Considering SE PHP 4 as the base for a large livecams site

    • Moderator
    • 6923 posts
    January 19, 2018 4:34 AM EST

    Yes our system is fully compatible with PHP 7. this site, our demo and my sites use PHP 7.

    • 75 posts
    January 19, 2018 5:30 AM EST

    Good to know.

    On a simpler, technical level: I assume your system/Zend can handle URLs that are SEO friendly AND at the same time have variables inside... for instance:

    domain.com/profile/1234/name-of-the-user

    domain.com/profile/5678/name-of-anther-user

    (where both 1234, 5678, name-of-the-user and name-of-anther-user are variables used to pull proper content from the CMS but both URLs map to one same template page)

    Or:

    domain.com/videos/sport?p=2&sortby=date

    (where both videos, sport, p=2 and sortby=date are all variables used to pull proper content from the CMS and to select the right template to be used to dispaly the page)

    • Moderator
    • 6923 posts
    January 19, 2018 7:45 AM EST

     Here's a link to the demo. Video at the demo, https://demo.socialengine.com/videos/3/8/kyle-neal-closer-originally-by-tegan-and-sara-grey-s-anatomy-13x 

    I am not sure about profiles. I haven't tested with the short urls removed to see what it looks like but I assume it just sticks the index.php in there.

    Please try the search feature at the demo as it does include it like this, https://demo.socialengine.com/videos?text=&orderby=rating&category=0&tag=

    • 378 posts
    January 19, 2018 8:08 PM EST

    Just a word of caution about CometChat - I have used it extensively for years. Not out of love for the plugin but due to it being all I could find in an off the shelf need.

    CometChat is not a stable platform and the support via their team is less than stellar in my experience. I still use it to this day on a site but am considering leaving it behind when I move to SE.

    • 75 posts
    January 19, 2018 9:05 PM EST

    Thanks for the advice - ours is quite steady and robust, so I wasn't planning on moving onto Comet :-)

    But at least it's an interesting precedent - means that SE can sustain that sort of integration

    • 378 posts
    January 19, 2018 9:59 PM EST

    Yes easily I would imagine the only handshake should be between authenticating privileges and the social aspect

    • Moderator
    • 6923 posts
    January 20, 2018 6:01 AM EST
    David said:

    On a simpler, technical level: I assume your system/Zend can handle URLs that are SEO friendly AND at the same time have variables inside... for instance:

    domain.com/profile/1234/name-of-the-user

    domain.com/profile/5678/name-of-anther-user

    (where both 1234, 5678, name-of-the-user and name-of-anther-user are variables used to pull proper content from the CMS but both URLs map to one same template page)

    I'm pretty sure you can do what you want in application/modules/User/Model/User.php where we set the URL and perhaps this documentation, https://framework.zend.com/manual/1.12/en/zend.navigation.pages.html

    Since we do allow turning off username in the sign up process and using user_id instead in the url, it seems that a little customization of that code could achieve what you want. You would need to test this yourself as it's not my expertise.

    • 378 posts
    January 20, 2018 4:05 PM EST

    I saw one of the experts has a plugin to accomplish SEO friendly naming

     

    • 75 posts
    January 22, 2018 2:43 PM EST
    ITLJames said:

    I saw one of the experts has a plugin to accomplish SEO friendly naming

     

    The URLs that Donna showed up above seem quite SEO friendly... were those achieved via a plugin? Or are they organic to SE ?

    • 75 posts
    January 22, 2018 2:44 PM EST

    One more question: can the database be installed on a different separate server?

    • Moderator
    • 6923 posts
    January 23, 2018 8:08 AM EST
    David said:
    ITLJames said:

    I saw one of the experts has a plugin to accomplish SEO friendly naming

     

    The URLs that Donna showed up above seem quite SEO friendly... were those achieved via a plugin? Or are they organic to SE ?

    The demo site is stock install. If you mean the links I put for the video section. 

    • Moderator
    • 6923 posts
    January 23, 2018 8:11 AM EST
    David said:

    One more question: can the database be installed on a different separate server?

