That's how the admin / moderator team seems to work very well, here on the Coffee Shop forum.

Graham does the (to me, scary) 'back of house' work on the servers and databases, and I do the rather easier 'front of house' work on splitting, moving and merging topics.

To reiterate: if anyone has an issue with posts I've moved or merged (they won't have been deleted!), please do contact me - details are all available in my profile here.

Chris from Nailsea. 

 

I confess to enjoying both the technical challenge of updating all of our pages as seamlessly as possible, and of explaining it.

Going quite well - here is a log of 25 seconds of requests for flow pages a couple of minutes ago


So that is - already 3 cached, 4 pages newly generated and when called up again will come from the cache, and 3 pages where the requester was a robot and it was asked to try again later.  There are no tic_busy lines which is what would be logged (and was sometimes in the first hour or two) if the worker could not cope. 

tic_cached will become a far higher proportion over coming hours and days as our receptionist says "someone asked me that earlier, and here is the answer"

 
That's exactly how I would have explained it. 

 

Ticket Flow data has become available and was uploaded overnight.  If you visit a URL such as https://www.passenger.chat/MKM.html you will see the comparison back to the year 2018/19 (the last full year before covid)  of the station, split down by destination.

Please bear in mind that this is significant new data and some 25,000 pages are being generated when first asked for from a database of just under 10 million individual flows, and when a particular result is first asked for there is a noticeable lag from the server.   The search engines are already indexing these amended pages and until our cache is substantively refreshed, the load on our pair of servers will be significant and you may see slow running - my guesstimate is that this will take a couple of days to fix itself.

 

Happy New Year, folks.    You will see even fewer changes than I may have hinted at and I'm really following up just to let you know I have not been idle.    The big talk is AI these day. 

As a provider of unique and excellent content, we have always been "targets" for search engine spiders.  Some of those we encourage but others just eat our bandwidth for no discernible gain - for example, love to be Google indexed but pointless being on Yandex results.   But search engines look like they have just been the starter to the AI indexer main course, where everyone and his uncle who want to be big in AI are collecting data with a fine tooth comb.    I have updated some of my own tools so that can more quickly identify new AI bots, and set myself up a couple of tools which give me ore options in rejecting/accepting/guiding/encouraging them.  Occasional bit hits on the server will still happen - we got 1500 requests in a minute at 5 p.m. yesterday - but identification, action if appropriate, and recovery is now easier for me - which will give me more time for other coding work.

As a user of AI - there are libraries available, and it could be that our searches could be improved. There is *some* intelligence in there already, but providing more might lead to issues of resources on our server, or us buying in to other resources and whilst I will keep listening and keep this under review, we don't yet - nor in the months coming - have a box into which you can type a public transport related question in English and expect a good Coffee Shop result. You will note I have not said "never"

 
My thoughts are ... that I'm very happy with the way things are continuing to evolve, here on the Coffee Shop forum.

Thank you, grahame.

 
The Coffee Shop forum will continue to operate throughout the Christmas and New Year period.  I'm having some thought a to tweaking / tuning / taking forward the Coffee Shop - which were shared with the moderator team a few days ago - to be undertaken during this quieter period.

Nothing to be done as mind-blowing as the changes last year, mind for which we had a brief daytime down time.  Littler things - but potentially a myriad of them.   Some of the items on my list

* Add in the 2024/25 station usage stats and prepare for the ticket flow data that I would expect to be avail mid-January

* See about loading more / all of the current NR timetables (but already done)

* Improve the phone interface read only pages and how they interface to the commenting / logged in pages of the Coffee Shop.  Remove the need for cookies to be approved every 24 hours, and I need to take some internal steps to stop acceptance tables running away.

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On something of a tangent, you may notice the number of views per topic is not increasing as much/quickly as it used to.   However, threads can now be read via the receptionist server and the numbers logged do not reflect that, as the receptionist has read-only access to the public post and thread databases and they are not counted.  I would not like to guess as to whether the net visits are more of less; I do know that our receptionist served 18,700 thread pages on Friday and 16,700 yesterday without reference to worker server. 

On Friday, some 336,000 requests were made to our receptionist, of which 136,000 were passed through to the worker and resulted in successful responses, with a further 36,000 being thinned out as being request by search engine which we don't want to be indexed.

Thoughts welcome.