Hi Werner: Our news feed on plplot.sf.net continues to have troubles.
The URL's of the individual news items have been bad for a long time which gives an immediate and obvious "black eye" for our project, and I was reminded of this again today when checking out the latest iteration of our website that is generated automatically as part of the release process. Here is the list of the bad URL's for the latest three news items: http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=0 http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=1004441 http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=960188 I assume that forum_id=0 result is from a database that has not been updated yet, but unfortunately the rest of the forum_id's have no relationship to the actual URL of the individual news items. It's a long story so I won't go into it, but I managed to figure out the actual URL's of our latest three news items which are https://sourceforge.net/news/?group_id=2915&id=287656 https://sourceforge.net/news/?group_id=2915&id=276054 https://sourceforge.net/news/?group_id=2915&id=270500 Unfortunately, the last two id numbers do not correspond to anything in the above corresponding bad URL's so we cannot use the bad URL's to predict the actual URL's. The source of this problem is a SF PHP script issue. Our PHP code simply refers to http://sourceforge.net/export/projnews.php?group_id=2915&limit=$newscount&flat=0&show_summaries=0, and if you check http://phpxref.com/xref/sourceforge/www/export/projnews.php.source.html for what I believe (although you can never be sure) is the source for the export/projnews.php script, it refers to the news_show_latest function which if you follow the links there you will discover constructs the (bad) URL out of database information. These are all late 1999 scripts which I doubt SourceForge are willing to change. I guess you could adapt them for our own use, but the problem is what sql query should you use to get the correct id number above for the good URL's? I have invested a number of hours today in tracking down all the above information, but I don't see any nice way out of the problem, and I am afraid if any of us attempts to take it further, it will become a serious time sink. Thus, I strongly favour removal of this lame information about individual news items from our site. After all, we still do have a link to https://sourceforge.net/news/?group_id=2915 on our website which still works to display the latest news with a further link to older news. Do you agree with this removal of the individual news items or do you have some other alternative to suggest to work around the problem? Alan __________________________ Alan W. Irwin Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca). Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net). __________________________ Linux-powered Science __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ThinkGeek and WIRED's GeekDad team up for the Ultimate GeekDad Father's Day Giveaway. ONE MASSIVE PRIZE to the lucky parental unit. See the prize list and enter to win: http://p.sf.net/sfu/thinkgeek-promo _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
