One thing that I always thought was neat, in a really strange way, is how users and coders see things totally differently.<\/p>\n
At work, we have some admin tools to manage users, but periodically, we’ll come across a spammer who’s just signed up. They have tools to stop them and delete their posts, but I’ll often go the extra mile and log into a MySQL replicant and do a “SELECT * FROM users WHERE ip LIKE ‘$spammers_ip’G”, and see if it turns up any other users. Sometimes it’ll unearth a bunch.<\/p>\n
The other thing I’ll do is something like, “SELECT username, signup_time, email, ip FROM users ORDER BY signup_time DESC LIMIT 20;” to view the most recent users, and re-run it every 30 seconds or so to keep an eye on who’s signing up. I have much better things to do than sit around watching this all day, but it’s useful when spammers do their periodic, “Register thousands of accounts at once” thing.<\/p>\n
So today I was doing this for one of the customer service people, and they asked, “Where is that tool? I can’t find it.”<\/p>\n
“Oh, I’m logged into the database… There’s no way for–actually, give me a few minutes.”<\/p>\n
I threw together a couple PHP scripts that basically do the above, and display it in a table. It’s the type of thing that might bore a Programming 101 student, and the only thought involved, really, was in trying to figure out why it was aborting with an error. (Hint: searching for “” doesn’t do what you expect it will. I must have looked at the bit of code 30 times trying to figure out what could possibly be wrong with the line, and then it suddenly dawned on me. I’m a giant idiot. The is an escape character, effectively telling PHP to treat the next quote as a literal quote, not a closing quote on the string. This is something I know well: I’ll often do something like echo \"link<\/a>\"<\/tt>, using the exact functionality that tripped me up today. And yet I kept missing the error.)<\/p>\n Anyway, that’s not my point. My point is that I’m consistently amazed at how the user’s view is so radically different than the programmers. From my perspective, I just wrapped a little PHP around one of the simplest SQL queries imaginable. Heck, much of the logic was copied-and-pasted from another script. But from the perspective of the people who will use this script, it’s an immensely helpful tool that fills a void that’s existed for quite some time.<\/p>\n Of course, sometimes it’s the opposite way. Sometimes all the user wants is a report on newly-created groups, the username of the person that created them, and the number of members. That’s just a simple SQL query! Actually, I suppose it’ll take a join. No, wait, two joins… But do we actually store the number of members in a group? I wonder if I can do that with a subquery… Maybe this needs to be a script. You know what? This is way too complicated.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One thing that I always thought was neat, in a really strange way, is how users and coders see things totally differently. At work, we have some admin tools to manage users, but periodically, we’ll come across a spammer who’s … Continue reading