I have a user that is busting my chops about site ratings. One particular site is getting rated far more than normal and the ratings seem to be very low. A few other site ratings look a little peculiar too. I had always assumed that the ratings were simply an average of all the scores given to a particular site. The scripts post the number of votes and the average score to the site's record. I have read in another thread that a user is unable to rate a site a second time within 6 hours unless he somehow changes his IP address. My questions are, is the ratings calculation more complicated than I thought and if so how are they calculated? Does anyone have any thoughts about what might be going on with my ratings. Is this simply a conspiracy against the one site that is more complicated than the Kennedy assassination?

Thanks to a tip from Eliot about running the top command with telnet, I was able to see what nph_build.cgi was doing to my server this morning. At the peak load it was using 97.4% of the cpu and 10.8% of memory. I have 2263 links and the database is about 3/4 MB. Build All takes about 2 1/2 minutes. Is this typical? If it is I can see why some hosting companies object to Links 2.

Thanks for your thoughts.

Will
Webmaster
FishHoo! Search Index for Fishermen
http://www.fishhoo.com/

Regarding ratings....

You could keep a "master" rate log that will record things like IP Address/Remote Host/Link/ID/Rating that you can use to create a @block_ips array and use codes similar to what Bmxer has written for blocking URLs in the following URL:

http://lookhard.hypermart.net/links-mods

to block those IP Addresses from rating sites...HOWEVER, keep in mind that dialup connections give out dynamic session-based IP Addresses to clients meaning that if you do block by IP, you might end up blocking a legitimate user who wants to rate sites. Not an easy solution to say the least.

Through the web browser, YES. If you use telnet (I know, I know...you do not have telnet access since you are on a NT server), your build time will take less than 60 seconds and you will only use around 30% of your CPU.

Eliot Lee

No I'm on Linux / Apache. Don't like NT at all.

Is there any downside to building with telnet? It seems I read where you said something like "If you build with telnet, you can no longer build with a browser." Did I remember this right and what's the story there? What's the reason?

Will
Webmaster
FishHoo! Search Index for Fishermen
http://www.fishhoo.com/

Ah..that's right...The auto execute script I linked for you in the Perl/CGI forum was written for Windows servers, which you felt you could NOT hack to work with Linux...although I still think you can!



You can build with both...BUT...and this is a BIG but, if you want to change the directory where you want to build your Links files and delete the older directories, you will NOT be able to do this via FTP due to permission problems...that is why I told the other Links user to check his directory and file permissions...because I know that they will be changed back to nobody when you build by the web browser, which causes problems with most Cron DAEMONS and also with deleting files!

Regards,


Eliot Lee

I have investigated this in some other forums and the concensus is that there has to be some outside influence to cause the script to execute another script. In other words, some one would have to take some action to cause the script to execute so that it could trigger another script to execute. Does anyone understand what I just said? Not me!

When I run into a situation where I cannot delete a file because it is owned by "nobody" I use Gossamer's Fileman to delete the file. It's never a problem. I guess if I had to delete a bunch of files, it could take a while.

Thanks for the tips. I'll try telnet next build.

Boy, the spell checker in this board spells worse than I do.

Will
Webmaster
FishHoo! Search Index for Fishermen
http://www.fishhoo.com/

Well that didn't work. With telnet I got "permission denied" on the home page but the browser worked fine.

This board doesn't seem to be sending mail tonight.

Will
Webmaster
FishHoo! Search Index for Fishermen
http://www.fishhoo.com/

That is the other problem...you have to delete all the links pages created by LINKS FIRST before building by telnet...currently the permissions of your files and directories are NOBODY...which WON'T work with telnet.

Delete all the files and directories created by Links, THEN re-build using telnet!



Regards,

Eliot Lee

That deserves .
Think I'll try that another day.

Will
Webmaster
FishHoo! Search Index for Fishermen
http://www.fishhoo.com/