World: r3wp

Carl wrote (jan-2005): <AltME is great for private messaging in small 
(<100) closed groups.>
http://www.rebol.com/article/0089.html

It could be well above the 50 limit. Maybe 100-200

actually, its easy to figure out if rebol really has a 50 connection 
limit, just open a listener port and call a one line connection rebol 
script more than 50 times.

I guess no one has ever got round to stressing it.

there's about 10 users logged in here at present .. and the lag time 
is significant

but could be just internet routing

I never saw more than 15 users online with IOS messenger

I've never traced user count to lag.

we've been two and it was 10 sec lag, and 15-20 and 1 sec lag.

inverse relationship?

lol

anyway, someone should do some testing to see what the limits are 
for concurrent viable connections for  a rebol based chat server

hum... wouldn't you, like, be the best person to do those tests  
 ;-)

Lots of people could do it.

Max ... you got disco'd !!!

we found the limit.

hahahaha

I actually pressed the close button by accident  ;-)

awwww....

but don't you actually have a chat server software against which 
you can implement a client-side test connection loop?  ;-D

Yes.

but it uses BEER so it might reach a BEER limitation

well if we can reach 100 connections to beer..  we definitely will 
have a party (or a brawl)  ;-)

well, the source is there .. just modify it to login automatically 
and start sending serial numbers to see if they are returned.

If I remember right, once I had around 250 or 127 connections at 
the same time. Don't remember the right number, just that I thought, 
that's the limit to one port number.

What happens if the limit is exceeded? Does the whole thing fail 
or does it just refuse the connection to the those beyond limit?

it melts your computer and spams alll the people in your contact 
list  ;-)

Some have asked questions in the past about the file size limit in 
AltMe. It appears to be 6 megs.

It's disappointingly small. I wonder if there is a technical reason.

I think it was more a practical reason so users of dial-up or slower 
connections weren't forced to sit through extremely long downloads. 
 I thought this limit was adjustable per AltME server, but I haven't 
been able to find a setting, so maybe I was wrong.

If that is the case then I wonder if there is also a limit to the 
number of files per world; otherwise, it was not a well thought out 
limitation because 100, 6-megs files is still a lot of waiting on 
slow connections.

A setting would have been nice -- like you said.

The nice thing is AltME asks you if you want to download large files 
or leave on the server, and highlights these icons with different 
coloured backgrounds.  so they are accessible and ready when you 
want them to be downloaded.

I've always thought a nice feature would be to set the 'start-date' 
from where you wanted to receive data from, so you could ease into 
retrieving either the entire world's contents, or simply start fresh 
with only the recent submissions.  However, your search capability 
would be limited as the search is performed locally on the data you 
have available.  Maybe the next AltME will have more features like 
this.

That's a similar feature as the newsgroup readers. Along those same 
lines, AltMe could just download the file list with comments instead 
of the files themselves.

It looks like the next Altme is tied to R3. I don't have a full view 
of Altme's roadmap which seems more like a poorly marked trail. I've 
tried to follow it somewhat using sources like this group, Carl's 
blog and most recently his slides from DevCon 2007. However, I'm 
not involved in R3, so I suspect I've missed some important sources.

The grand plan of R3 seems years away, though. Since Carl now controls 
 the AltMe source code, I wish he would pick a trusted person from 
the community  to keep the R2 AltMe moving forward. I will probably 
have to drop AltMe as a customer service tool because of issues like 
this 6 meg limit that shouldn't even be an issue.

It's definitely a technical limitation. There was a limited release 
of a version with a much bigger file size limit, but AFAIR, it was 
unstable and quickly retracted.

Probably just unable to accept the new connection.

Yup...

OK. Thanks for the update.

I'm a little worried about granting everyone group rights in the 
world I'm creating. It will be mostly NYC firefighters, many of which 
have little computer/internet/web experience and might delete groups 
accidently or maliciously as the are a group that is not always as 
well behaved as most reboler's. 


But at the same time I want them to be able to create private groups.


If a group is deleted how difficult is it to restore it...if possible...with 
previous messages.

I wouldn't grant this then.  Have a group for "new discussion topics", 
and your trusted admins can create them when available.

That's kind of what I thought I would do but the attraction of the 
ability to form private groups is too great not to take the initial 
risk. I can form new policies later if problems occur. 

I just want to be able to restore a group or groups in the event 
of...

Is there anyway to read the server files data outside of altme to 
monitor users that are active (online) in a world?

Look in the file "users.set". Last date field seems to be, when people 
was active.

Or maybe that's just last login or logout!?

I looked throught hte files but I could not see an indication of 
active users. Perhaps that is held in memory...

As far as i can tell, the files stored under the world name show 
only when a user joined and when they last posted.

Clearly, AltME is sending connection information -- we can all see 
that if we sort the Users list by Status. But is there an API to 
access that? There may be an answer available here :-)
http://www.altme.com/feedback.html

Lots of dropouts the last couple days...