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[TishTash]

I see a big fat zero (well not that fat and big) just below my username. I tried to see if others who have it and I share anything in common, and it’s not much. What does it denote? Is it recent activity? (I haven’t been around for a while.) Or is it — gasp — a scarlet letter, a warning to shun?

 

[ajw22]

@Leebo why do some Members show 0 where others show Member?

 

[Leebo]

It indicates none of those…….but a bug in the software that’s kinda been patched. The software gives the forums the opportunity to allow users to set “custom profiles” if they wish, but TFP has this field disabled so almost nobody even knows of it. Unfortunately some time ago a glitch caused many of these fields to be filled in with a “0” which in software terms means “false,” which technically the field is because it’s blank.

If you see a user with the “0” I can edit it but long term I’d love to shut the site down for a few and run some things behind the scenes which will update all……but until I can justify an extended downtime I’ll continue to edit manually.

 

[TishTash]

I was really just curious and half-kidding. I definitely agree it’s hardly worth shutting things down unless a bunch of other, far more substantial things are being fixed.

On a related but separate note: Was anything able to be done about old links (from past iterations of the forums) leading to 404 errors? Given the age of most of these deadends, it’s hardly vital, and the easy workaround for the odd relevant one is to search the current forums with a pertinent keyword. I can easily see how the manpower involved simply wouldn’t justify it unless it were completely automatible.

 

[Leebo]

Redirects are a constant update so I’d have to ask about which set of broken links? Over the last 20 or so years that TFP a has been around we’ve used many different programs and server types which all require their own set of redirects. Almost anytime you preform a major update to either of these you run into a risk of breaking old redirects causing you to fix the errors.

 

[Texas Splash]

It bugs the heck put of me. Anytime I'm online and see a "0" below someone's username I edit it out.

 

[Newdude]

I know the struggle Tish. A rando update a while back gave me a maroon N for my avatar. (Can you imagine ) I had to search deeeeeep into the archives to find a post where i had a screenshot of my orange avatar so I could copy/past it back.

Something so silly was unnerving.