Endorsements all messed up

[ddanbe]

If I look at my endorsements, seems I have many in Web development.
Never ever posted there something. Web development also seems to be my favorite forum???
I'm mostly to be found on the C# forum. Something to do with the fact that C# is only to be reached by tag?

[Dani]

Yes, everything is rolled up into top-level categories now.

[cereal]

Hi!

I'm experiencing something similar to ddanbe, I only see endorsements on UI/UX Design (12) and Linux and Unix (10) categories, everything else disappeared.

[Dani]

Yes, because endorsements are tied to forums, and those forums no longer exist or have been rolled up into higher level categories.

[JOSheaIV]

I hope these higher categories with no lower categories is just temporary.

[Dani]

It's not.

[cereal]

Yes, because endorsements are tied to forums, and those forums no longer exist or have been rolled up into higher level categories.

That's ok, but profile page still states 74 endorsements, most of them were on PHP (which is now part of Web Development) & Databases. In practice, at the moment, it seems I never got an endorsement in the programming area :D

[JOSheaIV]

It's not.

May I ask why this change was made? To be honest I was hoping it was, and I was just going to wait until it was fixed. I focus on C# code for assistance as it's my strong suit. Without knowing what category someone is asking a question in, how can I know if i can help someone? It would feel like a waste of time to come into a post and read about it and then realize "oh wait, I can't offer help".

Plus when I know a category someone is focusing on, sometimes I can fill in gaps if someone doesn't ask a question to clearly (or offer some additional advice they might find useful on a matter).

(also, I love how it says my endorsements are in hardware, from 3 people, and all my C# ones, which were my strongest don't appear even though it says I have 12)

[Dani]

Without knowing what category someone is asking a question in, how can I know if i can help someone?

Here's a link to all Unanswered C# Articles: https://www.daniweb.com/tags/c%23/unanswered

May I ask why this change was made?

Because there are an unlimited number of programming languages out there, and technologies come and go, and I was tired of being restricted by the confines of a finite number of programming languages that were determined to be the most popuar 15 years ago. By using the tagging system, instead, we are less restricted to be forced to talk about only certain programming languages or technologies, and we can do better moving forward with being infinitely adaptable and keeping up with modern trends.

I'll investigate the endorsements bug shortly.

[JOSheaIV]

Okay that does make sense, users just have to be responsible for placing their language as a tag (I see a suggestion menu pops up so that will work nicely).

[Dani]

(I see a suggestion menu pops up so that will work nicely).

And the suggestions, when creating a new thread, just as in the top search bar, are dependant on the forum category you're currently in, to help things along.

[Dani]

I've gone ahead and manually recalculated everyone's endorsements, one forum at a time. It took foreveerrrrrrr, ugh, but it's finally done.

Either way, everyone has lost endorsements in the process, now that they are rolled up into parent forums. For example, if a single member endorsed you for Web Development and again for PHP (2 endorsements), they both got rolled up into Web Development as a single endorsement.

I thought about switching it to the tag system where you could still be endorsed for the php tag, for example, but ultimately decided against it. With an infinite number of tags, it would easily get out of hand and not useful to seeing at a glance what people are into.

[Dani]

Yeah, I had no way of automating it easily. Endorsements were linked to old forum ids that no longer existed, and I didn't have the mapping of the old forumids to the new rolled up ones anywhere in the database. So I had to go through each removed/modified forum, figure out where its articles have been moved to, and update the endorsements table to change the forumid for all relevant records. One. forum. at. a. time. Which is a pain when you factor in that I actually had to use archive.org for each forum to match up now-deleted ID #s with what they were and where they have moved to.

[Reverend Jim]

And yet <M> still has credit for self-endorsing. (c'mon. You had to know I'd say that).

But I'm not bitter ^_^