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Old 02-14-2016, 12:30 PM   #21
feldon34
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Join Date: Dec 2000

Location: Rock Hill, SC
Posts: 10,937
Originally posted by Jeremy:
To Feldon34:

I don't mean my post to turn into a debate, but according to figures shown on this forum, it boasts "Registered Members: 3,971" and now "Browsing Forum: 49." However, you say only 19 members of those are active members. Who's correct, you or the figures displayed?  
Number of unique users who have posted since January 2016: 19
Number of unique users who have posted since January 2015: 65

I setup this forum on December 12, 2000. That's over 15 years ago. Yes, there have been a lot of registered users since that time. It was a very active forum in the early days. However after 15 years, interest in any product or topic will eventually fade.
Originally posted by Jeremy:
Also, from what you say, does it mean that out of all the sales at SereneScreen, money is not allotted to maintain a forum to serve as support for the SereneScreen Aquarium community? That I find extremely odd. Regarding Prolific, by what is shown on the SereneScreen website, Prolific is part of SereneScreen, Is it not?  
I started this forum within 2 months of the Aquarium being released. At first, the Aquarium was independently published by Jim Sachs off his own website. Then it went to a publisher and that's when it blew up. It went to retail sales in stores and sold by the wagon load. Now it's pretty much back to how it was at the beginning-- one guy.

SereneScreen is Jim's baby. Prolific are a software development company that Jim partnered with and allowed them to sell his products as well as use the Aquarium screen saver tech to expand into other products like the Goldfish Aquarium, FlagPride, etc.
Originally posted by Jeremy:
I sent a question to the SereneScreen website over a month ago specifically about this problem but I didn't even get a response.  
Prolific had been handling the tech support, paying a support person out of the money made from the Aquarium. I'm not sure what the current status is on this. I even did support for a few months but when I tried to push them to modernize things, they couldn't be arsed to give me an hour with one of their programmers to setup an environment so I could start coding the new support site. I gave up and so it's still an unnecessarily annoying process to lookup each customer, compare notes, and send support e-mails. My process would have reduced the average support issue resolution from 15 minutes to 90 seconds. Oh well.
Originally posted by Jeremy:
As for the search words, I agree with you, "10" is too short a word to search for, but I did search for "windows" and "zoom," and those words displayed so many results where "windows" and "zoom" were not even mentioned. It should have displayed results only where those words do appear. I'm not sure, but maybe the search engine can be additionally configured to display more accurate results?  
This forum is set to use the SQL FULLTEXT engine for searching which I agree is inaccurate for common words. I made this decision years and years ago as a performance savings over the built-in search which is more accurate but slower, because at the time I had a slow server with not a lot of RAM. Now that we're on a fast server (which I pay for every month out-of-pocket), it should be possible to switch to the more accurate search.

I have initiated the migration to Built-in Search. It will take about 30 minutes for the process to complete...
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