    I would assume so since the config file for the database has a database path.

    • 75 posts
    January 23, 2018 9:53 AM EST
    Donna said:

    The demo site is stock install. If you mean the links I put for the video section. 

    What do you mean? 

    I assumed the demo would be stock content run on a standard installation

    Does SE have SEO friendly urls with variables or is a plugin needed?

    • Moderator
    • 6923 posts
    January 23, 2018 9:56 AM EST
    Donna said:

     Here's a link to the demo. Video at the demo, https://demo.socialengine.com/videos/3/8/kyle-neal-closer-originally-by-tegan-and-sara-grey-s-anatomy-13x 

    I am not sure about profiles. I haven't tested with the short urls removed to see what it looks like but I assume it just sticks the index.php in there.

    Please try the search feature at the demo as it does include it like this, https://demo.socialengine.com/videos?text=&orderby=rating&category=0&tag=

    It allows the above if that's what you want. Otherwise you would edit it and maybe what I had posted for where to edit would help. I'm sorry but SEO URLs coding is out of my expertise. Helping as much as I can

    • 75 posts
    January 23, 2018 8:00 PM EST
    Donna said:
    Helping as much as I can

    You help plenty, Donna, and it's highly appreciated

    • 629 posts
    January 24, 2018 5:47 PM EST
    David said:
    Donna said:

    The demo site is stock install. If you mean the links I put for the video section. 

    What do you mean? 

    I assumed the demo would be stock content run on a standard installation

    Does SE have SEO friendly urls with variables or is a plugin needed?

     

    Yes, all urls are seo compatibal. So much so that you need a .htaccess file to change the index.php rewrite. They auto update based on the title of the post.

    • 31 posts
    February 19, 2018 4:15 PM EST

    Just some advice.

    Social engine does not scale well.. Active and large user databases will have constant issues. The support here is not responsive to the many bugs I've pointed out. Simple things like "online widget" with over 500k of users will slow your MSQL queries to a halt.

    Chat and SE plugin here will kill even a dedicated server. It also has very horrible UI. I stopped using it. Comet Chat is not any better. Removed Chat for users.

    Subscriptions on SE has not been tested by the team at all. I have reported many bugs that are not fixed. It required manual coding on my part to fix the many bugs. Out of the box users are able to upgrade, not pay, cancel, not be billed, keep having upgraded access etc. Also when users cancel they are downgraded immediately instead of at scheduled time, etc... These issues are not important to the core code so they have been reported over a year ago and not fixed. The have fixed one issue here. That's it in over a year of reporting it. 

    Honestly.. i realize this sounds like a rather negative post but I would hate to see people moving to this platform and being stuck like I did. I wish they took larger and more complicated sites seriously, but alas it doesn't seem to be who they are targeting with their product. 

     

    • 378 posts
    February 19, 2018 4:53 PM EST

    This is concerning as our site is a large active subscription based model that requires seamless subscription processes. I am working with developers to create a merch gateway for our merchant provider and it is not a cheap build. I will speak to them about your concerns but would love to hear from SE about this as well.

    • Moderator
    • 6923 posts
    February 19, 2018 5:08 PM EST

    Regarding subscriptions. Our team has tested it when the client reported the issue before. We were never able to reproduce it. We would need the client to send a support ticket for our team to check for an issue on their site since it's not able to be reproduced in any testing and we had only one client report it. We have many clients using subscriptions including some very large adult sites. So far, no one else has reported that issue. It's hard to fix a ghost we can't find. If we could find it, we could kill it. If we can't find it, we have to assume it's a site specific issue. You can see some of the large clients that use our script, if you go to socialengine.com. There are some very large corporations using it. There are some very large active adult sites. 

    There are also payment gateway plugins by third parties. If there were issues with our core product, we would expect them to contact us and let us know as well. They haven't in all these years.

    I'm not saying there couldn't be some bug here that is hiding. I'm saying that we cannot find it, we have had no one else say it's there, and without that, we can't fix it if it doesn't show up for us and any others.

