World: r3wp

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...

<sigh> got one while trying to post a message about drop outs... 
irony if there is any in altme.

kee dropping out today ... and lost my 3rd message.

even lost the "p" in the above message

seems better than 2 hours ago... it was dropping about every minute.

So, is this a network issue to rebol.net?

I am pretty sure it is.

we've all been feeling it the last few days.

I notice FaceBook is really bad too, but not other sites................hmmmm...

one of BCE's MAIN DNS went down today for almost 30 minutes...

actually all ip stuff went down. :-(

bell (BCE) is one of the two major web providers in quebec.

Reichart, can you confirm that nothing is screwed up on the machine 
running this world, or its internet access... it is seriously breaking 
up.


earlier, I had a drop every 30 seconds, I tried to post a message 
7 times...  graham and I had to chat elsewhere cause it was getting 
just to insane.

Just took me three AltME restarts to post a private message to Reichart. 

That "Internet Busy" text string deserves some extra remuneration 
for all the hours it is working.

I lost a message also.

Maybe someone could contact Carl and ask him to restart worlds? IIRC 
it helped in the past ...

I am guessing the altme server is near a critical memory limit.

or has a flaky web connection

or someone is attacking it?

I wonder if AltME is able to detect some brute force actions.

I have been looking at my WireShark output during one of the recent 
AltME problems. What seems to happen is that the server stops responding 
to the client keep alive requests (sent evey 5 seconds normaly), 
but the IP address keeps responding to my pings with almost no dropped 
packets or increase in latency.

After a while the client stops sending keep alives & the view changes 
away from the "chat" view.

Changing back to the chat view causes the client to create a new 
TCP connection (local port number changes) & exchange some ?authentication? 
data & some larger blocks of data too. After that the server stops 
responding to the keep alives again & the process repeats.

Oldes - btw - I got some reply from Carl. He said that it is not 
problem to post related sources to the area of interest we want to 
fix. It might mean he is not willing to release all altme source 
code. But I think it might be a good start. So if we e.g. want to 
fix the URL parse bug, I think we can manage it?

Good result, Petr.

Can we manage it?  Well, partially, it'll depend on how well written 
the code is:-)

If we can manage it, we may get a shot at some other fixes too. So 
let's at least try

the post dropping is the # 1 bug in Atlme.  lets just prevent it 
from flushing the text area before it receives the post, and at least 
we won't be frustrated.


the clearing of the view when a connection is dropped is also EXTREMELY 
annoying... you have to click back on the group, and it clears te 
"unread" bg color and resets the scrollbar.   these can be changed 
without any real coding change required... its just preventing a 
few things in the gui/network event handling.  maybe we could just 
the bg of the Network status to RED, that accomplishes the same goal, 
but doesn't turn us into enraged altme users.