ALTME is buggy

Discussion in 'Rebol' started by YueM, Jan 17, 2010.

  1. YueM

    YueM New Member

    Graham, I am replying here , (cannot post this in altme. it's too buggy) , can you do me a favour and post it in the altme group because i cannot reply to Henrik.

    I can see other people's messages, but I cannot post mine, can only post 1 out of 10 or 20 tries, sometimes not at all

    there is a counter on the top left corner that keeps going that keeps increasing

    from 1 going up

    at the same time there is also a message that goes through "internet busy" ,

    and when the counter gets to 82 it says not connected, reconnecting (1), sessions sync , users update , chat cheyenne etc...
    settings ,resync, on-line etc...


    I think there is a problem with the design, is it trying to refresh all users and
    groups? why does it have to do that? if I am in "i'm new" group only, this
    is the only group it should refresh that should be only a few kb of text coming down to
    me


    I think it's killing itself by trying to refresh every group and user. It's obviously an
    overkill.


    I can also say while it is saying internet busy, I did test my browser and
    try to surf google, my browser works.
    so is the alme tranferring gigs of information ? or is the server it's connecting
    to very slow?

    How can it be telling me the internet is busy when I can surf with google or yahoo. ( although I must point out I am not surfing and using ALTME at the same time, to ensure nothing else is affecting altme.)
  2. Graham

    Graham Developer Staff Member

    Altme is trying to download all the messages there are since this world was first created .. so many 1000s of messages. I guess it has no time left to allow you to post.

    I suggest you leaving it connected for a few hours to see if it can fully sync up.
  3. henrikmk

    henrikmk New Member

    AltME is similar to persistent IRC, which means it will download N number of messages from every group. N can be set in the preferences (standard is 100), but try to stay under 200 or it will take forever to finish. Increasing the number will allow you to search more messages. The REBOL3 AltME world has over a quarter million messages from the past 5 years, so just let it finish, before doing anything. It can take maybe 10 minutes to complete.

    When it's done loading, you can start posting. When posting, it can take a few seconds for a message to show up, so just let it do its work. AltME can choke if the network is interrupted, and then it will show "Internet Busy...". If it does this for longer than about a minute, you can try to reconnect to the world by clicking the world name in the upper left corner.

    Some things to remember:

    - Sometimes it will disconnect while you are posting a message, and then you will lose the message. This is a design flaw which we hope will be corrected soon.
    - If it disconnects, the chat screen jumps to the front page, which is annoying, but we also hope this will soon be corrected.
    - The AltME server has been moved because we had some network congestion problems on the old server, which was also overloaded. This is not AltME's fault, but we hope it won't occur again.
    - No, you can't mark all groups as read. You have to click them one at a time to get rid of the red color.
    - Posting URLs in messages will sometimes make the format of the display of that message look bad. Post URLs on separate lines.

    AltME is extremely valuable to the REBOL community and (at least until the aforementioned network congestion problems started and now hopefully have disappeared) also very stable and quick to work with. We hope you'll come back.
  4. YueM

    YueM New Member

    thanks Graham for posting my problem to the altme "i'm new group"

    thanks Graham and Henrik for your replies,

    actually I had set my altme to download only 10 messages. It didn't make any difference.

    Guess I won't be able to use it, unless they change ALTME to stop downloading all groups and all users' messages.

    I think what they should do is allow the user to control it i.e to download only those groups the user wants and how many messages the user wants in that group.

    In my case, I would have selected only "i'm new" group and only 10 last messages. I ' m using altme more for posting questions.

    anyway unfortunately for me I won't be able to participate in the altme forums.

    thanks again for your help.
  5. Graham

    Graham Developer Staff Member

    I think the message number is for display .. it won't stop it downloading all messages.
  6. henrikmk

    henrikmk New Member

    When I check my REBOL3 chat file directory, I see there are about 53 MB chat data files. So, there is a lot for AltME to download. I've never heard of anyone having continuous problems with AltME, even with the latest people added just a few days ago, so again, I think you should just start it and leave it running for some time in the background.
  7. Sunanda

    Sunanda New Member

    My understanding is that number is the number of messages per group you see displayed when using AltME. It will have no effect on the number downloaded, and/or problems with the download.

