that field but we basically have specific conditions to deal with Never & Today, to convert them to datetime.. just not (Recently), yet..  



Well, you know it's become active at some point between that moment, and the last time you scraped the profile.

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I never took the "show online status" as being directly related to the last active date, so 72 hours feels extreme when the default session time is 1 hour for a logged in "online" user. Maybe 8-12 hours for (Recently)?  
I feel like 'Last Active' should at least be accurate to the day they were last active to prevent someone disappearing for 3 days while victims think they are active.

And then what is displayed after 3 days of inactivity?.. the day/time they were actually last active, or 72 hours after the actual last active point?

This patch is also restricted to what ranks?? Because I can't  find it  in my forum preferences while checking...I guess this is also related to the small green button

[off]
Saw a current theme preference with a change  link , is the forum also planning on doing that or it's available and still restricted  ??

This is nice to see and thanks to Powerglove for coming up with such idea, also to the admin for a very effective implementation on this, we now see more reason on why privacy in very more needed even on the way we appear on the forum, its not always ideal to have people predict the active time we are on the forum precisely, but being shown as recently could mean now, few hours ago or even some days after, you cannot be well predicted on your last active time now, its such a good and new development.

I have checked this new feature and it's working properly. I believe it's a quite good patch and we all should be thankful to PowerGlove for devoting his precious time to make such useful patches for the forum.

He's truly a pro developer and someone who's very respected member of this forum. I hope we'll continue to see such great patches from PowerGlove and I'm also thankful to Theymos for implementing this useful feature regarding activity on this forum.

I'd say it should only show the date, not the time. Or even just the month.
Or just stay active, don't abandon Bitcointalk for more than 72 hours

Tagged: maybe.
Banned: no way. Just like users aren't banned based on similar IP addresses, the won't be banned based on their login time.

This patch will resolve the issue for someone blaming inconsistency or simalaties of login time. I do feel a lot of genuine users got banned cause accidentally they got logged in the same time.

I do understand this patch is meant for giving everyone active here the privacy of activities. If anyone here use this patch that means they are using for their own benifits. As BTT allows alt accounts some of the legends will use it to their benefits that will be evident when it doesn't show their accounts active

It is clear now that with this patch anyone can now use it for their own betterment. I personally don't think it will be good if anyone in the legend rank use it.

For a moderator role, you don't need to be a programmer but for a global moderator or admin role, you will need to be a technical programmer, that's what I meant.

I knew of forum's security bug bounty but I can't not recall PowerGlove won any award from it, not sure, and I don't think it's his motive.  

I agree that if he does it for happiness and it can stop anytime. People have their own lives beyond this forum and it's unrealistic to request them to stay here forever.

Ok
Question: What do you do in your free time?
PowerGlove: I write patches for bitcointalk.


Thank you, PowerGlove. However, this makes me think if I have disabled the "Show others your online status?" option, why does it still display the exact date and time of my last activity after 72 hours?

If for periods <72 hours, it's showing Recently.

Then periods >72 hours, it should display something like Long time ago, and perhaps Long long time ago for periods exceeding certain time like a year or more.

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That's a great idea for the BPIP parser. If it can keep track of user activity somehow, we might find ourselves visiting BPIP more often!

I haven’t been here for a decade and so I wouldn’t know or I simply don’t care very much. After all, the forum haven’t been so buggy but, an improved version of what it is today wouldn’t be undesirable, whatever that is and I don’t think it’s another launch into space to take much time.

The feed our family reasons could be some of the reasons why we must appreciate PowerGlove for the efforts he puts in without been asked to or paid to do so. Simply acts based on interest and I don’t mind what personal interests he might have but, I see one that is geared towards forum improvement at the moment and should the user be given credits for his contributions some day, it would be one that was well earned.
The idea of a team isn’t a bad one neither is having this done voluntarily on the sidelines an issue too. The need for whistle blowing so many other programmers here could come up with ideas and scripts that could be a plus for the forum, is unnecessary.

There would always be such eventuality when one stops doing what his known to be doing voluntarily and a lot of reasons could amount to that. Possibly as you’ve stated and could as well be to reasons as been just unable, lost interest in the forum, chose to be focused on family, is ill and many others. Perhaps other persons with concerns could keep up the work and not make the users absence felt.

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Unlike the OP edition, this Recent edition doesn’t seem to be most vital to me!

+1
I was not talking about having a staff position. I was talking about to gain financial benefit of the time and talent invested. I could be wrong but right now it seems earning a good forum reputation but once it is achieved he will have no motivation to continue contribution. A hobby does not stay for long time but when a hobby turns into a profession then it become a career.

Yes but you see, now it requires more resources to monitor each user's activity status, since the web server is no longer giving handouts.

For example, if BPIP were to now scrape all ~4 million profiles and filter the ones with a (Recently) date, then it can only assume the login came from the last 72 hours, unless it has previously scraped an actual date which it can use as a reference point. The independently-calculated "last active" time becomes fuzzy as a result.


Being a good programmer doesn't make you a good moderator. Let's not get carried away here.

He has skills to do SMF patches and he seems to do it comfortably with his understandings on SMF forum software but I really can not go far to say his efforts for forum security and SMF patches to improve community experience is to gain rank, reputation and what's more like a moderator, global moderator position.

