Captain Jordan

Mahz's Dev Journal

Finally, when trying to debug a search issue last week, I noticed that 100% of all posts with a length between 90k and 150k characters (the upper limit) were pure spam. And I don't mean spam-forum spam, but rather people in random OOC topics, off-topics, test forum topics, etc. just copy and pasting garbage until they hit the upper limit. Usually in a hider tag so when someone clicked it, they'd be greeted by a bunch of "".

Maybe I can fix that by adding a reminder above the editor to not inject garbage into the database for the lulz.

@Mahz

Mind only triggering that when the character count breaches 90k?

Mahz's Dev Journal

Interesting idea of more choices,@Altered Tundra...

We think it would be fun to have a "here, have a goblin!" button. Fairly nonsensical, but surely someone will find uses for it.

@Ellri

If we're adding more choices, we need the rating first. ;)

Mahz's Dev Journal

Latest push:

- [Experimental] Introduced search
- Added convenience button at the top of each topic for "Search in this topic" and "Find my posts in this topic":

- Posts are synced to the indexer every 10 minutes
- It's under construction

Lemme know if you encounter issues, particularly if the search results are incorrect or not what you expected. I'll clean up the UI soon and add some missing search parameters.

Search only returns 50 results right now and doesn't paginate. I'll add pagination, I just wanted to launch a basic demo to see if there are any issues with my syncing system.

@Mahz

Whooo! The username finding is awesome!

Eventually, a distinction between searching for posts and searching for topics would be nice. When someone has a lot of posts in a single topic, returning all the individual posts can really clog up the search results.

Mahz's Dev Journal

<Snipped quote by LegendBegins>

Speaking of money for the site and ads, could there eventually be a subscription enabling people to turn off ads? Also, I've seen sites where they have fake posts when not logged in that contain ads. Could that be utilised as well?

@NuttsnBolts

I'm in support of this (EDIT: this being turning off ads. Sponsored posts are annoying and I hate those, too). Mostly because ads are the means by which Mahz generates revenue to keep the site running, and if a donation (it would require a minimum amount, I think, to make it fair) would be made of equal or greater revenue, it seems fair that someone who does so can turn those off.

I don't think donations require user titles, special features (aside from turning off ads) or private forums, however. A donation is a gift, not a payment. The easy way to avert abuse here is to kindly refuse the donations of anyone who decides donation entitles them to special treatment. My own website that runs off ads uses this same policy, and I have a former staff member who is banned from donating for just this reason.

Mahz's Dev Journal

Half the ads I get on my laptop are for remote control hobby sites, mostly cause I use them a lot, and the other half are for Led glasses known as dropshades (happen to look at the site one time to see what they were).

On my mobile they seem to be mostly generic ads with an occasional university or android ad.

What I have noticed is AVG went nuts over an ad in the IRC chat that I accident click on once.

@NuttsnBolts

Yeah, honestly I kind of wish we'd go for the text only ads. Less obtrusive and usually a bit more relevant to the website or personal browsing habits. Not that you can't get an infection by clicking on some of them, but they're less likely to carry infections in the ad itself (via Flash or javascript).

Mahz's Dev Journal

<Snipped quote by Sage>

Livejournaling

@Mahz

I never did get sucked into that particular bottomless pit. Or Tumblr.

I'm on reddit, though. 'Nuff said.

Mahz's Dev Journal

To be honest, we can't remember.

@Ellri

"It was the 23rd century
Mankind's darkest hour
The war had been raging for almost a hundred years
We had been fighting for so long no one could remember the reason why it
started in the first place
All we knew there were two sides...
The Coalition and the Alliance
For decades, millions died for the same piece of rock
Again... and again..."

Mahz's Dev Journal

Seriously, guys. Circle. Jerked. To. Hell.

New topic, please.

Mahz's Dev Journal

If a GM has a good reason for banning a player, they'll take the time to write at least a very short summary of said reason. Is it too much to ask of a GM to do that? I think not.

@whizzball1

Point is, requiring it (and coding the feature to do so) is overthinking it. There's no problem yet, only the anticipation of one. The anticipation that has been quite well circle jerked over the past few pages (oh yeah, I'm calling it now). Some say it will happen, absolutely, guaranteed, for sure! But pretty equal numbers say it won't, or the number of abusive GMs will be so minimal as to make the feature not worth it.

Anyway, this has been circle jerked to hell.

Mahz's Dev Journal

As I see it, the commentbox would only be visible to three parties:

1.) The person who was barred.
2.) The person who did the barring.
3.) Mods.

Not public.

(EDIT: Yes, I think that letting the player know why they were barred is an absolute must. And the reason why the commentbox is post-sized, not 140 characters Twitter-style is exactly so it wouldn't be out of context, but you could quote/refer to some of the places where the player was being a disturbance, cite instances of powerplay/godmod and refusals to edit posts to remove such, state when the player last IC-posted and how long others have been waiting on them, et cetera, et cetera.)

@Shienvien

Doesn't matter. Logic is no match for irrational thought.

You're overthinking it.

The simple explanation is: The GM has the right to kick you from their game. Boom. Done. KISS.