i run a site called phpbuilder.com...

[Anon]

yeah... my database went down all morning... how should i fix it?

[Anon]

heh...and the forums are screwed up (not all the time though, very strange). Might wanna look into that..

[Anon]

oh... and the whole lack of content thing, and no one really caring about it anymore....

damn... how did i fu.ck that all up? oh well.

[[deleted]]

how cruel... spot-on, but cruel.

BTW: yapf didn't go down (again) this morning, should any of you care for a growing alternative where the sysadmin actually gives a damn about his site. :-)

oops, hijacking the phpbuilder crowd is bad form, but at the moment, phpbuilder is not very good form either...

[Anon]

what is your URL?? i was actually looking for it when phpbuilder was down to give my daily dose of help... but i couldn't find it.

google searches for "YAPF" or "YAPF vincent" or any array of combinations of that and "php" returned nothing.

get an easy domain, and then hijack the crowd. obviously this place is dead.

[Anon]

well... actually it returned a lot of hits to phpbuilder.com... which at the time was of course not accessible.

[[deleted]]

http://www.hvt-automation.nl/yapf/

[gerardg]

Who is the sysadmin here?

[Anon]

tim 'sell my soul' purdue sold it to internet.com or whatever the fu ck happened, and now they never update it... it has the cold feel of a chrome toilet seat in january, and is dying slowly. as far as i know, there is no sysadmin.

anyways, i think i might just start half answering questions and send them to the YAPF...

[Anon]

I think it is unfair to call Tim Purdue names in regard to this. One man can't run all the projects he was involved. Something had to go.

[Anon]

I'm tellin ya - you need a true domain name. :-)

yapf.com!

[[deleted]]

Tim did a very god job of building and maintaining the site, but unfortunately he made a bad choice of who to sell/give phpbuilder.com to. Bad for us that is, I'm sure that at the time it seemed like a good idea to Tim.

[Anon]

what does yapf stand for?

young ageless php fanatics perhaps?

[[deleted]]

alas, it is much less catchy:

Yet Another PHP Faq

[Anon]

do you intend on having a searchable knowledge base there? id be interested to hear how you intend to progress it.

[[deleted]]

First I plan to make it so that the current functionality works without any bugs. :-)

Then I'll basically add whatever the visitors want most.

But first and foremost, I set YAPF up to contain newbie-proof PHP information. All the information in the articles should be self-contained; ie: after reading the article, nobody should have to ask 'yeah, ok, but what do you mean exactly?'

There are tons of 'good' resources out there (like faqts.com) but most of them just contain bits and pieces. You run into a problem, you search, you find the solution, you try again, you run straight into the next problem...
What you really want is a 'complete guide', for ex: an article that will not just tell you how to open a database connection, but also how to retreive data from it, and which are the most common mistakes to watch out for.

[Anon]

sounds good, it should be interesting watching it evolve, thanks for the feedback.

[Anon]

exactlly... all he had to do was accept story submissions, code submissions and integrate them into the site (a php guru, i would assume all of those actions would be fully automated)

so... he sells it to people assuming they will accept, edit and post the submissions other people do, and keep fresh content (AND A FRESH FUNCTION DEFINITION!@!!#@#%) on the site.

many MANY times i have been burned by the WRONG function definition on this site... like what it means when a function returns 0, or what the acceptible input is... php.net is best for a function definition obviously... this used to be the best for articles and forum... it is no longer the best for articles, and YAPF will soon take that over.... so all they have left is forums. if YAPF offers all the functionality of phpbuilder.com, and the usual question answering crew stops answering questions here, then YAPF will succeed (given a good domain.......)