    If the download is complete, you should see 200 or more *.set files in the worlds/rebol3/chat folder. (I see 230, and they total 34meg....Yours will vary depending on private groups membership).

    If you see something significantly different, and the numbers do not change over time, then I'd guess something horrible has gone wrong with the initial download/resync; and it has got stuck. And, if you have the patience, I'd suggest you try again:
    • exit AltME
    • delete the worlds/rebol3/ folder
    • restart AltME
    • log on to the REBOL3 world
    • keep fingers crossed!

    Good luck!
  8. Sunanda

    Sunanda New Member

    Version 1.2.19 of AltME 018-jan-2010) says it fixes the lost message problem:
    http://www.altme.com/new.html

    YueM -- you sound the ideal person to test that claim!
  9. YueM

    YueM New Member

    new version 1.2.21 still same problem.


    hI sunanda ,

    I tried the new version.
    now what happens is when I press ctrl S, the message just sits there in my edit field, the field turns grey, but it still doesn't get posted to the "i'm new group". which is still my problem, that I cannot post things to the group. because it's still busy downloading things to my machine. I don't want it to download things to my machine that I don't need.
  10. Graham

    Graham Developer Staff Member

    What version of windows? What is your internet connection speed? Have you tried just leaving Altme connected for an hour or so to download all the messages?
  11. YueM

    YueM New Member

    raham, henrik, sunanda, thanks for your replies.

    I did check mine folder there are about 245 *.set files, size about 1.97mb
    so there is a long way before it gets to your 34 - 50 MB. I still don't understand why they force people to store 34-50 mb of data on their pc. I'm not interested in reading all 34 -50 mb of messages.


    I have some concerns with ALTME's approach,

    1) suppose I am in a corporate
    world where I have 2000 users (this is a very very small number), and
    you have to store 50 mb on each user's machine, that means
    you will need 100 gigs of the same repeating data all over your IT
    infrastructure
    is that a good idea ? that's not an efficient use of storage.
    that's not environmentally friendly as well.

    by analogy it's like a financial database on every user's machine instead
    of having of a master/enterprise database where all the financial
    information is stored. if you really want to prevent outage, you can
    have one or two fail over databases in conjunction with
    a disaster recovery external site. that should cover you 99.99999% of
    the times.

    even in a peer to peer system, you choose only the files you want to
    download
    you don't download everything that's available in the whole peer to peer
    network infrastructure.


    2) a lot of people are not interested in keeping chat messages on their
    pc (me included). I don't see the need for that. It's the chat server
    which should store all the messages. I view 99% of the
    times. only 1% of the times , I will post. and maybe I'm only
    interested in 1% of all the messages on altme.

    I should be able to determine what I want to download, i.e what group and how many messages I want to download.

    see I never have any problem posting to this forum.
  12. YueM

    YueM New Member



    I use xp normally, my connection is slow as stated earlier , 57.6 kbs dial up modem. No I didn't try leaving altme connected to download. I will forego altme.
  13. Graham

    Graham Developer Staff Member

    Yes, when you put it like that it does seem unreasonable, but of course no one is forcing you .. it's all by choice.

    A lot of us prefer to have messages downloaded for offline use, and having them on the server only means that the traffic must increase a lot.

    Web forums offer an alternative way to communicate, and that's why this forum exists.
  14. Brock

    Brock New Member

    Yeum,
    I would think that AltMe with the persistant messages would be ideal for you with your slow connection. Remember, AltME does not need you to be connected at all to review old messages, search, etc. The unfortunate thing is that regardless how many messages you want to view, AltME retrieves all messages in the world. The limit is just to control your memory usage when you open the app.

    Consider other use cases. Say you are a busy sales rep and on the road most of the time. Not having a network connection, or needing one, gives AltME a distinct advantage.

    Now I agree, that in this day with internet connectivity available almost everywhere and hand-held devices that can take advantage of that, makes the above unnecessary.

