How to fix the missing user names in the archive
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7,psephomancy
Here's an example of the method of chasing from quotations that cite names.
First I went to the search and entered a regular expression so the URI of the search became https://www.votingtheory.org/archive/search?0=%22PCRE%22&pattern=%22%5C%5C%5Bquote%3D%5C%22%22&i=0&m=0&s=0 . If you navigate there, the search form will be filled in as I filled it in, but the search will not start until you press the "Go" button.
Then in the first post that comes up, I hit the Expand button, and I saw 36:29 by 43 on 2018-11-22T19:15:03.285Z in reply to 36:4
[quote="psephomancy, post:4, topic:36"]
and so on. So, according to this quotation, psephomancy is the author of 36:4, which is to say the fourth post in topic 36. If we middle-click on the link 36:4 where it appears right after "in reply to ", we get to the post being quoted and we can see that the author of it is 7, thereby we can relate the ID 7 to the name psephomancy.
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24,Ciaran
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@Jack-Waugh Yeah I tried using the quotes but found it was quicker and more reliable to use the CES forum for reference, since it is still there.
How hard would it be to put these usernames in the archive database and then show it in the archive? Is there a username to user id table? or at least a column in comment table for the username?
It would also be nice if you could show the timestamps in a bit more user friendly format. It shouldn't matter if they are just displayed in UTC as opposed to the time zone of the person viewing it. But this sort of thing hurts my brain: "2019-06-12T14:21:33.354Z"
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@rob Adding and using the number-to-name associations will be easy. I can also format the dates. Give an example of how that should look, to your taste.
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Another thing maybe worth changing is the font used for the comment bodies. The fixed-width font comes from Sara's homepage design, but I feel it's not that good to just use everywhere for lack of anything else in the palette (other than the cursive, which would be wholly unreadable). Should I use something more like one of the fonts that this forum uses?
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@Jack-Waugh I'm glad to see it is easy to do the numbers to names. I'd bet if you went ahead and did it for the 17 I collected as well as the two additional ones you found, that would make a huge difference in terms of usability of the archive.
My preferred format for dates is "Dec 28, 2020, 9:48am". However, the forum uses "28 Dec 2020, 09:48", which is ok too.
I don't have strong feeling about improving the font, but if you used the ones that are used on this forum that'd probably be best.
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@rob The archive is now showing author names in the cases where it knows them.
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@Jack-Waugh Nice! Huge improvement. It seems to put names on well over 90% of the posts.
Thanks....
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@rob I am now formatting the dates that are associated to the posts.
Topics used to show all the details, including creation date. I no longer show any details for them, just the title of the topic.
I believe there were no other contexts in which dates showed up, just those two.
Of course, post headers themselves show up in three contexts: posts for a topic, a single post, and search results.
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