    • 31 posts
    February 19, 2018 9:14 PM EST

    This is just not true. I sent detailed replicatable bugs from a base install in github many times. You simply removed them when you switched over here. 

    You said you fixed them, but you didn't. Parts were fixed, but I long fixed them on my own by the time you got around to your bandaid fixes. 

    Constantly saying things are "my site issue" when I wont provide you access to my backend .. even though its completely replicateable on a base SE install is the social engine mantra. Then you must do the dev work yourself because they will take upwards of a year to fix the bug.. since "no one else is reporting it"... 

    How does paypal know when things are being left upgraded on an SE site even though the payments were cancelled? Payments request from failed subscriptions happen forever from their side because SE doesnt code in a fail date for failed susbscriptions. No. This *like all things I have reported to you guys* is a Social Engine issue. 

    I highly doubt sites by EA, Nasa and Mastercard are using paypal subscription modules.. but please feel free to link me to them!

    Just because "big corporations" use social engine, also doesn't mean they have big sites. A large difference. The product simply does not scale well at all. There are constant bugs and loopholes in the code that are not noticeable on small sites with Less than 1000 users but quickly turn into 70 GIG databases on large sites because of poor coding. By far the majority of SE sites are small. Including the "demos" on socialengine.com  like this page that hasnt had a newsfeed update in over a year as a testimonial on your front page! - https://excreators.com/community/ or this one that has a solid 487 members - http://www.recipleaser.com/members IN fact all your demo sites have an alexa rank of over 5 million. They have less than a 100 users a month visiting them. Just like i'm saying. 

    Again... I know this comes off harsh but SocialEngine is NOT a good choice for larger, subscription monitization networks, but it is a great option for small niche sites with less than a few thousand users who don't want any subscription, adsense or advanced customization. It tries to be "everything to everyone" and fails on hammering out the core bugs as a result.

    This gentleman asked. I have given my honest advice. I regret every day that i use social engine as my back end. It was an ok platform for the first 5 years. The last 5 and ESPECIALLY SE 4 have been a pure nightmare to keep things together. 

    • Moderator
    • 6923 posts
    February 20, 2018 4:45 AM EST

    I asked our core developers about that bug before we released. It was only one client submitting it and no other client. You are not the only one with a large site using subscriptions. Even so, they tried again to reproduce it and were not able to. If we can't reproduce it, we can't fix it. We either need access to the site or we need to reproduce it on our testing sites. As for the initial bug, I came in well after it was posted. I don't know what happened in the beginning but if you recall, at the end of that GH issue, I said we would try to replicate and fix. If you want to email support with details of the bug, please feel free and put the description as subscription bug for Donna. I will test it myself and see if I can replicate it. We have clients with more than a few thousand users. Demo sites are sites that allow us to post and are not adult. Many of the bigger sites take full advantage of the lack of visible branding and do not want to be posted. 

    We do have more coming this year. All scripts can improve. None of them will 100% be what someone wants. None of them will be 100% bug free. 

    • 378 posts
    February 20, 2018 1:41 PM EST

    @DreamCoder - I strongly suggest that you give access to your site to SE to verify the bug that you are seeing. If only you see it and no others are reporting what you see then that leads me to believe that you have a conflict with plugins or something else that is proprietary to your site and install.

    Otherwise this is just a he said/she said and the conversation is of no benefit.

    My site is in the process of porting over to SE and we have a significant userbase. Our testing to date has not shown performance issues that you indicated above and we are building a stand alone subscription module as that is the bread and butter of our business. Any business that relies on a specific thing such as subscriptions or anything else that comes stock with an off the shelf product and then does not work to improve and/or make it their own for their needs is essentially shooting themselves in the foot. If it is important make it the best it can possibly be with investment and move on....  