    All this to say. It's a different tool than what you really are looking for. People either love it or hate it. Unfortunately for those who are interested in Rebol and don't like AltME, there isn't as much information out there since the majority of it is AltME. Thankfully you can see some of the recent public groups from the following link http://www.rebol.net/altweb/rebol3/

    It really is a great tool once you've used it a while. The real-time conversations with the persistant archive is really nice. You get responses to problems almost as soon as you post in many cases.
  15. Brock

    Brock New Member

    Seems http://www.rebol.net/altweb/rebol3/ is not getting refreshes at the moment. Likely due to the moving of the server recently.

    The worst thing about AltME to me is not being able to access it from work. Can someone post a message on AltME or R3chat letting those that can do something about this, know.

    Thanks.
  16. Graham

    Graham Developer Staff Member

  17. henrikmk

    henrikmk New Member

    And on the other hand, making a single AltME post requires probably less than 1/100th the bandwidth of posting to a forum like this one. I know, because I tried it a couple of days ago while my connection was maxed out: Took about 2 minutes to submit post #6 to this thread, because it has to load the HTML code, etc., while it took 5 seconds to post on AltME. :)

    The download process is a one time event and when it's done, I keep local backups, so I don't have to download all messages again. I keep it running 24/7 in the background and it has less downtime than any other messaging clients that I use (IRC, Jabber, AIM, and ICQ), of course depending on network stability. It's not different from downloading a list of newsgroups.

    The design of AltME is intentional for allowing offline use. For REBOL users there is a ton of valuable information, discussions and source code available from the past 5 years of discussions and you can search all of it.

    If you have a corporate network of 2000 users, they probably won't all be connecting simultaneously to the large REBOL3 world, but an empty world and when adding new users to a large world, it's not likely, you'll be adding 2000 users at once. Besides, the server component can be used on your own server, if you want to use it in the enterprise.

    Another advantage is that you can keep it on a USB stick or drive. AltME doesn't require installation, but can be run from its current location.

    That said, I've discussed with Carl adding a bulk download feature. It would probably run faster, but probably not allow you to do anything until download is completed. But it would then be clearer what's going on.
  18. Graham

    Graham Developer Staff Member

    I doubt 2000 users could connect to a single Altme server .... you would max out the number of possible tcp/ip connections that Rebol can handle.
  19. Graham

    Graham Developer Staff Member

    It has been calculated by someone else that using a 56k modem, and under ideal conditions, it will take you 3-4 hours to download all of the Rebol3 world.

    Which is a bit tough ...

    I wonder if someone can bundle up the public sets for download from rebol.org ...
  20. YueM

    YueM New Member

    Thanks to you all for all your replies and advice for help.

    Yes I get your point about viewing off line. It's a fair point abouit the users wanting to view off line rather than on line. I am not trying to have my feature at the expense of the feature that you need. Maybe we can have both feature coexisting to atttract more people to use it.
    Giving people the possibiltity to "download everything" and also the option to d"ownload what someone needs" or to "view everything on line". I don't think this is hard to implement, it's just providing a check box next to each group, and options to "select all" or "deselect all" or to "select specific group" that the user needs (e.g see yahoo mail where you have these options), and also use the setup parameter to determine how many messages to download.

    One more thing , that it is also good to keep in mind, is that today, only a small fraction of internet users throughout the whole world have access to broadband or high speed connection. Even in developed countries, the majority of people are still using dial up. Yeah, this will change in the future as high speed becomes the norm, but unthi this happens , are we not locking out potential users of Rebol ? It's one more tool in the arsenal of tools that should be used to attract more users not to shut them out. this is what the other languages are doing, they all have web forums, which unless someone proves me wrong is the most accessible today.

    one of the problem that I see today, with all the craze about RIA, is that people forget about the fact that the majority of people are still using slow connection, and it doesn't help them at all then how sexy their page or site is if people just don't visit their sites because it is too slow to display or load.

    I know it's a huge obstacle to progress by not being able to access altme where the majority of the discussions happen.

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