Anyone who knows me knows I (ab)use elog a lot.   And this one is another of a long list of cheats and work arounds rather than modifying the code properly.

In summary mode, the top row are titles, and if they are long, they will dominate the width of that column.  Similarly if they are short, if entries under that title are either non-existant or even shorter.  Sometimes entries below the title will dominate, e.g. entries under "Date" title.

I assume your entries under the title in question are things like more than one word, such that they get split into two rows within that cell.  Sometimes that can look very untidy.  However, if you want the column wider than the title is given, you can pad out the title with " " (without the "").  Either on both sides for a centred title, or on the right for left justified.  Or between words if the title has more than one.  (Sorry for this edit, I hit submit button rather than preview).

I'm not sure if this is what you want.

If you want to prevent "accidental" replies being identical to the original message, you can force a situation where the user will be alerted that they have to do something if they really want to make a reply. 

An example.  I have an attribute "Action".  In order to make a reply.  I have set up that I must select an Action attribute every time.  If I forget, I get an error message screen, and can click to go back to the entry and have another attempt (nothing is deleted if you have added to the reply).

In the elog.cfg file, I have the lines

Required Attributes =  Action

Preset on reply Action = 

This hopefully would remind them that they are making a reply to an entry, and either make a reply, or abort the attempt.

Hi Harry,

I'm just an elog (ab)user, not one of the developers.  My original 2017 reply was to report an issue that was due to hardware, but somehow overcame a configuration flag (no multiple replies to a single entry), which might have been the same problem as the original poster, Alan Grant, was observing, where one real reply mysteriously became two identical ones.  That appears to be different to the issue you have.

There is an "Abort" button; in version 2.9.2 it is "Back" (without a warning), somewhere along the development it because "Delete" (with a warning), but that only covers circumstances where a reply is started by accident/unintentionally and then it is realised.  My previous suggestion certainly would alert the replier that they have to do something - even if only selectiing an "Action" - before the new entry would be accepted,  This suggests that you have a circumstance where the reply being a duplicate of the entry is a real issue, and that neither of the suggestions above would help.  Don't forget, some people may *want* this.

It would be for Stefan and Andreas to put this on the elog wish-list.  I am a little puzzled as to how your problem arises - lazy user? - so perhaps more comment as to how this is occurring will help Stefan and Andreas understand the why.  There is somewhere on this site a page where you can add suggestions for the wish-list, but due to security certificate issues, I can only access the Forum at present and cannot point you to it.

Dear Stefano,

Try the entry I wrote some time ago elog:68655

David.


> Dear expert,
>   I'm running the latest git version of elog ELOG V3.1.4-395e101a on ubuntu 20.04.2.
> I'm experiencing frequent hangs of the elog server: the status is always reported as running, but the web server is not responding.
> The only hint I have of something strange is that the elogd process is using a lot of CPU (50-100%), the log do not show anything suspect 
> as far as I can see.
> 
> Has anyone experienced something similar or has any idea how can I start to debug the problem?
> 
> Sorry for lack of many information, but I don't know what to look at.
> 
> Thanks in advance
>   Stefano

The way to do this is to ensure that the date of the entry is in the future.  As a hard -core linux (ab)user of elog, I create an entry, then dive into the yymmdda.log files, and edit it so that the date at the top of the entry is, for example, Sat, 31 Dec 2022 23:59:59.  Then, that entry will remain at the top of the listings until the New Year.  I do this very thing for the very same reason, i.e. to keep one entry at the top of the listings until after a certain date.

It may be that if you have "date of entry" field and sort by that, you could set the date of entry in the future.  I've not tried that.

The same effect could be done by adjusting the computer/server's date to the future, make the entry and then reset back to the present, but that may well be unpopular and impractical.  On a single computer, I have done this, although I then changed to editing the yymmdda.log file directly.

I am rather with John on this.

I deliberately stopped contributing to Wikipedia years ago after I added an observation to an entry.  That is, a piece of what could be called original research.  It was shot down in flames for being precisely that: original research.    From what I read in the Draft:Elog and the Talk section,  I think that the same issue in some guise or other will come up.  All of us use and love Elog - I think I use it for all of the listed purposes - but apart from being in the Debian distro (which I did not know about) there is very little published primary sources.  Mind you, the quality of publications as primary sources can be questioned, I can bore on with several examples.  

Has anyone ever published a paper citing their filing cabinet organisation?  Elog's obviously different, but has the same problem when it comes to citations.  It is a utility, a very useful one, but the sort of utility that might just make an aside in a paper these days.  If we were in the 1980s and (hypothetically) Elog was available and as functional, that would probably make it the subject in computer research papers and magazines. 

David.

In my case, I had a number of attributes which had a varied prefix.  For example, "progressed" , which could have no prefix, or prefix "I", "To be", "Strongly", "Seriously"... and that was true (the same prefixes, or at least many of them) for a number of attributes.  Splitting them into two groups, the prefixes and the action, allowed me to gain more actual attributes without having to recompile.  Suitable change in the elog config file will also make this easy to follow in how the entries are shown in threaded or full display modes.  In your case suffixes may be better, but I hope you get the point.

Although I have done a (linux) recompile in the past, v2.9 something, 120 attributes seemed not to affect things.

Or what about the "ticket number" feature?  Every new entry  thread (sorry, confusing terminology on my part) would increment the ticket number by one, and there is no limit as far as I am aware.  This is all explained in the elogd configuration documentation.