Perhaps I'm just missing it... But it'd be very convenient if the number of items in your InBox (especially) was displayed on my eQSL home page.

If I were doing the interface design, I'd probably put the number of entries in each of the folders (InBox, OutBox, Archive, RejectBox) as well as the change since last logged in. But, hey... Just the number of items in my InBox would certainly be handy.

P

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K1PGV Peter Viscarola

The reason you don't see this is not because we haven't thought of it. It's a pretty obvious thing to want to see when you first log in. The problem is that some of our members have hundreds of thousands of log entries in their In and Out boxes, and counting these ends up taking several minutes. eQSL.cc is an interesting attempt to mix two entirely different uses of databases, one transaction-oriented and one analytics-oriented. We're walking a tightrope between both of those, and trying to make some compromises that allow each usage to proceed at a reasonable speed.

The latest attempt we've made is to "blink" the InBox icon on the login page if you have new Inbox items since last login. For some of our users, just doing that little thing makes their login process take 5 minutes, and it is thus unacceptable.

But, we're not giving up, and I think we'll find a good way to display a kind of "scorecard" upon login one of these days.

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Of course, that's just my opinion... I could be wrong!

73,
Dave Morris, N5UP

Hmmmm... Well, sure... I didn't think you'd do "select count(*) as InboxEntries where..." on each login :-)

I can even see how determining whether you flash the inbox would take time -- if you're doing "select newQSOs where DATEDIFF(AddedDate, LastLoginDate)..." given that you still have to iterate over the data.

Perhaps you add a field to the user record that contains the current number of inbox items? As new QSOs are added to the inbox, you increment the count. Yes, I realize that maintaining the inbox (and keeping the count in sync with the actual contents) becomes more complex.

Sorry, it's the developer in me that wants to define the problem by the solution...

de Peter K1PGV

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K1PGV Peter Viscarola

Hi Peter,

I appreciate your thoughts.

In our system, the InBox is a weird thing. It doesn't really exist as a physical entity. If you go into My Profile and change your Expiration date, your InBox will shrink. That's because the InBox is actually generated on-the-fly at the time the query is run. This way you can be logged in, doing something, and when someone posts a new eQSL with your callsign and your date range, nothing else happens until you go to your InBox.

The query for that is pretty hairy, and when dealing with 80 million records, it can take a long time to generate a result set. We have tried different indexing schemes, and some that seemed very promising ended up costing even more time.

I don't maintain external flags and counters, because those things have a nasty habit of getting out of sync with the true contents of the database. But those may be required in order to add the kinds of features we're talking about, to display the numbers in the InBox, OutBox, Archive, etc.

The system has evolved over 7 years, and things I would have done today were not even thought of back then, so some of the mechanisms need to be revisited and maybe redesigned. With continued input and suggestions from our members, we'll eventually find all those little pesks and keep fine-tuning the system so it works well for everybody. Right now there are about 3 or 4 members with logs in the hundreds of thousands, who are beating me up because it takes them forever to log in. So I have some good motivation to get this stuff working more efficiently.

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Of course, that's just my opinion... I could be wrong!

73,
Dave Morris, N5UP