    • 31 posts
    February 20, 2018 3:09 PM EST

    Hey I get it. You have no idea who I am and posting a random dump of this isn't the best idea for you when the development team says no one else has the issue sounds totally reasonable. I am an advance Social Engine Developer with over 10 years in this code. I have customized my ENTIRE social engine site. I do not report bugs here unless I can replicate the exact issue in a base install, because as you all keep stating "otherwise it is my site". If its replicateable on a base install, its a bug.

    I have over half a million users on my site and privacy issues that do not allow random devs to come and access things, especially when as I've stated I clearly outline the steps to make it happen on a clean install. 

    As I stated above, many of the issues will not become issues until real life users try and do things in a real envrioment and large masses of them at that. Like people trying to scamming your site and not having the funds in a paypal account. Or signing up and canceling and signing up etc. Or Uploading 700 profile photos because they don't like any of them. Or trying to message 200 users with the same message. Or a million other things that users will try. This is not going to happen in a test environment on average. 

    Overall... I get it.. I really do SocialEngine can't justify offering good solid support for a $300 one-time purchase product. There are countless configurations and options that a user can create in social engine... complete testing will not be happening on most of them. They would need a team of 50-60 engineers and techs to support it properly. When I report issues that are critical to my site, but if no one else reports them... How critical are they to the bottom line of sales? I get all this stuff. But what I DON'T like is how the support here argues, says its not a bug, drops it, or asks for access when they can replicate it with what I provide. If they can't replicate it, ask for more details. I am not some noob coder here that wants the moon. I want the code to work as SocialEngine says it works in the manual. When it is constantly dropped, or blamed "my site"... That gets frustrating. 

    Anyway, Good luck with your site .. may you avoid all the issues I've dealt with.


    This post was edited by DreamCoder at February 20, 2018 3:10 PM EST
    • 378 posts
    February 20, 2018 4:52 PM EST

    Sorry but this just doesn't add up.

    You state that you have half a million members here yet in another thread you state 1 million. If you are in fact an advanced developer... just fix the issue with your site and move on. You state that you have customized your entire site and to me that tells me that there are many opportunities to create bugs. Especially if you started digging into the core.

    SE are not random dev's and you indicate privacy is your main concern. Well to me that is your mindset, not reality. Either you let them in to see what you see or you don't - your choice... We allow trusted developers into our site. There is nothing there that is so private that they shouldn't be able to access us. I would suggest you look at doing the same.

    Support has every right to "argue" your point when you publicly state things but do not allow them access to confirm them. Otherwise they are on a wild goose chase trying to recreate something and wasting time.

    Again, things do not add up here.

    • 31 posts
    February 20, 2018 5:12 PM EST

    I clearly said.. "almost a million"... Because it depends what you are counting as users.. Active? Daily? Total? The context in each argument was different hence my difference in numbers quoted in this forum. I've also stated I've fixed all the issues above - "I long fixed them on my own by the time you got around to your bandaid fixes. "

    You seem confused on what a "base install" is. It means a default out of the box installation of Social Engine. A new users sets up a basic installation of Social Engine with no additional plugins or configuration that is not standard. I provide steps to SE Support here, github, and via tickets multiple times to re-create the bugs in this base install environment. This means it has nothing what so ever to do with MY site as I've mentioned more times than i care to. I'm not sure why there is confusion here, unless you didn't understand what i meant with "base install". 

    If SE support installs a basic version of social engine.. follows the step by step and then repeats the bug they can confirm just fine. But they don't, and just ask for either paid support or site access. Something I am not willing to provide, nor should I have to. This is how bug reporting works in every company on the planet. Give us the steps to replicate, we will, and then we fix the bug.

    The point i'm making here when YOU specifically asked for advice and experience from large sites, It's not a sort of. If you have a large site you will have the same scaling issues 100%.  The code does not scale and has not been designed for large active sites. SE support is not responsive when a replicatable bug has been told to them in the above stated environment.

    I understand you might not want to believe that since you've invested down this road already though. It seems you'd rather argue with me than hear the only person with a large site who bothered to answer this thread. Best of luck in your site. I won't respond on this any longer.