Staff position is possible but a global moderator position will need much time for PowerGlove to achieve. Being a technical member with good contribution for the forum is big advantage but theymos will need more time to actually trust PowerGlove and appoint global moderator position to the coder.

I hope the threads created and comments on posts do come up as just recently too else,

That would be one means to note how active someone has been or when last was this user online without stating the status in a more present time. I’ll be a guest!

The new forum software is in the line for a decade, we actually do not know how it's going, how much funds we are spending, what is the progress, will it even become a thing in the near future or it was just a failed project. We know nothing.

I do not think PowerGlove is the only one who is doing the Voluntary job [if it is], there are many with us who are able to form a team and give us a new software if they receive the honer, respect they deserve with the financial benefit to feed their family.

We do not know what interest PowerGlove has right now but most probably it's to gain a good forum rank, have a spot it DT and be a respectable member. Today or tomorrow he will achieve it and then he will have no motive to move further. It's the reality.

So if I monitor a profile that was last active more than 3 days ago, and it's status switches to "(Recently)", I know it became active right at that moment.

That is entirely different from what we had. Having your last time active "hidden" indefinitely is the exact opposite of having it displayed.

"(Recently)" obfuscates when you're online. "(Hidden)" obfuscates when you were active. Your own posts would only then betray that.

Voluntary contribution is very respectable, but it wouldn't hurt if theymos opened up that dusty cold storage for the most dedicated contributor. 

I like the update. Good work Theymos and PowerGlove.

Tens of thousands of bitcoins is a lot but we don't know what price we are paying. Obviously it looks like there are some selfless contribution so far from PowerGlove.

This could cause a drama about questioning specific user "has logged in this forum, but refused to answer" or "hasn't logged in this forum".

Usually when there's a problem about specific user, people would like to wait till the user logged in and let him to defend himself before tagging him. Now, if someone tagged the user when he didn't receive the reply for few days or weeks, people might disagree and say you're tagged too fast.

Using last active time metric to detect alt accounts is really pointless, no one gonna believe it.

Most people will ask "solid evidence" if you fail to bring that even though you're sure they're alts, people will say it's just your own assumption/suspect without any proof.

Too bad he only gets merits, and not tens of thousands of bitcoins.  :/

This is the first things i thought while reading the OP — the bots, surely it will be adjusted by you too.

I guess this is just when someone is just "online", last active will remain as is with datetime.

How about doing...
Last active: Hidden.
Hidden means it is not displayed at all, I don't know the purpose of recently. Are we trying to differentiate someone who is still coming online like BlackHatCoiner but don't want to display the last seen and someone who hasn't been active for like 355 days and above?

How about after 72 hours?
Does it get to display the exact time someone was last active, or it will still be like... Last active (a long time ago)?

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It will also be a little harder to detect those cheating Alt accounts using the "Last active time" metric if they decided not to show others their online status.

You see, i don't think the sole essence of the modification was to blur out the system entirely... I think it was more about blurring out the exact time a user is/has been online, thereby creating some level of pseudonymity - I may be wrong, but if it goes your own way, everyone knows you haven't been on - That doesn't really differ from what we had.

In this Case, Nobody knows precisely if you're online or not; The display word "recently" does a two-way job.. it could mean the user ain't active, it could mean they are...

I'm sorry about that. Profile parsing did cross my mind, but what made me feel okay about it was that I noticed in the SMF code that non-datetime text was already possible for that field before this patch (the text "Never" can be displayed there, too), so I guessed that you must already have made your parser(s) robust against non-datetimes.

This unfortunately broke BPIP's parsers, since (Recently) is not a valid datetime. We'll try to get it corrected as soon as possible.

I was even about to ask the same question, because it will really make more sense if someone can just turn off their activity status and leave it offline until you decide to remove it from their account.
 
Even if you just make a post, people can only see the last time you made it, but your last active hour and time won't be visible even while you are online. It's a very common feature that is being used on some of the social media sites where it's active to enhance members privacy a little bit.

This is nice one just as it's with telegram when you hide your visibility others will only be seeing recently seen even though you are online it's just same option as recently same way others would appear to you as well except you make yourself online then you can be able to see other people online.
Anyway this is cool option, thank you PowerGlove I know you much cares about privacy.

Nice! Just went invisible.

I may be asking for much, but wouldn't it be more appropriate if the user had the option to choose not to display any activity at all? For example, if you were inactive for 73 hours, display "(Not recently)" instead of "June 09, 2024, 08:40:33 PM". Or just "(Hidden)" regardless.

Someone might want to take a break without letting anyone know about it.

It seems when other members are probably going on with their life activities, PowerGlove is definitely busy making patches. Once again thank you PowerGlove for this addition.

I actually like the new feature it adds to more privacy’s feature of the forum, some can decide to be ghosting the forum without non staffs noticing.

PowerGlove sent me a nice patch for this which I just added:

Previously, if you didn't check the "Show others your online status" option, it would still be pretty obvious when you were online because your "Last Active" time would still constantly update to be ~now. This has now been changed so that if you were last active within the last 72 hours and you have the show-online option disabled, then the exact time will not be displayed, and it will instead just say "(Recently)".

If you would like people to be able to more exactly tell when you were online, then you can of course just enable the "show others your online status" option in your profile settings.